Very soon, Cyalume sticks (aka glow sticks) will be history. MPK CO. has invented a new kind of light source called Litroenergy that acts somewhat like a glow stick, but lasts more than 12 years without ever needing a recharge. No electricity nor solar exposure required!

“The Litrospheres are not effected by heat or cold, and are 5,000-pound crush resistant. They can be injection molded or added to paint. The fill rate of Litroenergy micro particles in plastic injection molding material or paint is about 20%. The constant light gives off no U.V. rays, and can be designed to emit almost any color of light desired.”

Safe, consistent, and eco-friendly. Litroenergy could possibly save billions of dollars for the world.

But smart netizens has dug out Litroenergy’s patent application, and it says the active ingredient used is Tritium. That is the tricky part – United States has a ban on the import of Tritium, probably due to its radioactive nature.

Do you think this product will ever materialize?

Major advancements in technology like this one are what makes the future worth looking forward to. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany have invented an artificial cornea that may well be the key to restoring sight for our people with damaged corneas.

“Our artificial corneas are based on a commercially available polymer which absorbs no water and allows no cells to grow on it,” says IAP project manager Dr. Joachim Storsberg. “Once our partner Dr. Schmidt Intraokularlinsen GmbH has suitably shaped the polymers, we selectively coat the implants: We lay masks on them and apply a special protein to the edge of the cornea, which the cells of the natural cornea can latch onto. In this way, the cornea implant can firmly connect with the natural part of the cornea, while the center remains free of cells and therefore clear.” What is special about this protein is that it can survive the later thermal sterilization of the artificial cornea without being damaged, as it does not have the three-dimensional structure typical of large proteins. Such a structure would be destroyed during the sterilization process, leading to changes in the material’s properties. The optical front part of the implant is coated with a hydrophilic polymer, so that it is constantly moistened with tear fluid.

Researchers in Dr. Karin Kobuch’s working group at Regensburg University Hospital have already tested these corneas in the laboratory and found that their cells graft very well at the edge and cease growing where the coating stops. The optical center of the implant thus remains clear. The first implants have already been tested in rabbits’ eyes – with promising results. If further tests are successful, the technology will be tried on humans in 2008.”

The scientists working for the US Air Force have invented a new kind of fabric that can be worn for weeks without washing. Although the idea of wearing the same clothings for weeks may not appeal to most, it can be a dream come true for the military, athletes, NASA, or even gaming addicts that refuse to bathe.

The fabric “cleans” itself by repelling water, resisting stains, and killing off bacteria. This keeps the wearables dry and reduces the smell caused by sweat.

While we mere mortals are all happy with our dual-core processors and all excited about the upcoming quad-core processors, several researchers from Tokyo University are secretly snickering at us. But of course, they have all the right to do so since they invented a 512-core processor known as the Grape DR chip.

To be accurate, the processor is not a replacement for our favorite Intels and AMDs, but sits on a PCI-X card providing number-crunching power. Even though the processor runs at just 500MHz, it is capable of delivering 512GLOPS (512 billion floating-point operations every second). To put things into perspective, our modern processors are only capable of performing at a few GFLOPS.

The 512 cores are split into 16 groups of 32, each group capable of processing a single type of FP instruction. The chip itself measures 17 x 17mm and contains 300m transistors. It consumes up to 60W of power.

The researchers actually started working on this project since 2004. By 2008, they hope to accomplish a prototype capable of delivering 2PFLOPS (two quadrillion floating-point operations a second, 3906.25 times faster than 512GLOPS).

What’s the fastest inkjet printer now? 30 pages per minute (ppm)? Ha! Don’t make JeTrix laugh.

The new JeTrix printing technology is invented by Flamingo Electronics and is capable of hitting 1,000ppm printing speed! That is insanely fast. They achieved the speed by making the print head as large as a full page itself and sporting 56,000 nozzles, compared to traditional inkjets with only around 1,000 nozzles.

The technology is expected to be available two years from now. So if you are in an industry that requires high-speed printing, look out for JeTrix in 2008.

Alright, this seems really pointless, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless. It would have been even cooler if it could just assemble a little faster. Created by Raffaello D’Andrea and Max Dean, the Robotic Chair is meant to be an art piece that employs robotic technology. By communicating with a computer, the disassembled chair is able to find its way to the rest of its parts and joins them back together.

