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Water thermochemical cracking is probably the most efficient method of converting solar energy to chemical energy that we have, perhaps that even exists considering the inefficiency of electrolysis.

First, with present technology, this is incorrect. Using solar photovoltaic plus electrolysis to produce fuels (hydrogen, carbon monoxide, or a mixture (syngas) appropriate for liquid hydrocarbon fuel synthesis) can be done with >30% sunlight-to-syngas efficiency using expensive concentrated photovoltaics (~40%) combined with high-efficiency high temperature electrolysis (>90%, see here and here). So far no thermochemical cycle has been demonstrated to achieve such a high efficiency.

Second, it is not about efficiency. In many cases one can achieve very high efficiency at the expense of using expensive materials. The idea here is to use cheap ceria-based oxide materials in the solar thermochemical reactor instead of expensive high-purity silicon semiconductors and other semiconducting materials in photovoltaics or photoelectrochemical cells.

Interesting. I have Asperger's, and I think I experience such an effect - in the middle of a conversation (or otherwhise), it feels like something "shuts down" wholly or partially in the brain (a sense, like closing your eyes or plugging your ears) - and I become effectively socioemotionally aphasic, and have to keep the conversation going via mechanical acting until this kicks in again. This is hard, and makes me feel "fake". I also doubt that this "sense" or "mode" functions at full capacity regularly. I also experience other people's emotions like "aura colors" in my mind to a large degree. I came across a study where they scanned the brains of high and low-functioning asperger cases, and saw that the activation in the autistics where located in the frontal lobes, and not an area in the center of the brain. They dubbed this the "self signal", theorizing that it signified awareness of self in a social context. This would also explain why I feel like I "lose myself" when this happens as I observe others interact.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biotech/20167/

According to [1] the cost of sequencing Watson's genome in 2007 was $2 million, not $1 million! Costs of the "original" genome sequences are often misquoted as well as $3 billion when that was the cost of the entire HGP which included the yeast genomes, the mouse genome and the development of a lot of technology that enable the sequencing of larger genomes. For an estimate of the actual cost of sequencing the original genomes (circa 2001-2003) a better source of information is the total amount of capital Celera raised from the late 1990s through 2003. Alternatively one could go through the NIH NHCGR budgets for the late 90's thru 2003 and separate out the grants actually awarded to the primary genome sequencing centers related to human genome sequencing. I believe the "common" number quoted for the first human genome is around $1 billion (~30% of the cost of the entire HGP), but I suspect that Celera never raised that much money so the real 1st & 2nd genome costs were probably less.

But it is clear that in the last 7 years the cost of sequencing a genome has declined by more than 5 orders of magnitude and that another order of magnitude will bring personal genome sequencing into budget realm (~$500) of individuals living in developed countries. However the fly in the ointment here is that there is currently little capability and will be little capability for some time [2] for using this information in medical settings to improve health care or reduce sickness, disease and aging.

Most people think that just because one sees reports on CNN that one can diagnose predispositions for breast or colon cancer that we are on the verge of curing all diseases. Not! The only way we will solve the primary problem driving our health care costs (aging) is by recognizing that the genome architecture is fundamentally flawed and the only way to solve the problem is to design a new more robust and reliable genomes. This can be done now. It could probably even have been started a decade ago [3]. Sure it will not be simple -- but neither was learning how to build automobiles or airplanes or rockets. But it is time that people start about transcending the current human OS just as Chromium OS will likely trump Windows and Linux and they in turn trumped VMS, UNIX, MVS, etc.

1. http://www.technologyreview.com/biotech/18809/
2. Scientists have not even begun to think about the "systems biology of specific human genomes" (vs. the systems biology of the "generic" human genome) and except for exceptional cases where defective genes have been directly tied to diseases in OMIM the information required is lacking and will only slowly accumulate through long term correlation studies. The only "short-cut" is to do full scale molecular dynamics simulations of all of the atoms in single eukaryotic cells (and then tissues, organs and bodies) and our largest supercomputers are still many orders of magnitude away from having that capability.
3. There will be people who claim designing a cellular OS is impossible until we completely understand how it works. I would argue that writing a program that prints "Hello World" seems difficult to people who don't understand programming or computers but is pretty simple to people who have been taught basic computer skills without the requirement of having to know assembly language or do arithmetic in binary numbers. There is also the problem that in designing cellular operating systems one is playing "God" -- so you will not see politicians touching this "third rail". Thus the demand and support has to come from private individuals or foundations who recognize that this is simply the logical and "right" thing to do.

