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Researchers led by Dr. William J. Tyler, an Assistant Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University has developed a novel technology

A new generation of much more sophisticated and lifelike prosthetic arms, sponsored by DARPA, may be available within the next five to 10 years. Two different prototypes that move with the dexterity of a natural limb and can theoretically be controlled just as intuitively - with electrical signals recorded directly from the brain - are now beginning human tests.

Tianhe-1A, a new supercomputer revealed today at HPC 2010 China, has set a new performance record of 2.507 petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second), as measured by the LINPACK benchmark, making it the fastest system in China and in the world today, according to an NVIDIA statement.

The work, which appears in a paper in the October 28 issue of the journal Nature, shows that "individuals can rapidly, consciously, and voluntarily control neurons deep inside their head," says Koch, the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology and professor of computation and neural systems at Caltech.

Members of the public could form the backbone of powerful new mobile Internet networks by carrying wearable sensors, according to researchers from Queen's University Belfast.

A team of UCSF researchers has engineered E. coli bacteria with the key molecular circuitry that will enable genetic engineers to program cells to communicate and perform computations.

Researchers from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) have broken one of the major roadblocks on the path to growing transplantable tissue in the lab: They've found a way to grow the blood vessels and capillaries needed to keep tissues alive.

In a first-of-its-kind experiment, University of Vermont roboticist Josh Bongard created both simulated and actual robots that, like tadpoles becoming frogs, change their body forms while learning how to walk. over generations, his simulated robots also evolved, spending less time in "infant" tadpole-like forms and more time in "adult" four-legged forms.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have coaxed polymers to braid themselves into wispy nanoscale ropes that approach the structural complexity of biological materials.

A study appearing Feb. 10 in Science Express calculates the world's total technological capacity to store, communicate and compute information, part of a Special Online Collection: Dealing with Data. The study by the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism estimates that in 2007, humankind was able to store 2.9 × 1020 optimally compressed bytes, communicate almost 2 × 1021 bytes, and carry out 6.4 × 1018 instructions per second on general-purpose computers. General-purpose computing capacity grew at an annual rate of 58%. The world's capacity for bidirectional telecommunication grew at 28% per year, closely followed by the increase in globally stored information (23%). Humankind's capacity for unidirectional information diffusion through broadcasting channels has experienced comparatively modest annual growth (6%). Telecommunication has been dominated by digital technologies since 1990 (99.9% in digital format in 2007), and the majority of our technological memory has been in digital format since the early 2000s (94% digital in 2007).

A simple technique for stamping patterns invisible to the human eye onto a special class of nanomaterials has been developed by researchers at Vanderbilt University. The new method works with porous nanomaterials that are riddled with tiny voids, which give them unique optical, electrical, chemical, and mechanical properties. There are nanoporous forms of gold, silicon, alumina, and titanium oxide, among others. The technique involves the creation of pre-mastered stamps using traditional, but complex, clean room processes and then using the stamps to create patterns using a new process called direct imprinting of porous substrates (DIPS). DIPS can create a device in less than a minute, regardless of its complexity. The smallest pattern the researchers have made to date has features of only a few tens of nanometers (about the size of a single fatty acid molecule). They have also succeeded in imprinting the smallest pattern yet reported in nanoporous gold, one with 70-nanometer features. The first device the group has created is a "diffraction-based" biosensor that can be configured to identify a variety of different organic molecules, including DNA, proteins and viruses. The researchers envision a wide range of applications including drug delivery, chemical and biological sensors, solar cells, and battery electrodes.

Cisco predicts more than 15 billion network-connected devices by 2015, reaching 966 exabytes (10^18 bytes) per year - close to 1 zettabyte (10^21 bytes). Average global IP traffic in 2015 will reach 245 terabytes per second, equivalent to 200 million people streaming an HD movie (1.2 Mbps) simultaneously. This growth will primarily be driven by the global online video community, which will increase by approximately 500 million users by 2015, up from more than 1 billion Internet video users in 2010, Cisco says. Global IP traffic growth is driven by four primary factors, according to Cisco: An increasing number of devices: The proliferation of tablets, mobile phones, connected appliances and other smart machines is driving up the demand for connectivity.  By 2015, there will be nearly 15 billion network connections via devices - including machine-to-machine - and more than two connections for each person on earth. More Internet users: By 2015, there will be nearly 3 billion Internet users - more than 40 percent of the world's projected population. Faster broadband speed: The average fixed broadband speed is expected to increase four-fold, from 7 megabits per second in 2010 to 28 Mbps in 2015. The average broadband speed has already doubled within the past year from 3.5 Mbps to 7 Mbps. More video: By 2015, 1 million video minutes -+ the equivalent of 674 days - will traverse the Internet every second. By 2015, the Asia Pacific region will generate the most IP traffic (24.1 exabytes per month), surpassing last year's leader, North America (22.3 exabytes per month), for the top spot. The fastest-growing IP-traffic regions for the forecast period (2010-2015) are the Middle East and Africa, surpassing last year's leader, Latin America.

