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After the crap articles in "gizmo" rags, the actual announcement from Panasonic was released on December 25. "Panasonic Corporation today announced the development of two new 18650-type (18 mm in diameter, 65 mm in height) high-capacity lithium-ion battery cells[1] for use in laptop computers and environmentally-friendly energy technologies. The company boosted the capacity of 18650-type battery cells, which are widely used in laptops, by improving electrode materials. By improving the positive electrode, it has achieved the 3.4 Ah cell which offers 20 percent greater capacity than the current 2.9 Ah model. The 3.4 Ah cell will be mass produced in fiscal 2012 ending in March 2012. The 4.0 Ah cell, which has 30 percent greater capacity compared to the 2.9 Ah cell, uses a next generation electrode material, a silicon based alloy for the negative electrode, substituting carbon. The 4.0 Ah cell will be mass produced in fiscal 2013 ending in March 2013."

So that's it. Lithium-ion batteries with 20% more capacity in 2012, and another 17% for 2013, or a 38% improvement over the next 3 years. Nice for laptops, very helpful for electric cars.

this idea.

Last year, we read about/or i read about:

http://corporate.honda.com/safety/details.aspx?id=pedestrian

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/lifestyle/autos/news/article_1435518.php/Honda_improves_pedestrian_safety_with_new_generation_dummies

http://world.honda.com/news/2004/4040824_02.html

https://www.japancorp.net/Article.Asp?Art_ID=8166

OK, first off: why is a purely electric vehicle being described as a hybrid?

Um, because it is a hybrid, not a pure electric?

It's actually not a "hybrid".

The term "hybrid" means that a car has multiple sources of power delivery -- for example, both a battery and a gasoline engine.

Because the car only has one source of power (the battery), the term "hybrid" does not apply.

It does have multiple power sources. Read this and you'll see that it has a gas engine as well:
http://www.japancorp.net/Article.Asp?Art_ID=14929

Maybe you should do a little investigation before you jump on people for using the term incorrectly.

Ok, I'm going to be silly and feed the anonymous troll...

Mostly, I agree with you; but, there are cases where the "tinfoil hat" IS the business decision that the twelve-year-old can grasp:

"Cure vs treatment". The profit motive (by itself) would far rather sell a treatment than a cure.

So they are hiding the cures because they want to sell a treatment? Who is hiding it? Who discovered it that has that motive? As I said before, NIH dollars fund the most basic research which leads to new biology/drugs. Pharma does a little of that, but most of their dollars go into the clinical trials. So the academic researcher working for NIH funds has *ZERO* motive to hide the cure. *ZERO*.

So your tin-foil-hat theory rests on the key discovery being made by smaller amount of primary research being done in Pharma companies. Who do you think does the research, runs the bench experiments, crunches the numbers in those Pharma companies? Is it the high-end management who stands to make a killing from corporate profits? No. It's done be Ph.D. scientists and lab techs. A decent sized group of them.

Do you honestly think someone lab tech with a B.S. biology degree is going to be paid enough money to shut up about some great disease cure that is found by their group?

How about the Ph.D.'s in the group? Earning a Ph.D. is a long long haul. Most folks doing that are pretty smart and could have made much more money going to business school if making money was their number one priority. Most scientists care about knowledge, care about cures, and yes, like the prestige and recognition for making a major discovery. How likely is it they are going to keep a disease cure secret so the top management can get big bonuses? Not very freaking likely.

Even if some would do it, all it would take is one in the group to leak it. Keeping secrets in groups just doesn't work very well. Now stop to think what if a friend/family-member/loved-one of a member group has the disease? Not that unlikely with any decent sized lab group. Still think they are going to keep a cure secret? Please.

