Tech Suki

Intel’s Wireless Power Technology Demonstrated

Intel claims it has improved the efficiency of a method for powering devices wirelessly. Intel’s “Wireless Energy Resonant Link” (WREL), technology was demonstrated by transmitting electricity wirelessly to a lamp on stage and lighting a 60 watt bulb, which consumes more power than an average laptop computer.

DailyTech - New Nanomaterial is Just What the Doctor Ordered for Medical Implants

Revolutionary material could offer clean, non-rejected implants of artificial organs or monitoring devices

DailyTech - New Mexico Spaceport Plans Continue, Despite Vote Outcome

Spaceport America will continue construction even though another county has chosen not to support the company with tax dollars

Officials expect construction to begin shortly, with initial plans to open it up sometime in late 2010 or early 2011.  Spaceport America’s presence in New Mexico should help boost the state’s economy, with thousands of jobs that need to be filled.

Spaceport America is working with Lockheed Martin, Virgin Galactic, ROcket Racing, Micogravity Enterprise and other aerospace companies as it moves forward.  Sir Richard Branson chose Spaceport America as the location where he hopes to launch Virgin Galactic spaceliners, which will offer tourists an opportunity for a suborbital flight for a mere $200,000.

Commercial space ventures continue to explode in popularity, as companies continue to receive funding for private space research.  Space Adventures, a space tourism company, works alongside the Russian space agency to send space tourists into orbit, earning around $30 million per trip.

DailyTech - New Toshiba Gaming Notebook Uses Three NVIDIA GPUs

Toshiba introduces new X305 gaming notebooks with three NVIDIA GPUs

NVIDIA’s 9400M GPU is rather new itself and is the GPU used in the newly revamped MacBook notebooks. The Qosmio X305-Q706 features an Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 CPU, 4GB of PC3-8500 RAM, and a 320GB HDD. Both machines use a 17-inch WSXGA+ TruBright display with a resolution of 1680 x 1050. The X305-Q706 retails for $1,999.

The high-end X305-Q708 carries a much heftier retail price of $4,199.99. For the extra money you get 4GB of PC3-8500 RAM, an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9300 CPU, and a 128GB SSD in addition to the 320GB HDD. The onboard sound system of both machines is a four speaker Harman Kardon stereo system with a subwoofer.

DailyTech - NVIDIA Launches 4GB Quadro FX 5800 Graphics Card

In addition to the massive amount of RAM, the FX 5800 offers up to 240 CUDA programmable parallel cores. The card supports interactive 4D modeling with time-lapse capability. Memory bandwidth is up to 102 GB per second and fill rates exceed 52 billion texels per second. Geometry performance is reported to be 300 million triangles per second. The card also features 10-bit color.

The Quadro FX 5800 is available now at an MSRP of $3,499.

DailyTech - Miniature Nuclear Reactors to be on Sale Within 5 Years

Hyperion, Toshiba, others, race to produce “personal” nuclear power.

Unlike conventional nuclear reactors, the Hyperion design uses no water for cooling, meaning it can be sited anywhere. It is designed to be covered in concrete and then buried while in operation, to reduce the risk of tampering. The reactor must be excavated every 7-10 years for refueling, but can otherwise be left entirely undisturbed.

Since power is produced 100% of the time, the total energy output is more than 15 times what the world’s most powerful 400-foot tall 5 MW wind turbine will produce. The total cost is estimated at $25 million USD. It generates no greenhouse gases while in operation and, when one takes into account the total amount of resources used during manufacture, is said to have much less of a carbon footprint than even wind or solar power.

The Phoenix > Lifestyle Features > Space cowboy

For more than 50 years, UConn physics professor Ronald Mallett had a secret. Now that it’s out, we may be one step closer to traveling back in time.

Traveling into the future is easy. Anyone familiar with Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity knows a moving clock ticks slower than a stationary one. So it’s simple, really: all you have to do is build a spaceship that moves nearly as fast as the speed of light, pump it with enough fuel for a long — long, long — round-trip voyage, and head for the stars. By the time you return to Earth in, say, five years (as marked by you onboard your light-year-traveling spaceship, of course), you’ll have aged half a decade while everyone and everything else on Earth has aged considerably more.

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For more than 50 years, he’s been obsessed with finding a way to return to the past.

Mallett is convinced that time travel will become a reality sooner rather than later. “What I’m doing, I like to think of as analogous to the Wright brothers,” he says. “They sent this rickety craft across a few hundred yards of beach. But with the technological acceleration that happened after that, by the middle of the century we had intercontinental air travel. This is only the beginning. Once it can be shown to be done, even in the simplest case, then what we learn from that will be incredible.”

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If that experiment succeeds, then it would be on to the next: trying to confirm that that twisting of space leads to the twisting of time. The idea is to drop tiny neutrons into that tortioned space. If Mallett’s theories held water, the subatomic particles would travel fractions of a second backward in time.

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The actual science behind all this is dauntingly complex. And —though he once took out a provisional patent for what he called a LOTART (Laser Optical Time Machine and Receiver Transmitter), an early-warning device that might allow the reception of signals from the future that could warn us of disasters — Mallett concedes that any practical implementation of his ideas is a ways off.

Click the source for the article

DailyTech - Researchers Crack WPA, No Brute Force Needed

A pair of security researchers claim to have partially cracked WPA encryption, with an attack that takes around 15 minutes.

