Daily Tech News

TAMING THE HUNGER FOR POWER Wi-Fi is everywhere in our daily lives, invisibly connecting laptops to printers, allowing smartphones to make calls, stream movies, and letting online gamers battle it out. The downside to this is that connecting to Wi-Fi consumes significant energy resources for devices, and this often leads to drained batteries. Now, a team of University of Washington computer scientists and electrical engineers have created a method that would allow the generation of Wi-Fi transmissions at 10,000 times less power compared to conventional methods. Their project, which they dubbed as  Passive Wi-Fi , could potentially unseat existing energy-efficient wireless platforms such as  Bluetooth Low Energy  and  Zigbee. “We wanted to see if we could achieve Wi-Fi transmissions using almost no power at all,”  said  co-author Shyam Gollakota. “That’s basically what Passive Wi-Fi delivers. We can get Wi-Fi for...

BUILDING AN ELECTRONIC KIDNEY Scientists at Vanderbilt University have developed a first-ever implantable artificial kidney. The artificial kidney contains a microchip filter and living kidney cells that can function using the patient’s heart, and this bio-synthetic kidney acts like the real organ, removing salt, water and waste products to keep patients with kidney failure from relying on dialysis. The key to this new development is a breakthrough in the microchip itself, which uses silicon nanotechnology. “[Silicon nanotechnology] uses the same processes that were developed by the microelectronics industry for computers,” said Dr. William H. Fissell IV, who led the team that developed the device. The microchips are affordable, precise, and function as an ideal filter. Each artificial kidney will contain 15 microchips layered on top of each other. These chips will work as filters and also act a support system for the living ce...

Love it or hate it, Bombardier Recreational Products'  Can-Am Spyder Roadster  is definitely a unique vehicle. Recently, however, BRP introduced a one-off model that's a little  more  unique than all the others – the Can-Am Spyder F3 Turbo Concept Vehicle. Unveiled this Thursday at Florida's Daytona International Speedway, the F3 Turbo was on hand to help kick off BRP's sponsorship of the upcoming Can-Am NASCAR racing season. The vehicle features a 150-hp, 1,330-cc turbocharged and intercooled Rotax engine. That powerplant takes the F3 Turbo from 0-60 mph (0-100 km/h) in 4.3 seconds and does a quarter-mile (0.4 km) in 12.3 seconds. There's also a Sport mode, which allows for controlled rear tire drifts when engaged. "BRP's Rotax engineers challenged themselves to develop a turbo version of the Can-Am Spyder F3 engine, which resulted in this high-performance vehicle," says Rénald Plante, director, Can-Am Spyder engineering. "This...

SMART PRICE Despite the ubiquity of smartphones, you’d be hard pressed to find one that you could purchase with spare change. Yet Ringing Bells, a handset manufacturer from India, has managed to create one that’s only going to cost $4. The device is called  Freedom 251  and was just very recently unveiled. Specs aside, the most impressive thing about the Freedom 251 is, by far, its price. The pricing strategy and development of the technology was anchored on Narendra Modi’s intent to ‘empower India to the last person,’ and the smartphone was a way for central government to promote inclusivity among its constituents for its digital initiatives. Similar initiatives following this thrust included the launch of the Askash tablet, a piece of technology made specifically for underprivileged students that was recently endorsed by the government. While the project wasn’t a success, mostly because of the quality concerns users experienced while using the tablet, thes...

Researchers could be fending off the demise of Moore's Law with the help of a new material that allows electrons to move from point A to point B faster. Engineers at the University of Utah discovered a new kind of flat semiconducting material made of tin monoxide that is only one-atom thick, allowing electrical charges to pass through it faster than silicon or other 3D materials. Charges traveling through conventional electronic devices bounce around in all directions when traveling through transistors and other components consisting of layers of silicon on a glass substrate. Engineers have only recently begun to work with 2D materials like graphene, molybdenum disulfide and borophene, which force electrons to "only move in one layer so it's much faster," says professor Ashutosh Tiwari, who led the research. Tiwari says the new material fills an important gap in speeding up electronics because, unlike graphene and other near atom-thin materials, it allows both ne...

The Japanese electronics multinational Kyocera has begun work on what it says will be the world’s biggest floating solar farm. The power plant is being built on a reservoir in Japan’s Chiba prefecture and is anticipated to supply enough electricity for nearly 5,000 households when it is completed in early 2018. Space-starved Japan has already seen several floating solar farms built as part of the country’s drive to exploit more renewable energy in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster. The shutdown of nuclear plants has seen Japan increasingly reliant on fossil fuel imports that have hit its emissions-cutting ambitions. The Yamakura dam power plant will see more than 50,000 solar photovoltaic panels cover a 180,000 m sq area, but compared to other land-based plants it is relatively small. At 13.7MW when finished, it would not make the top 100 of the world’s largest solar photovoltaic farms. In the UK, water company United Utilities  started work last year on a float...