But as an example, consider the minor ailment athlete's foot. It's a huge industry. It's a fungus. It's absolutely not impossible to get rid of. But you will get marketed treatments, not cures (it'll cure the fungus on your foot, but you'll quickly get reinfected from your shoes, socks, shower, and so on; and they don't ever try to sell you anything to fix the problem once and for all. Doing so would be a poor business decision.) People don't have it in Japan, hence, no huge stinky-foot industry either. From a business point of view this is just lost profits!

Umm, Bullshit. Where do you tinfoil hat nutters come up with this stuff. Yes, they get athlete's foot in Japan. Need me to google for you? http://www.japancorp.net/Article.Asp?Art_ID=12391 Now, if you want to claim Japan has a lower incidence, I might believe you because I've never bothered to look up the statistics. However if that is in fact the case, that might be due to a more rigorous cleaning of public pools/showers, (places where it is most likely to be transmitted) in Japan than in the states. Not some secret cure that the American pharm companies are hiding from us.

Anti-bacterial drugs are relatively easy to make because you can often simply target the cell wall. Fungi are eukaryotes, like humans, and don't have a cell wall. One of the problems that comes along with that is that drugs that damage fungus, also tend to damage humans. Lamisil is a drug you often see marketed on TV. Take enough of it and it is absolutely guaranteed to cure your Athlete's foot. The cure is not hidden from you at all. The problem is it may well also kill your liver before all the athlete's foot is gone. Fungi are hard to kill without killing human cells. Ask any researcher who has had to deal with fungus in their tissue culture.

Honda has been working toward better production efficiency for the past few years. http://www.japancorp.net/Article.Asp?Art_ID=11538
and
http://world.honda.com/news/2006/c061201HondaSolte c/

As per the discussion on Digg here is a video of the robot in action with the MRI:

http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/honda_develops _bmi_robot_hand.php

And all the other links that were related:

http://www.engadget.com/2006/05/24/hondas-asimo-ge ts-mind-control-interface/

http://www.japancorp.net/Article.Asp?Art_ID=12565

The Japancorp has the most information than both the engadget and then Yahoo.

You mean like the Sharp 904SH? Doubt you'll see anything like this if you don't live in Japan though... for a while at least. Also features face recognition technology for security and a 3.2 megapixel camera with 2x optical zoom. Patience...

1) Bio-panel - a panel that uses algae to produce either hydrogen or bio-deisel oil based
off hybrid algae, a variant replacement for conventional solar panels .

My idea based on already known uses for algae .

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,54456, 00.html

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

2) Nanite memory - non-volatile ram that is 10 - 20 times faster than current DD2,
and and Ipod could have 10 Tera-bytes of a module the size of a sugar cube .
No power required to maintain the bit state either .

http://www.nantero.com/

3) Growing human organs with the recepients DNA markers on the backs of mice,
already been done, think it through to its full possibilities .

3rd pic down http://www.pbs.org/saf/1107/features/body.htm

4) Next Gen Fuel Cell vehicles .

http://www.japancorp.net/Article.asp?Art_ID=11628

5) LED based wall projectors to reduce electrical power usage world wide .
Imagine all display systems in the world going from 100 wats plus to 1- 3 watts .

http://www.lightblueoptics.com/

6 billion ppl, probably over 2 billion display systems world wide with a over
100 fold reduction in power usage, it could have a major impact . (Tv's, monitors, etc )

Ex-MislTech

GODDD, is this news? I wonder what they're doing for security.

Even before following TFA's link, I recalled hearing or reading about this when I was in Japan from Dec 04 to Feb 05. So, for this response, I "googled" it, and though I left on 24 Feb, and these links I'm supplying are dated 28 Feb, the news is sourced from material in the making long before that.

OMRON Announces 'OKAO Vision Face Recognition Sensor', World's First Face Recognition Biometric for Mobile Phones

http://www.japancorp.net/Article.Asp?Art_ID=9494

Face-recognition security comes to mobile phones
http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS7172421600.html

As for the Omron URL, this is an excerpt:

"To use the unit, the user simply takes his or her own photo. The 'OKAO Vision Face Recognition Sensor' will automatically detect the user and unlock the unit. The identification process takes less than a second from snapping the photograph. Further, their is no need to adjust the camera position when taking the photo. If the face is included in the photo, the sensor will detect the owner automatically."