“Some people thought it was a hoax, or fabricated or computer animation,” D’Andrea said. “Others thought it was remote-controlled. The reality of it is, it’s not. It’s a self-contained system that does what it does.”

“It’s continually reassembling itself,” he also said. “Somewhat like what we do in our own lives. We fall apart and put ourselves back together.”

Ahhh…artsy fartsy people, I can never seem to understand them. Video of this “piece of art” below.

This badass-looking robot is known as RuBot II, a robot that can solve any Rubik’s Cube in under 50 seconds. It speaks in a rather gentlemanly manner. And upon placing a Rubik’s Cube on its tray, it picks it up, scans the cube with its camera-fitted eyes, and goes on to solving it in blazing speed.



If there is going to be a RuBot III, I would love to see it look more “friendly” and not like it’s going to fry the kid with a laser beam any minute.

The phrase “my computer has got virus!” may just take on a new meaning in the future. Researchers have invented a way to coat 30-nanometre-long chunks of tobacco mosaic virus with platinum nano-particles, creating a transistor with very fast switching speed. And by combining millions of these transistors, super-fast memory chips could be created to replace our existing memories.

The team built a transistor by embedding the coated virus strips in a polymer matrix, sandwiched between two electrodes much like a standard transistor. Apply a voltage to the transistor, and the platinum nano-particles – roughly 16 per virus – each donate an electron to proteins on the surface of the virus, moving the device to an ON state.

When the voltage dips below a certain threshold, the electrons jump back to the nano-particle, switching the transistor to an OFF state.

The increase in speed could be as much as 1,000 times. Virus or not, I don’t care. Just give me speed, speed and more speed!

We are now officially one step closer to Star Trek-like teleportation. Two years ago, teleportation between two atoms at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter was achieved. But today, Danish scientist Eugene Polzik and his team of scientists have managed to perform teleportation between two different objects, light and matter, at a distance of 1.6 feet (0.5 meters).



“Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer distances because it involves light as the carrier of entanglement,” Polzik said.








The mind-boggling stuffs:

A strong laser beam was shined onto a cloud of room-temperature cesium atoms whose spins were all pointing in the same direction and fluctuating according to their given quantum state. The laser became entangled with the collective spin of the cloud, meaning that the quantum states of laser and gas shared the same amplitude but had opposite phases. The goal was to transfer, or teleport, the quantum state of a second light beam onto the cloud.



The group mixed a second, weaker laser pulse with the strong laser and split the superimposed beams into two arms. A detector in one arm measured the sum of the beams’ amplitudes and a detector in the second arm measured the difference between their phases. Neither measurement disturbed the delicate entangled state between the light and cesium. But the researchers could use the results to apply a precise magnetic field to the cesium vapor that effectively canceled out the ensemble’s original spin state and replaced it with one that corresponded to the polarization of the weak pulse, as they report in the 5 October Nature.

But this technology is really more like transferring of information at incredible speed than “real” teleportation. So to get beamed up by Scotty is still a long way ahead. Rather than for teleportation purposes, the technology can best be applied to the creation of ultra-powerful computers and super-secure encryption systems. Sounds just as fun as teleportation around the world! Ok, maybe not.

Yes, three-holy-terabytes (3,000-gigabytes) of data on an optical disc the size of our regular CD-R might just be possible soon! Harvard researchers have developed an “optical nano antenna” which helps focus light from an inexpensive laser onto a spot size of 40-nanometers.

To put things into perspective: CDs use lasers with a wavelength of 780-nanometers, DVDs use 650-nanometers, and HD-DVDs and Blu-ray use 405-nanometers. And conventional lenses can only focus these lights to half their wavelength. As you can see now, the 40-nanometers from the optical nano antenna is very impressive indeed! Furthermore, all it needs is a laser with 830-nanometers wavelength.

The antenna works together with two gold-coated nano rods, separated by a 30-nanometers gap, to focus the laser’s light. Pictured above is a computer simulation of the rods.

While the Harvard guys work on weeding out any existing hurdles, I guess we’ll have to stick to Blu-ray and HD-DVDs.