Surround Haptics, a new tactile technology developed at Disney Research, Pittsburgh (DRP) in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, makes it possible for video game players and film viewers to feel a wide variety of sensations, from the smoothness of a finger being drawn against skin to the jolt of a collision. The technology is based on rigorous psychophysical experiments and new models of tactile perception. The technology will enhance a high-intensity driving simulator game developed in collaboration with Disney's Black Rock Studio. With players seated in a chair outfitted with inexpensive vibrating actuators, Surround Haptics will enable them to feel road imperfections, objects falling on the car, skidding, braking and acceleration; and experience ripples of sensation when cars collide. They will also experience jumping, flying, falling, shrinking or growing, of bugs creeping on their skin, the researchers said. The DRP researchers have accomplished this feat by designing an algorithm for controlling an array of vibrating actuators in such a way as to create "virtual actuators" anywhere within the grid of actuators. A virtual actuator can be created between any two physical actuators; the user has the illusion of feeling only the virtual actuator, the researchers said. As a result, users don't feel the general buzzing or pulsing typical of most haptic devices today, but can feel discrete, continuous motions such as a finger tracing a pattern on skin. Disney is demonstrating Surround Haptics Aug. 7-11 at the Emerging Technology Exhibition at SIGGRAPH 2011, the International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Vancouver, B.C.

Duke University engineer Nico Hotz has proposed a hybrid solar system in which sunlight heats a combination of water and methanol in a maze of tubes on a rooftop to produce hydrogen. The device is a series of copper tubes coated with a thin layer of aluminum and aluminum oxide and partly filled with catalytic nanoparticles. A combination of water and methanol flows through the tubes, which are sealed in a vacuum. Once the evaporated liquid achieves higher temperatures, tiny amounts of a catalyst are added, which produces hydrogen. This combination of high temperature and added catalysts produces hydrogen very efficiently, Hotz said. The resulting hydrogen can then be immediately directed to a fuel cell to provide electricity to a building during the day, or compressed and stored in a tank to provide power later. After two catalytic reactions, the system produced hydrogen much more efficiently than current technology without significant impurities, Hotz said. The resulting hydrogen can be stored and used on demand in fuel cells. "This set-up allows up to 95 percent of the sunlight to be absorbed with very little being lost as heat to the surroundings," he said. "This is crucial because it permits us to achieve temperatures of well over 200 degrees Celsius within the tubes. By comparison, a standard solar collector can only heat water between 60 and 70 degrees Celsius." Holtz performed a cost analysis, comparing a standard photovoltaic cell, a photocatalytic system, and the hybrid solar-methanol system.  He found that the hybrid system is the least expensive solution, with a total installation cost of $7,900 if designed to fulfill the requirements in summer. The paper describing the results of Hotz's analysis was named the top paper during the ASME Energy Sustainability Fuel Cell 2011 conference in Washington, D.C. Topics: Energy | Nanotech/Materials Science

Engineers at Stevens Institute of Technology have developed a technique to optically modulate the frequency of a laser beam and create a signal that is disrupted significantly less by environmental factors, says Dr. Rainer Martini. The research provides for enhanced optical communications, allowing mobile units not tied to fiber optic cable to communicate in the range of 100 GHz and beyond, the equivalent of 100 gigabytes of data per second. Eventually, the team hopes to extend the reach into the terahertz spectrum. The frequency or amplitude modulation of middle infrared quantum cascade lasers has been limited by electronics, which are barely capable of accepting frequencies of up to 10 GHz by switching a signal on and off.  Marini and his team have developed a method to optically induce fast amplitude modulation in a quantum cascade laser to control the laser's intensity. Their amplitude modulation system employed a second laser to modulate the amplitude of the middle infrared laser, using light to control light. The current detector is only capable of detecting frequencies up to 10 GHz, but Dr. Martini is confident that a new detector will make the system capable of much higher frequencies. With an optical system that is stable enough, satellites may one day convert to laser technology, resulting in a more mobile military and super-sensitive scanners, as well as faster Internet for the masses, says Martini. Ref.: "Optically induced fast wavelength modulation in a quantum cascade laser," Applied Physics Letters, July 7, 2010.

MIT researchers have developed a new application of carbon nanotubes that shows promise as an innovative approach to storing solar energy for use whenever it's needed. Storing the sun's heat in chemical form - rather than first converting it to electricity or storing the heat itself in a heavily insulated container - has significant advantages: in principle, the chemical material can be stored for long periods of time without losing any of its stored energy. The researchers created carbon nanotubes in combination with a compound called azobenzene. The resulting molecules, produced using nanoscale templates to shape and constrain their physical structure, and the concept that can be applied to many new materials. This material is vastly more efficient at storing energy in a given amount of space - about 10,000 times higher in volumetric energy density, making its energy density comparable to lithium-ion batteries, the researchers said. Ref.: Alexie M. Kolpak, Jeffrey C. Grossman, Azobenzene-Functionalized Carbon Nanotubes As High-Energy Density Solar Thermal Fuels, Nano Letters, 2011; 110705085331088 [DOI: 10.1021/nl201357n]

Robots have been considered too unpredictable and dangerous to work alongside humans in factories, but improved technologies for artificial sensing and motion are leading to a new wave of safer robots. Last winter, NASA sent a humanoid robot dubbed Robonaut 2 (R2) to the International Space Station. R2, which has only a torso, sophisticated arms and fingers, and a head full of sensors, jointly developed by NASA and General Motors under a program to create a robot that could operate safely alongside humans. R2 uses a popular robotics technology called series elastic actuators in its joints. The actuators have an elastic spring component between the motor and the object the robot has to pick up. The actuators help the robot detect and control the force of its own movements. R2 is also covered in soft material in case of accidental collisions, and its head contains cameras so it can keep track of its human colleagues. In June, President Obama announced a $500 million federal investment in manufacturing technology (including $70 million for robotics). It represents another step in developing robots that can assist with repetitious or physically stressful assembly-line tasks without posing a safety risk.