This sounds like one of those Greg Egan novels I read recently.. What was It... Steve Fever.... http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19534/ Yep, thats it!

Link to the printable version - skips the two overly obnoxious ads that get in the way before you could read the article.
http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=26882

...a lot of people recently said that Wikileaks has become an anti-US organization. We should probably wait and see what they actually release, but perhaps this news shows otherwise? Or is the fact that they are going to release data on US based corporations just going to be viewed as more evidence of an anti-US sentiment?

You should probably clarify that you meant anti-US government as they might actually be providing the citizens a lot more transparency than previously thought possible. When a US company is targeted, both the government and the people might be happy -- especially if it's tax evasion or violation of laws. Here's a good snippet when they run down which industries they might have dirt on:

Continuing then: The tech industry?

We have some material on spying by a major government on the tech industry. Industrial espionage.

U.S.? China?

The U.S. is one of the victims.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that everyone would like the offenders of industrial espionage to be dragged out in the open. Especially the United States government.

Anti-US, pro-US, who cares? This is going to get interesting and the knife is going to cut everybody.

I'm really going to break down laughing if Wikileaks hosts dirt on Amazon, their knew hosting provider with EC2!

Or maybe they want to talk about a discovery confirming the suitability of possible targets for life or colonization? I'm guessing it's something along those lines ... or perhaps they have a target that they think they can deploy bacteria to that will provide a better atmosphere for possible habitation in the distant future?

Think about it though. Would NASA announce contact or, you know, the president? I'm guessing that the politicians would be all over this claiming credit if it was something that big.

For example, see: Fighting Allergies by Mimicking Parasitic Worms

A number of epidemiological studies have shown that people infected with parasitic worms suffer less from allergies and other immune diseases, and research in animal models designed to mimic these diseases supports these findings.

Given that X-rays are used as a part of the follow-up care when implanting pacemakers, I wouldn't worry about X-rays in particular. Google also has some academic studies if you're interested.*

What I'd be more worried about-- and this is perhaps on my mind more than most people, because the laboratory I work in studies just this-- is whether the digital components are hardened against malicious attackers. My colleagues' preliminary results suggest that the answer is no-- these things are quite hackable.

* one caveat: this was discovered by a professor here.

But discovery has never been patentable in any other field, and that's what's being discussed in TFA. You can't patent if there's prior art, can't patent something you've found rather than made, and can't patent abstract scientific knowledge.

I'm curious how you'd square that stance with the invention of velcro. It wasn't truly invented - the guy looked at the burrs which stuck to his clothing under a microscope and saw the hook and loop system. So he didn't think up the idea, nature had already invented it. But there was still a massive engineering effort required to replicate the idea synthetically, and the idea was mostly ignored by the textile industry until NASA showed the public that the stuff was actually pretty useful. If it had not been patentable, I'm doubtful anyone would have bothered doing the R&D and PR on it, and we would be without a very useful product today.

I'm holding out similar hope for nanotape - sticky tape based on carbon nanotubes modeled after the microscopic hairs on gecko feet. Nature invented it, but it's proving to be an enormous engineering challenge to replicate it. Without the carrot of patents to spur on R&D, would so many researchers really be trying to make this stuff commercially viable?

Another thing to keep in mind that unlike copyrights which have been abused so much that their duration now spans two lifetimes, patents are only valid for ~20 years. While some industries (e.g. software) move quickly enough that this is intolerably long, for the vast majority of industries 20 years is about the right amount of time for the inventor/discoverer to do the R&D, market the idea, have the idea become popular, and make some money for a few years before the idea falls into the public domain. The harm from patenting stuff which probably shouldn't be patentable isn't as long-lived as with copyrights, so you don't have to err as much on the side of the public domain.

