Pentagon officials on Monday announced plans for a ship-mounted laser to debut next year, Fox News reported. A solid-state laser prototype will be mounted on the backside of the USS Ponce in early 2014 for deployment in the Middle East. The cutting-edge technology will be able to obliterate small boats and unmanned aircrafts with a blast of infrared energy. One Navy official described the device as “a blowtorch,” but with “an unlimited magazine.” More →
The word “sapphire” typically conjures up images of luxury gems, but it could soon be associated with high-end smartphone displays as well. Technology Review reports that engineers at New Hampshire-based GT Advanced Technologies are working on ways to make sapphire a practical alternative to Corning’s ever-popular Gorilla Glass as a building material for smartphone screens. While Technology Review concedes that sapphire screens will likely remain much more expensive than Gorilla Glass screens going forward, the publication points out that sapphire screens would be roughly three times more durable and resistant to scratching than Corning’s displays. The key will be to get sapphire display costs down to around $20 per unit, which would still represent a major premium compared to a typical $3 Gorilla Glass screen, but would at least make the material viable for a limited number of high-end smartphones.
The secret laboratory headed by Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin, which has birthed such projects as Google Glass and the company’s driverless car program, plans to unveil a new project “in the coming month.” Google’s Astro Teller, who holds the distinguished title “Captain of Moonshots,” shared details about the company’s secret X Lab facility at the South by Southwest conference in Austin this week. As reported by GigaOM, Teller notes that in order to solve difficult problems we must overcome society’s expectations and embrace risky ideas and failures. More →
We’ve heard a lot about graphene being a “wonder material” that could be used for smartphone casings and antennas, but now it seems that some engineers have found a way to incorporate it into audio speakers and headphones as well. Technology Review reports that University of California Berkeley researchers Qin Zhou and Alex Zettl have found that graphene is the perfect material for constructing speaker diaphragms, which typically work best when made from a thin material that reduces the need to conduct expensive and energy-consuming “damping engineering.” More →
While gigabit Wi-Fi seems to be all the rage these days, some researchers at Georgia Tech are working on new technology that makes even the fastest wireless networks look like dial-up in comparison. Technology Review reports that Georgia Tech’s broadband wireless networking laboratory has been experimenting with making antennas out of graphene, a two-dimensional “super-material” that measures just one atom thick and has been described by Nokia (NOK) as the “strongest material ever tested, having a breaking strength 300 times greater than steel.” But while a lot of attention has been paid to graphene’s potential for manufacturing incredibly thin and light gadget casings, the researchers at Georgia Tech are using it to create an antenna capable of transmitting data at a rate of a terabit per second. More →
Everyone who loves fast mobile data should be very excited for LTE-Advanced since it’s the next iteration of LTE technology that promises to deliver average downloads at 100Mbps or higher. But Technology Review has posted an interesting article that touches on one of the downsides of LTE-Advanced: It could make smartphones bulkier than what we’ve become used to over the past several years. Because LTE-Advanced relies upon multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) technology to deliver its high-end speeds, it requires multiple antennae that receive data signals from different spectrum bands to function optimally. More →
Nokia (NOK) this week made a somewhat under-the-radar announcement that could nevertheless pay out major dividends for the future of the tech industry. Via Tom’s Hardware, Nokia and the Graphene Flagship Consortium this week won a grant of €1 billion ($1.35 billion USD) to develop graphene, a two-dimensional “super-material” that measures just one atom thick and is described by Nokia as the “strongest material ever tested, having a breaking strength 300 times greater than steel.” More →
There’s just one problem with the post-PC mobile revolution: The Internet may not be designed to properly handle it. To understand why this is, recall that the Internet was originally designed to be something like the post office where packets of data are sent back and forth from one IP address to another based on information in the packet header. The problem is that none of the Internet’s architects at the time could have known about all the mobile devices that would one day be hooked up to the Internet, from smartphones and tablets to vacuums and refrigerators. When you take all these devices into account, and you consider that they could easily create a logjam by all requesting the same data from the same source, then you can see how the mobile revolution could potentially overwhelm the old architecture. More →
One sure way to deplete your smartphone’s battery life is to leave GPS services turned on for a prolonged period of time. But now researchers at Microsoft (MSFT) have come up with a smart way to get phones’ GPS chips to consumer significantly less power by outsourcing some of their key functions to the cloud. Technology Review reports that Microsoft researchers have figured out a way to use the GPS chips to only collect the most important data from satellites while they relying on “public, online databases” to collect other key data “such as satellite trajectories and Earth elevation values, to calculate the device’s past locations.” Microsoft Research principal researcher Jie Liu tells Technology Review that low-powered GPS chips could lead to more “continuous location-sensing applications” that can give users more detailed and accurate information than many of today’s GPS-capable apps.
Google’s (GOOG) self-driving cars are really cool but they could also put a lot of people out of work if they catch on quickly. Google chairman Eric Schmidt seems to grasp these implications, but at the New York Times’ DealBook conference on Wednesday, Schmidt said the potential problem of highly automated services causing widespread unemployment could be overcome by giving young Americans the right kind of education. More →
Although NAND flash, the storage that’s found in smartphones, tablets and many computers today, is faster than traditional platter-based hard drives, it does have its limitations as well. For starters, NAND flash storage is usually only good for about 10,000 read/write cycles before it fails. Taiwanese engineers from Macronix plan to announce at the 2012 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting that it has figured out how to improve NAND flash storage read/write cycles from 10,000 to 100 million cycles using a “self-healing” process that uses a flash chip with “onboard heaters that could anneal small groups of memory cells.” The result is a chip that can be erased and rewritten on over and over, even when it should theoretically break down. As promising as Macronix’s breakthrough could be for the mobile industry, there are no plans for a commercial product to be released any time in the near future.
Remember the days when school desks were only useful for jotting down graffiti? Well those days might be coming to an end. Reuters reports that British scientists are testing out new “smart desks” that are essentially desk-sized tablets with multitouch screens capable of supporting multiple users at the same time. The researchers have apparently found that these new desks are particularly beneficial for teaching mathematics as they “have benefits over doing maths on paper” and “pupils are able to improve their fluency and flexibility in maths by working together.” More →