However, it says nothing to ally to allay fears that a thief could place before the camera a picture of the owner of a stolen camera. It might be possible that the camera may someday have strobes or some thermal sensors that try to detect heat from a human body temp range, but that could be fooled with a transparent "Mission: Impossible" mask of the Gerry Anderson type (I purposely ignored the recent MI stuff since I loath money-grabbing remakes or remakes-in-title).

I suppose a good security feature set would include:

1. thumb or finger sensor with thumb print/fingerprint biometrics
2. retinal scan (with enhancements to determine live/dead eyeballs
3. breath, saliva or mucous tissue sample scan and later match/compare
4. electrolytic sample (to determine voltage of live/dead person)

If they can do that (put a mini-lab in the phone) then probably only CIA, NSA, MI6 and Japan's pending MI6, Mossad, and others would surely buy up these phones, or any other devices so equipped/secured.

Image word: entice, just as this "article" was "enticing"...

Their policy is to announce "it'll be done by 2020", then wait, while paying out ever more Japanese corporate welfare, and claim the credit when the inventors produce the tech sometime during the next human generation.

Meanwhile, Toshiba's already got one. A little one, but 15 years ahead of schedule.

Oops -
Already done

Why is it news when another company jumps on the 3D using parallax bandwagon?

Sharp has done it, Toshiba has done it. All three are using the same layered LCD technology. Slashdot has covered each one now

BB

You might also want to read the following papers:

A Comparison Analysis of the Greater Carbohydrate and Increased Photosynthetic Element Count of Budweiser Versus the Similar Enzyme Content of Bud Light

Next to medicine and biowarfare, brewing and fermentation technology is a major funding source for microbiology.

Some research suggests that drinking beer may stop your hair from turning grey

And possibly the most expensive PDF's in the world

Indeed, I took the cell numbers as functionally equivalent to module efficiency (ie mirrors can be 98+% efficient). But reading the literature, It's clear that cheap is the goal (cheap focusing elements). In fact, the production price for multijunction concentrators being discussed is 12-50 cents/Wp. WOW! $0.12/Wp for 30 years is $0.0015/kWh! (of course this doesn't include BOS, but even with, its amazing)
Commercial Efficiencies:
Entech - 30% net concentrator efficiency, 33% cells (2001)
Sharp - 28% net concentrator efficiency (FYI-uses non imaging optics)
Sharp - 17.4% MODULE efficiency (not cell)
Sunpower - 16.5% MODULE efficiency (21.5% cells)

Now take into consideration that the spectrapower cells Entech is using are now up to 37.3% (2004) efficiency, which will increase module efficiency to 33.5% from their 2001 announcement (which is in line with a claims of the VC I spoke with).

So at 30% efficiency (using published value) we need to increase our land base values by 33%. So All US ENERGY Needs from 13,491 Mi^2 or 5% of TEXAS (including shading at an average of 1800 kwh/m^2/year).

Thanks for calling that one, I'll update my database of facts. I haven't been reading the solar journals very closely over the last 4-5 years as the company I am working for is developing storage technologies, so I put most my time that technology and market trends therein (which we will get to).

http://www.japancorp.net/Article.Asp?Art_ID=8266 is pretty good. Really if you check http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2c off=1&tab=wn&ncl=http://www.japancorp.net/Article. Asp%3FArt_ID%3D8266 you can choose the one you like most.

Not a mirror but this is the Panasonic page. It was also covered by JCNNetwork and Engadget.

There's also a press release on JCNNetwork.

How about a link without MySQL and PHP . . . .

Try Japan Corporate News Net

Coutesy of Google News . . . .