I'd like to see this as a glucose monitor powered by glucose itself. Perhaps the array would begin to glow at 75 mmol/dL and increase in intensity from there. If it is off or laser pointer bright you are in trouble. Perhaps tie it in with an insulin pump so you only have to find one port site whenever you need to move the pump.

Well if you ever read the interview with Tesla's CTO on why they had to re-engineer everything from AC Propulsion and stop using their parts it was.

AC Propulsion's parts were ruinously expensive and no two of the same part were exactly the same.

http://www.technologyreview.com/tr35/Profile.aspx?trid=742

"One scientist puts the travel time at 180,000 years based on current space flight technology, while another explains that it could be quite quick if we build a matter-antimatter drive, and can figure out how to bring along 530 times as much mass in fuel as is contained in the ship and cargo itself."

As this article explains, there's new science afoot, and propulsion need not require expulsion of mass any more. Note that energy would still be needed, and the technique needs to be engineered up from the current proof of concept stage to an actual ship, but the need for big mass may be gone.

Since the acceleration is based on mv=mv, accelerating low mass particles to very high velocity might offer a very high thrust to mass ratio. In other words that "530 times" is open to improvement if higher exhaust velocities are used.

The real limiting factor is how much acceleration the payload can take, and what your target top velocity (cruising speed) will be before braking starts, and of course available energy regardless of mass requirements. Assuming Vmax of .5c gets to the destination in a lifetime, but doesn't get data back. If entangled particles could be used to pass data, the requirements would no longer include return hardware, and results would be in quickly. Interesting speculation. Of course there are nearer systems, and while ideal planets haven't been seen, they could exist and would be currently undetectable.

How is that for hypergeeky speculative technology solution that saves the day?

Should be able to have a solar wind collector on the surface of the moon, instead of in orbit. Use the solar wind collector to mine Helium-3 on the moon, and send it back to earth for IEC fusion reactors.

See article touching on Helium-3 and IEC fusion reactors.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19296/

While it doesn't exactly refute your argument, I do think that it's important to point out that China, the world's biggest polluter, is also the world's largest producer of solar panels (see Suntech). So while China's cheap labor costs and lax environmental policies are certainly helping to push the world toward the brink of destruction via global warming, they are also working toward a solution by making solar power prices more competitive with traditional forms of energy.

I do agree completely after watching the recent (and ongoing) conflict between China and Japan that the US seriously needs to take measures to be less reliant on China for.. well.. everything.

Sprint has unlimited data plans with great prices. The CEO of Sprint prefers to offer unlimited data plans.

I disagree with the grandparent that a thinking machine *will* be made in a chemical process. I believe that nature uses chemicals because they are practically free, they're everywhere, extremely energy dense, and efficiency/recyclable. I think it's a result of availability, not function.

But, I don't think that thinking computers will ever use serial type processors for their main processing power. I can imagine using fast serial, or even very parallel serial processors as control and math type coprocessors, but I think the bulk of processing and "thought" will have to occur in the analog domain, something like this. They stay with the neuron design, but implement it in silicon.

The problem with serial computing is that the information is absolute and stored and transferred with incredible density. The value of a number might be in a single location in ram, then transferred over a single memory bus, with some operation performed on it, the operation also being stored as a single number that made its own journey...and this has to take place with very close to no chance of error.

A modern CPU will usually fail manufacturer screening even if a *single* transistor, out of the millions in there, doesn't function properly (this is where the lower core count, but similar feature processors come from, as well). That's an insane requirement for a massive system!

My biggest question is how closely we'll end up mirroring animal brains. From a mouse to a human, they're all extremely similar. I think it's silly to think that human consciousness and personality, which is all *extremely* similar for all of us, doesn't come, in a large part, from the pre-built structures that are there. I've seen people argue that there's no way to know if one person perceives the world the same...well I think it's pretty close, mostly because if we each had to wire our own consciousness, I think we'd see a HUGE variation in personalities and abilities. As it is, there's virtually no difference (except dysfunctional brains).

