Sorry, Google, but you may not hold a monopoly on researching far-out technologies that may not even help your core business in the future. Forbes contributor Haydn Shaughnessy notes that Samsung has started investing substantial sums of money into science and technology research for an ecosystem that may never see the light of day. In particular, he says that Samsung has said it will invest $1.34 billion over the next decade in the Samsung Future Technology Foundation, which The Korea Times reports will focus on “three areas such as basic sciences — physics, chemistry, life science, and mathematics, materials science, and ICT fusion-type projects.” More →
Anyone who remembers the ’80s surely recalls the television ads for The Clapper, the sound recognition system that you could use to turn lights and appliances off and on just by clapping your hands. Researchers at the University of Washington have come up with a more sophisticated version of this idea by configuring Wi-Fi antennas used in your home gadgets to interpret hand gestures so you can turn on lights, adjust your thermostat and change channels on your television all with the wave of a hand. The University of Washington says that its technology is very similar to the technology used for Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect sensor but adds that it’s “simpler, cheaper and doesn’t require users to be in the same room as the device they want to control… because Wi-Fi signals can travel through walls and aren’t bound by line-of-sight or sound restrictions.” A video demonstration of the technology is posted below. More →
You may not believe it, but Samsung may be guilty of over hyping itself. In an article on Samsung’s recent claims about developing breakthrough “5G” wireless technology that will delivering 1Gbps connectivity over the air by 2020, Technology Review quotes two experts who are for now skeptical of the company’s assertions. Victor Bahl, a principal analyst at Microsoft Research, says that it will be very difficult to assess the accuracy of Samsung’s claims until the company actually publishes the results of its wireless tests and opens them up to peer review. More →
Google’s secretive Google X laboratory is where some of the company’s brightest minds go to work so-called “moonshot” projects such as Google Glass and self-driving cars. A new Businessweek profile on Google X makes it clear that there are limits to what the lab will put resources into researching, however. For example, Businessweek reveals that Google engineers gave serious thought to starting a research project on teleportation but ultimately decided to nix it “in part because any unique item that you would want to teleport… would have to be completely destroyed before it could be reconstituted on the other end.” But just because Google has for now given up on studying teleportation that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have other bizarre projects in the works. Among other things, Businessweek says that Google is pondering research on levitation and “inflatable robots” and wind-powered aerial drones.
Remember how exciting LTE-Advanced peak speeds of 1Gbps used to be? Well they still sound exciting but they’re nothing compared to what German researchers have just accomplished. TechWeek Europe reports that “researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics (FIAF) and the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT) have managed to transmit data over the air at a speed of 40 Gbps,” a world record for wireless data speeds that just happens to be “fast enough to send a full DVD in under a second.” Network engineers who worked on the project tell TechWeek Europe that the new wireless technology could be used to offer fiber-like connectivity to rural areas that have been previously unable to get access to high-speed Internet capabilities.
A teenager from Saratoga, California took home one of the top prizes at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair late last week after showing off her invention, which can fully charge a cell phone in 30 seconds or less. Eesha Khare was given the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award and a $50,000 prize for being runner-up in the competition, which was won by a 19-year-old who unveiled a new spin on self-driving car technology. Khare’s battery technology requires a new component to be installed inside the phone battery itself, and Intel notes that it also has potential applications for car batteries.
Google’s engineering director Ray Kurzweil, who has long been known for both his bold futurist predictions and his work in artificial intelligence, has laid out his vision for where search is headed in a new interview with Wired — and he’d apparently like to see Google become more like a friend with search benefits. Kurzweil starts off the interview by saying that he’s working at Google to help its search engine pick up more semantic meanings and thus help users receive good answers to more complicated questions. More →
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 →