The technique relies on an undisclosed “mathematical breakthrough,” say researchers Erik Tews and Martin Beck, and breaks the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) key used to encrypt data between a wireless router and its clients. Currently, the attack works only one way: data traveling from the access point to its clients is vulnerable, while data traveling in the opposite direction is not.

DailyTech - Sea Ice Growing at Fastest Pace on Record

Rapid Rebound Brings Ice Back to Levels from the 1980s.

An abnormally cool Arctic is seeing dramatic changes to ice levels.  In sharp contrast to the rapid melting seen last year, the amount of global sea ice has rebounded sharply and is now growing rapidly. The total amount of ice, which set a record low value last year, grew in October at the fastest pace since record-keeping began in 1979.

Riken researchers make brain tissues from stem cells › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

Japanese researchers said Thursday they had created functioning human brain tissues from stem cells, a world first that has raised new hopes for the treatment of disease. Stem cells taken from human embryos have been used to form tissues of the cerebral cortex, the supreme control tower of the brain, according to researchers at the government-backed research institute Riken.

The research was led by Yoshiki Sasai at Riken Center for Development Biology in Kobe.

DailyTech - NASA Launches Probe to Explore Solar System’s Boundary

The IBEX probe launched into orbit over the weekend to help scientists learn more about solar wind

NASA successfully launched the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) probe over the weekend into orbit so it will be able to research solar wind that helps protect planets from cosmic rays.  The probe launched aboard a Pegasus rocket over the Pacific Ocean.

IBEX was launched into high-orbit and is scheduled for a two-year mission to help researchers learn about solar wind that is now at its lowest pressure in the past 50 years.  The solar system’s interstellar boundary is when particles from the galaxy meet with particles that are emitted from the Sun, which helps create a large buffer zone able to help protect the solar system from the majority of cosmic rays.

DailyTech - British Breakthrough Makes Manned Mars Mission Safer

New method for protecting astronauts would make trip to Mars much safer

A team of British researchers believes that they have defeated one of the major obstacles to the journey: solar storms. The Earth is protected from deadly solar storms by its magnetosphere, which deflects the radioactive particles produced in the storm.

When a spacecraft travels beyond the protective magnetosphere, it is subject to the destructive power of these storms that scientists claim can pop-up quickly and pose severe risk to instruments on the spacecraft and the lives of the astronauts in the spacecraft.

The system Bingham and other researchers developed creates a mini magnetosphere around the spacecraft. The team says that the theory has been tested in the lab on a scale model and provides almost total protection to the ship and occupants inside the vessel.

Designing a mini magnetosphere had previously been dismissed as impossible due to the large amount of equipment and power deemed necessary to create the protective bubble. The researchers were able to develop a prototype system that in its final form would be about the size of a merry-go-round on a playground and require as much energy to operate as a kettle.

Scientists see the system being comprised of two mini magnetosphere-generating satellites housed in outriders in front of the spacecraft. The artificial magnetosphere would not run at all times and would only be fired up when a solar storm was detected.

DailyTech - New “Near Perfect” Solar Design Could Change Entire Industry

New coated cell 43 percent more efficient, can be easily produced with current production lines

The new RPI solar cell is a normal cell covered in a special anti-reflective coating which traps sunlight from nearly every angle and part of the spectrum.  The new cell is near perfect; it absorbs 96.21 percent of the sunlight shined on it, while a normal cell could only absorb 67.4 percent.  That 43 percent efficiency boost, coupled with mass production, if properly implemented could place solar on the verge of competing unsubsidized with coal power, at last.

DailyTech - World’s First Fully Functional Artificial Heart Costs $192,000

French invention could help to extend the natural human lifespan

French scientists have invented a working prototype of a fully artificial heart.  The heart is based on bleeding edge technology found in satellites and aircraft.  The heart beats nearly like its organic counterpart and operates using similar feedback as well.  It uses electric sensors to monitor and control heart rate and blood flow.

Carmat, the company who developed the device, with funding from the European space and defense group EADS, unveiled the heart at a Paris press conference this week.  The device could save millions — and its all thanks to modern aerospace technology, according to Carmat’s top executives.  Carmat’s chief operating officer Patrick Coulombier states, “It’s the same principle in the airplane as in the body.”

In the past there have been artificial hearts, like the much hyped Jarvik heart, however they were only a temporary fix while awaiting transplant.  The key problem was that they could not adjust their pumping like a biological heart, and could only be adjusted externally.  This limited their usefulness.

The new heart tries its best to model the real thing, and come awfully close.  Tiny pressure and altitude sensors, developed for use in airplanes, feed information about blood flow to the heart.  The device responds almost immediately, with lightening fast decisions to increase or decrease blood flow.

Past hearts have also only had one pump, but the new heart features two, just like the real heart. It pumps blood to the lungs and then pumps the returning blood to the rest of the body, just like in the real heart.  The new heart is made largely of a combination of polymer and pig tissue, a similar design to modern heart valves, implanted in many people.

The device has been successfully tested on large mammals, and is awaiting permission to begin clinical human trials.  Its makers are very confident that the device will be safe, long-lived, and will open undreamt of possibilities for people with heart disease.  Initially it will be offered to those suffering from a massive heart attack or who had heart failure.  However eventually it could be implanted in people with milder heart problems.

AnandTech: The Dark Knight: Intel’s Core i7.

Awesome review and benchmarks by Anandtech. Click above for the article.