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24203/

Someone from D-wave is giving a talk called "separating hope from hype": http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/02/quantum.ars http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/20587/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems

There's no way to fix it?

Of course there is; you said it yourself, "If there are four people sitting in your living room in four different chairs, they need to have four different pairs of image shown to them, a different one for each seating position."

And, while you're at it, you can track each viewer's gaze for focal depth and DOF, track their interocular separation and tilt angle for generating custom stereo separation, etc....

Microsoft is already working on hardware that can track audience members' faces and steer custom visuals to each viewer. Imagine where that sort of technology might go over the next decade (build it with MEMS instead of big moving parts for starters, maybe use IR backscatter for better eye tracking and gaze tracking, add the ability to support more viewers, etc...).

Just because 3D displays kind of suck now doesn't mean they always will, if hollywood can hook enough people into pouring money and R&D into the technologies in the mean time.

And, in the mean time, there are markets where all of those drawbacks (viewing angle, focus/DOF, stereo separation and angle) just aren't relevant. That's why I expect the 3DS to make Nintendo yet another mint despite Apple looming over the portable gaming market. That sort of rendering hardware doesn't fake focus and DOF to begin with, it's only used by one player at a time, and the user is controlling their own POV and angle just by holding the device. That only leaves a single stereo separation variable to control manually via a simple slider (and of course the issue with the viewer's constant focus depth despite views of differing simulated depth, that is often brought up as a potential medical hazard of 3D, I'm not sure how that could be handled...).

Lockheed Martin recently put out a press release about their magnetic communications system (MCS), which works at distances of up to half a mile through solid rock:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-08/lockheed-develops-magnetic-communication-mine-safety

Although the MCS probably uses large coils and low wavelengths on both sides to achieve that impressive distance, typical RFID cards have small coils. To make up for this, very strong digitally controlled magnetic fields could be used to couple to a coil from far away. For example, see this implementation of a static 0.7 tesla magnet:

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/25527/page1/

A strong enough, highly directional magnetic field and a sensitive enough detector could couple all the way to the theoretical maximum distance permitted by the RFID card's frequency. Like the MCS, that distance is one third the wavelength of 125 KHz (1.5 miles), or half a mile.

"Thursday, June 24, 2010 - Astronomers Solve The Mystery of Hanny's Voorwerp" http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25366/

Dude, you need a reality adjustment. It is estimated that there is enough surface-mineable thorium alone to power us for hundreds of thousands of years to come. In fact, just the thorium discarded from our surface-mined coal could power us for thousands of years.

Actually, I think you need the adjustment. See The Coming Nuclear Crisis. Our current nuclear power is expensive with the easily mined Uranium sources, and we're running out of those. Now picture how expensive nuclear will be when we try to tap those less dense Uranium sources, like the oceans.

You are correct however that nuclear power is currently so expensive because they're inefficient. Deploying faster reactors and thorium reactors, which as you say, are orders of magnitude more efficient, will stretch out the Uranium supply significantly longer.

Since I never met this quote before and found it quite insightful here is the link for interview where Stroustrup said it for those like me who didn't know it - it's worth reading.

This is a case when we should be reading the comments to the article.

So... Not only did you read the fine summary, AND the fine article, but you actually read the fine comments UNDER THE FINE ARTICLE AS WELL!? The only higher heresy is reading the original fine publication, deviant! Purge, cleanse and purify in the name of the Taco!!

This is a case when we should be reading the comments to the article.

Hydrogen the worst fule in the world by energy density? Hardly. Why else is it used as a fuel source for rockets going into orbit? The Hydrogen/Oxygen reaction actually gives one of the highest ISP ratios of nearly any kind of rocket fuel available, and is the primary fuel component for the Space Shuttle, being used in the SSMEs. That big orange tank on the bottom of the orbiter is mostly filled with hydrogen. Still, not everybody needs to use hydrogen even in that kind of application. Furthermore, it also requires cryogenic fuel storage as the hydrogen used in rockets tends to be liquid hydrogen in order to compress the fuel to be useful.

