Hasta La Gadget!

So maybe a true-to-life Innerspace is still a few years off, but a professor at the University of Rochester has developed a way to take high-resolution 3D images under the skin’s surface, potentially eliminating the need for biopsies in cancer detection. Professor Jannick Rolland created a prototype that uses a liquid lens, in which a droplet of water replaces the standard glass lens, in conjunction with near-infrared light, to take thousands of pictures at varying depths. Those images are then combined to create clear, 3D renderings of what lies up to one millimeter below your epidermis. The method has already been tested on livings beings, but is likely a long way from making it to your doctor’s office, which means it’s off to the guillotine for that Pangaea-shaped mole you’ve been picking at.

New high-res imaging could make biopsies obsolete, doctors still cutting up in meantime originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Feb 2011 21:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The year 2050 is what the year 2000 was to futuristic thinkers like Walt Disney and Arthur C. Clarke. It’s the new year that everything will change: robots will outperform us on the field of play, computers will outwit us in matters of reason, and nerds will never be lonely again. It’s also the year that 100 percent green energy will be possible according to a bunch of neo-maxi zoomdweebies from Stanford and the University of California-Davis. That’s right, in 40 years we could be saying goodbye to fossil fuels in favor of renewables like solar and wind power. The biggest challenge to achieving the goal, say researchers, isn’t related to the underlying technologies or the economics required to fuel the change, rather, it’s whether we earthlings have the collective will and political gumption to make it happen. Interesting… we’ll look into that claim just as soon as we’re done with our Nero fiddling and telling all our friends about this amaaazing story we just read in the National Enquirer.

Green Energy will replace fossil fuels by 2050 if you really really want to originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Feb 2011 08:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A bit of semantic juggling makes Apple the biggest player in both the personal computer and mobile platform markets.

A research report published today by DisplaySearch found that sales of the iPad propelled Apple past HP for the No. 1 spot in the “mobile PC” market.

To make that work, you have to count the iPad as a PC. DisplaySearch combined sales of Mac notebooks with the iPad and found that Apple sold 10.2 million, or 17.2 percent, of mobile computers shipped during the fourth quarter of 2010. HP shipped 9.3 million.

But you could also count the iPad as a mobile device, as some have done. If you lump together the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad, Apple’s iOS is the mobile operating system most often used to browse the web, according to NetMarketShare.

“While we anticipate increased competition in the tablet PC market later this year with the introduction of Android Honeycomb-based tablets, Apple’s iPad business is complementing a notebook line whose shipments widely exceed the industry average growth rate,” said Richard Shim, Senior Analyst at DisplaySearch. “Apple is currently benefiting from significant and comprehensive growth from both sectors of the mobile PC spectrum, notebooks and tablet PCs. Cannibalization seems limited at this point.”

The reports seem slanted in Apple’s favor: traditionally the iPad wouldn’t be considered a PC, and most research firms have concluded Android is beating the iPhone in the smartphone market, which doesn’t count the iPod Touch or iPad.

But it’s rational to count the iPad as a personal computer because, well, it’s a computer, even if it has more limited capabilities than a PC. And it seems fair to combine iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone sales when determining which mobile platform has the most dominance: They’re all running Apple’s iOS.

When you look at the big picture, the labels don’t matter to the manufacturers: They just want customers buying their products, and they don’t care if you call it a PC, smartphone or tablet.

The two reports also demonstrate that the lines between “PC” and “mobile” are blurring. Technically all these products — the iPhone, MacBook, iPad, iPod Touch, HP notebooks, Android smartphones and so on — are mobile computers.

So if you look at the iPad as a personal computer, and the iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone as one mobile platform (which it is), one thing is clear: Apple may have lost the PC war, but it’s winning in the post-PC era.

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

Prefab nuclear power plants might sound straight out of a 1950’s vision for the nuclear age, but the technology may be on its way to laboratories across the country. The New York Times is reporting that the Obama administration’s budget, which will be officially proposed tomorrow, includes funding for research into low-cost, modular nuclear plants that can be quickly assembled and shipped without the overhead of traditional designs. Designed to be deployed at first in large-scale national laboratories, like the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the plants cost up to $2 billion, a small fraction of the $10 billion price of a typical nuclear reactor, but offer about 1/20th of the output. The use of these reactors is expected to help the Energy Department lower its carbon footprint by 28 percent before 2020.

In the long-term, this research is expected to yield the ability to mass-produce these power plants, assembly-line style, allowing them to replace existing coal plants already on the grid. According to the Times, this type of modular reactor saves utilities from the large start-up costs associated with building a traditional reactor, allowing for more options when it comes time to replace older, less environmentally-friendly plants. They also produce roughly the same amount of power as older coal plants from the middle of the century that are now nearing retirement.

The administration will likely be asking for $500 million over five years, which will pay for half of the design costs for two reactors.

[via New York Times, image via Flickr: Bagalute, CC-BY]

Continue reading Researchers aim to replace copper with aluminum as a conductor in auto power systems

Researchers aim to replace copper with aluminum as a conductor in auto power systems originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Feb 2011 03:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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