THE ROADMAP TO A REVOLUTION Moore’s law  has a simple logic to it. The number of transistors in integrated circuits doubles every year. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made this prediction in 1965. At this time, 50 transistors per chip was the lowest per transistor cost. Moore predicted that, by 1970, an integrated chip would contain 1,000 transistors and that the price per transistor would drop by 90 percent. This law was a reflection of reality at the time. And it has been a reflection of reality for a long,  long  time. Indeed, some time ago, the silicon chip industry noticed this trend and started using it as a roadmap for their products. What was a mere observation ended up becoming a target that the entire industry should achieve. This wasn’t just a goal set by the industry. It became a roadmap for the companies in the semiconductor industry. The Semiconductor Industry Association, a group that includes Intel, AMD, TSMC, GlobalFo...

MINIMALLY INVASIVE NEURAL INTERFACE Australian researchers have created a “bionic spinal cord.” They claim that this device could give paralyzed people significant hope of walking again. And if that’s not enough, it could do it utilizing the power of thought and without the necessity of open brain surgery. A research team from the  Vascular Bionics Laboratory at the University of Melbourne  developed the novel neural-recording device, which both eschews invasive surgery and decreases the risks of a blood-brain barrier breach by being implanted into the brain’s blood vessels. Developed under DARPA’s Reliable Neural-Interface Technology (RE-NET) program, the Stentrode can potentially safely expand the use of brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) in the treatment of physical disabilities and neurological disorders. The researchers describe their “proof-of-concept results” which come from a study conducted on sheep, demonstrating high-fidelity measurements taken...

German solar technology firm Heliatek claims to have outdone itself by setting a new world record for directly converting sunlight into electricity using organic photovoltaic cells. In 2012 it claimed a then world record 10.7 percent conversion efficiency and said it was gunning for 15 percent in the near future. This week it announced it's halfway there, achieving a new record of 13.2 percent. Heliatek says its R&D teams achieved the new record using a multi-junction cell and that the measurement was independently confirmed by Fraunhofer CSP's solar testing facility. While traditional silicon cells have achieved higher levels of conversion efficiency, organic cells are also pursued because they can be produced more cheaply and are also more flexible. In fact, the firm claims that "the excellent low light and high temperature behavior of the organic semiconductor" in the new cells makes them equivalent to the electricity generation capability of conventional s...

The danger posed by rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide has seen many schemes proposed to remove a proportion it from the air. Rather than simply capture this greenhouse gas and bury it in the ground, though, many experiments have managed to transform CO 2  into useful things like carbon nanofibers or even fuels, such as diesel. Unfortunately, the over-arching problem with many of these conversions is the particularly high operating temperatures that require almost counterproductive amounts of energy to produce relatively low yields of fuel. Now researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) claim to have devised a way to take CO 2  directly from the air and convert it into methanol using much lower temperatures and in a correspondingly simpler way. With the simplest structure of all alcohols, methanol can be used directly as a clean-burning fuel for appropriately modified internal combustion engines, as well as in fuel cells. It is also ...

POWERWALL From the moment it was launched, the Tesla Powerwall was a massive success. The device, which was introduced last year is already sold out, and it is speculated to have already reached some $1 billion in sales. Basically, the massive battery allows you to stock solar energy and use it to run your home’s electricity after dark. The batteries are designed to tap into backup power when the grid goes down, or to be used in tandem with solar panels to access solar energy in the evening, making it a smart and reliable source of power during the harsh winter seasons or other chaotic times. To break this down a bit more, if you have either solar panels or electricity that is generated from wind, you can never be certain of what you are going to get. Cloudy day? Then you probably won’t get much from for solar panels. With these sustainable forms of energy, you don’t always produce the same amount of power. However, with a battery, you ...

Google is pushing forward in the race to deliver universal Internet access, testing solar-powered drones capable of beaming high-speed Internet back to Earth. The secretive Project Skybender,  The Guardian   reports , aims to use high-frequency millimeter wave transmitters that could be used to provide next-generation 5G wireless Internet access. The experimental technology has previously been used in airport body scanners. But by using what’s called a phased array, millimeter waves could theoretically be used to transmit data 40 times faster than the fastest 4G systems used today. A network made up of thousands of autonomous drones, powered by solar energy, would then be used to deliver high-speed, reliable Internet around the world. “The huge advantage of millimeter wave is access to new spectrum because the existing cellphone spectrum is overcrowded. It’s packed and there’s nowhere else to go,” said Jacques Rudell, a professor of electrical engineering at the Unive...