In terms of automotive fuel storage, there may be a point to hydrogen being more of a problem for energy densities in terms of watts per m^3. It becomes an issue due to the fact that the storage device generally weighs much more than the fuel itself. So in terms of practical fuels for an automobile, it might have a lower energy density than other fuels and energy storage devices.

BTW, in terms of battery technologies, one of the most promising that seems to be a real kicker is a Zinc-ion battery If this researcher is to be believed (and there is some serious money getting thrown at this researcher to make it happen), it promises to have over ten times the energy storage as Lithium-ion batteries. That could be monumental in terms of making electric vehicles practical and conceivably gives something like the Tesla Model S over a thousand miles of driving range on a single charge. If that happens, the need for these recharging stations is pretty much thrown out the window at least for remote and isolated locations far from major population centers.

CO2 is not a pollutant. It is in fact essential for the Earth's life cycle. Plants would not survive without it.

If you actually believe that global warming is a man made problem, and believe greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced, you would not be replacing coal with natural gas (methane). Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Any methane infrastructure will necessarily have emissions.

No, the reason people are going for natural gas is the typical myopic management of today. Building a natural gas power plant is very cheap, even if the fuel isn't. Since people plan everything on the short term today, what matters is the low initial capital costs, even if you have to screw your customers in the long term.

We live with a finite set of resources at the bottom of a massive gravity well isolated by millions of miles of hard vacuum from anything else at all. We are consuming many of those resources at an unsustainable rate. If we don't want to end up like the people of Easter Island, we'd better not take any of it for granted.

Its a good point, but at the end of the day we are still drowning in resources, and are likely to remain so even if developing countries reach a developed country standard of living. Yes, oil will run out, but it won't drop off a cliff - oil companies have a very good idea of how much is left in remaining fields. It will peter out slowly and other resources will come onstream. Take a good look for example at the European supergrid concept, which postulate most or all of European energy use coming from renewable resources. There is no reason why the US or Africa, China or India could not follow suit in a similar fashion.

There is already more than enough food to supply the world's population several times over, starvation is a political issue, and as for mineral resources we've barely tapped into the barest skin of the crust. Ultimately we shouldn't have to though, since there are more easily accessible asteroid resources with trillions of tons of whatever minerals we need just floating around out there; by the time we need them, we'll easily be able to reach them.

The whole thing is essentially geometry-free, only the differential of any vector ever plays a role.

Which is precisely why the Erik Verlinde paper (along with Padmanabhan's insights) using holography to derive gravity is so exciting. It makes gravity an emergent feature rather than a fundamental force, just like we observe in nature.

N.b., the theorists haven't gotten a derivation for general relativity, yet, but there has been a flurry of activity. One nice thing about Verlinde's analysis is that the observed value of dark energy falls naturally out of his equations, unlike in Lambda-CDM.

-l

There are a number of scientists who disagree with you. Either way, this is the sort of thing that should have been studied further BEFORE rolling out these things to hundreds of airports.

And even if it proves not to be harmful, at least that would have delayed this privacy-invading absurdity a few more years.

So maybe we could have enjoyed an accurate submission saying that Berkeley have reported an advance over the already-reported finding, confirming an already-reported finding: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23581/

Wow, way to read into my post, dude.

Something most Slashdotters probably know is that science journalism is very derivative. Since a lot of journalists don't know squat about science, most of them just end up regurgitating stuff. Sometimes random irrelevant facts are added, sometimes important information is stripped out. Mentioning that both hearts are from sows without mentioning why seems strange. There could be a reason why, or it could have just been an extraneous fact that was included..

Now, the sentence from TFA ("Thatte and his group harvested two female pig hearts and placed them in two different containers.") is very similar to a sentence in a cited source here ("The researchers harvested hearts from female pigs, stored them in one of the two solutions, then biopsied them at several points over the next four hours.") Was there an original story somewhere that said why sow hearts were preferable, or was it just a random detail that someone added without context? Unfortunately, I can't access what appears to be the original paper at the moment to find out either way.

