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As the 2012 hurricane season reaches full tilt, researchers at NOAA are hard at work hacking two different maritime robots that the agency hopes will become critical storm forecasting tools of the future. The first, Liquid Robotics' Wave Glider, is envisioned as a persistent surveillance platform, an army of mobile monitoring stations that will remain at sea for the duration of a hurricane season, waiting to swarm into the path of a developing storm. The second--Hydronalix's Emergency Integrated Life Saving Lanyard, or EMILY (a 2010 PopSci Best of What's New award winner)--will be capable of tracking the storm itself for days at a time, streaming continuous data directly from the center of the storm to researchers ashore.

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/05/23/Marcus_Chown_in_Conversation_with_Fred_Watson Marcus Chown, author of Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You: A Guide to the Universe, discusses the mechanics behind quantum computers, explaining that they function by having atoms exist in multiple places at once. He predicts that quantum computers will be produced within 20 years. ----- The two towering achievements of modern physics are quantum theory and Einsteins general theory of relativity. Together, they explain virtually everything about the world in which we live. But almost a century after their advent, most people havent the slightest clue what either is about. Radio astronomer, award-winning writer and broadcaster Marcus Chown talks to fellow stargazer Fred Watson about his book Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You. - Australian Broadcasting Corporation Marcus Chown is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, he is now cosmology consultant of the weekly science magazine New Scientist. The Magic Furnace, Marcus' second book, was chosen in Japan as one of the Books of the Year by Asahi Shimbun. In the UK, the Daily Mail called it "a dizzy page-turner with all the narrative devices you'd expect to find in Harry Potter". His latest book is called Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You.

The supply of secure, clean, sustainable energy is arguably the most important scientific and technical challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. Rising living standards of a growing world population will cause global energy consumption to double by mid-century and triple by the end of the century. Even in light of unprecedented conservation, the additional energy needed is simply not attainable from long discussed sources these include nuclear, biomass, wind, geothermal and hydroelectric. The global appetite for energy is simply too much. Petroleum-based fuel sources (i.e., coal, oil and gas) could be increased. However, deleterious consequences resulting from external drivers of economy, the environment, and global security dictate that this energy need be met by renewable and sustainable sources. The dramatic increase in global energy need is driven by 3 billion low-energy users in the non-legacy world and by 3 billion people yet to inhabit the planet over the next half century. The capture and storage of solar energy at the individual level personalized solar energy drives inextricably towards the heart of this energy challenge by addressing the triumvirate of secure, carbon neutral and plentiful energy. This talk will place the scale of the global energy issue in perspective and then discuss how personalized energy (especially for the non-legacy world) can provide a path to a solution to the global energy challenge. Daniel G. Nocera is the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Director of the Solar Revolutions Project and Director of the Eni Solar Frontiers Center at MIT. His group pioneered studies of the basic mechanisms of energy conversion in biology and chemistry. He has recently accomplished a solar fuels process that captures many of the elements of photosynthesis outside of the leaf. This discovery sets the stage for a storage mechanism for the large scale, distributed, deployment of solar energy. He has b

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.

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.

ScienceDaily (June 18, 2010) - Conventional solar cell efficiency could be increased from the current limit of 30 percent to more than 60 percent, suggests new research on semiconductor nanocrystals, or quantum dots, led by chemist Xiaoyang Zhu at The University of Texas at Austin.

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).

Todd McDevitt at the Georgia Institute of Technology and colleagues have found that adding biomaterials such as gelatin into clumps of stem cells (called "embryoid bodies") affected stem-cell differentiation without harming the cells. By incorporating magnetic particles into the biomaterials, they could control the locations of the embryoid bodies and how they assemble with one another. Compared to typical delivery methods, providing differentiation factors - retinoic acid, bone morphogenetic protein 4 (BMP4) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) - via microparticles induced changes in the gene and protein expression patterns of the aggregates. In the future, these new methods could be used to develop manufacturing procedures for producing large quantities of stem cells for diagnostic and therapeutic applications. The findings were presented on June 16 at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. [full text]

Global risk-based authentication market stood at $ 2.3 bn & is projected to grow at a CAGR of more than 18.8% by 2024 due to increasing adoption of risk-based authentication solutions in various industries.

"We live in an era of accelerating change. Technology is changing and innovating faster than most of us can keep up. And at the same time, it's easy to get so caught up in shiny visions of the future, and not notice the astounding things that are happening in science and technology today. So the next time people ask you where the future went, tell them it's already here. Here are nine underrated or overlooked technologies that could transform the world before you know it."

We live in an era of accelerating change. Technology is changing and innovating faster than most of us can keep up. And at the same time, it's easy to get so caught up in shiny visions of the future, and not notice the astounding things that are happening in science and technology today. So the next time people ask you where the future went, tell them it's already here. Here are nine underrated or overlooked technologies that could transform the world before you know it.

The author makes some important observations that are astoundingly political and may be uncover the core to today's religious interests in science and technology. Major points of interest, when referring to the human eras of social/scientific/technological development: "At each stage, a new resource became available. Something that was previously unknown, unavailable or unusable suddenly became a valuable commodity. In other words, key developments in technology created new resources. The quantity of available resources has continued to expand throughout human history."

The author makes some important observations that are astoundingly political and may be uncover the core to today's religious interests in science and technology. Major points of interest, when referring to the human eras of social/scientific/technological development: "At each stage, a new resource became available. Something that was previously unknown, unavailable or unusable suddenly became a valuable commodity. In other words, key developments in technology created new resources. The quantity of available resources has continued to expand throughout human history."

Scientists are getting closer to the dream of creating computer systems that can replicate the brain.

Digital advertising billboards being trialled in Japan are fitted with cameras that read the gender and age group of people looking at them to tailor their commercial messages.

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

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.

Using stem cell technology, reproductive scientists in Texas, led by Dr. Richard R. Berhringer at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, have produced male and female mice from two fathers.

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.