I have been paid to work in a research lab. I have also been paid to work for a newspaper. The interaction between science and the media fascinates me. And in my experience, there's a lot of truth to this comic.

Why would the gender of the heart donors matter?

The question is, why wouldn't it? Do you know? I don't.

Yeah, I'm hoping for a response from someone who does know. Thanks for making gross, incorrect assumptions about me, though.

We've Been Down This Road Before
This model suffers from the same problem as the dry gully hypothesis put forth by Shinbrot et al. (2004) (http://www.pnas.org/content/101/23/8542.abstract). Yes, you can get an alcove and an apron, but it's missing the key defining characteristic of gullies, which is the channel. Their experiments did not produce the sinuous, anastomosing [branching and reconnecting] channels often observed in martian crater wall gullies. They call some features in their experiments "channels," but terrestrial geologists studying landslides on sand dune faces wouldn't call those features channels. They're more like chutes [a term from avalanche geology]. The gullies on Mars also aren't just simple landslides of loose sand/dust on slopes; in many places the channels cut into the underlying rock, which requires something able to erode such rock (i.e. liquid water).

If a life form existed on earth with oil based protoplasm rather than water, you wouldn't need the dispersant because that life form could live inside the volume of the oil as opposed to upon the surface...

Like maybe some of these buggers?

...Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records. But it wasnt so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken. Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape! ...McIntyre and McKitrick have found numerous other problems with the Mann analysis...

http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=13830&channel=energy&section=

Before anyone asks, the article is clearly wrong in the statement "The new process causes the polymer to conduct heat very efficiently in just one direction...", the heat moves along one dimensions, in 2 directions.

Right, the article isn't talking about a heat diode.

This article describes a very similar process from a New York company that uses supercritical diesel fuel -- and they report much more sensible efficiency gains of up to 10%. They've only tested in a lab setting so far though.

I found the article because I was looking for the supercritical points of gasoline, which is a complex mixture of many different hydrocarbons, making the critical points very tricky to estimate. Turns out they are 720K and 60Mpa, from the article above. Their system achieves temperatures this high (almost 400 degrees higher than normal fuel system operations) using exhaust heat. Given that higher temperatures mean improved efficiency, I'd buy the 10% they propose -- though I remain very skeptical abut the 50% proposed in this article.

Yes

Obviously this comment is too short to be informative as I wrote it quickly. Gah.... I wish Slashdot would grow a bit over this time limitation for posts...

I'd like to benchmark this against graphene. Since optical signals don't have to be converted to electrical first, then (I think) the bottleneck would be the optoelectronics.

The original article is poorly written. MIT's Technology Review has an article that includes information about efficiency of generating electricity, and it says 15%-20%. http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/24665/?a=f

So the story is really that there might be a way to make cheaper, flexible solar panels by mixing silicon and polymers.

Checking your writeup against your sources and verifying those sources is something even Wikipedia enforces.

The standards of inclusion in the IPCC reports are much higher than Wikipedia. There are no non-peer reviewed articles quoted in the IPCC science report. However, the other reports are not limited to peer reviewed journals, but can instead use "Peer reviewed and internationally available scientific technical and socio-economic literature, manuscripts made available for IPCC review and selected non peer-reviewed literature produced by other relevant institutions including industry".

I'm doubly suspicious when it takes the people derided as 'deniers' to find the errors

Not true. The Himalayas mistake was mainly discovered by J. Graham Cogley, professor of geography at Trent University, who has said "I don't think it ought to affect the credibility of the edifice as a whole".

Sony's expectation for the XEL-1 was never anything other than establishing brand recognition as the leaders in OLED. The truth is that while the display cost ~2500, the manufacturing costs probably were around ~5K as a function of the very lossy shadow mask technology they use for deposition of the organic material. The project was never sustainable, nor intended to be.

The technologies for manufacturing remain very immature, but the major display manufacturers, material developers and equipment vendors are investing major resources into solutions. A better bellweather for display technologies may be the Koreans (Samsung, LG) and the Taiwanese (AUO, etc). These folks are chasing the rabbit pretty hard.

There is also a Silicon Valley startup that is developing an interesting solution named Kateeva. Spun out of MIT, the company is developing a solution that marries the material advantages of evaporation with the simplified deposition approach of ink-jet. More information (and video!) at this recent article from Technology Review.

Disclosure: I do have an interest in Kateeva...

They've designed more than just a skeeter zapper.

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=tr10&id=22114

I'm honestly curious about this part: "Also, even if they do make a product this time, does that really excuse killing the products of other companies via patents on things they haven't actually built or sold?" Like?

This isn't NTP (so far.) IV designs stuff. They built a prototype in this case. They haven't gone to litigation. It's a think tank that's working outside of a mega-corp's normal RAND department.

Is it possible that, *gasp*, this company is actually trying to do good? Or do we just apply the 'patent troll' to any company that doesn't make tangible product? (BTW, ARM doesn't make the chips that go in the devices that use them. Does that make them a patent troll too?)

You people make billions of dollars, why would you sully up an awesome product to follow someone else's {insert profanity here}..

Someone over there must have been smoking crack, when they thought "hey lets let everyone tweet from google!!"

This is part were Gibbs would smack Denozo up side the head for being an idot..

You guys need an idea copy/borrow/steal/improve ?

1) You know that show FlashForward ? Build Mosaic!! yeah that would have came in handy for all those earthquake victims in haiti, ..., ...., etc huh!!? yeah well not everyone has a laptop you say; I seen a guy iphone himself through a serious injury on the tube. People always find a way to McGuyver sh$t when times get tuff. You should be able to hack andriod into a $5 cheese grater by now.. retail it for $50 - $30( I'm throwing numbers since were smoking crack ) for R&D and you still have profits..

2) Hp is building a global senor network that will obviously need a web infrastructure that will scale well... can someone say " Yeah we should Buy NOW?! "

3) I know you guys and gals can spell holographic.. I want to google medical journals and have them signed to me via a holographic tutor.. look ma NO SOUND.. [ http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/18572/?a=f ]

All of the projects above for Google's man power, war chest, and ingenuity are do-able..

Common Really... Get it together people.. Its 1:30 est time and I'm out of tv references, Im going going to bed hoping this was a nightmare that will go away...

W...T...F... ?!

Probability of absorbing more than 1 photon on that one molecule is vanishingly small. Yes microwaves cause heating, but it's very, very unlikely to cause anything else. Terahertz waves are much more cause for concern.

Interesting video but how often do you get to have an open flame of methanol to heat your laptop on a plane?

The more likely problem is with overcharging Li ion batteries (another post had a link to a battery being charged at LAX and catching fire).Newer battery technology has a inherent property preventing overcharging caused failures.

Aside from internal 1984 style abuse of this proposed system, the fundamental concept (and all existing implementations of it) introduces a new level of security risk and it is this exact interface that is said to be the weakness that was exploited in the Google China attack. From a computer security perspective, this is wrong on many different levels.

My understanding is that to win the prize, you don't have to be able to interpret every thought that comes out of the brain, you can get away with thoughts directed at the device. We already have video game controllers that can do this, although they are very crude (they don't take dictation or anything). Picking up thoughts consciously directed towards a device is a lot easier than trying to pick up whatever randomly is going on in the mind.

Communication from device to nerves is different than communication from nerves to device; so as another guy mentioned, we are already pretty close on the artificial vision. There have also been prosthetic arms that already connect directly to the nervous system. This is all very different than interpreting everything that goes on inside the brain.

It is also not likely to lead to a Matrix style data-dump into the brain. For the brain to learn new things, it needs to reorganize itself physically, grow new connections between brain cells, and even grow new brain cells. All this growing takes time, energy, and nutrients, (and probably sleep), so if you want to do a data-dump, you are going to have to know more than just how to communicate with the brain, you're going to have to know how to re-organize and build it. That knowledge is a lot farther off.

There are recentish studies which suggestpossible interactions with DNA not previously considered which would mean damage to DNA would be much greater than acknowledged.