Hasta La Gadget!

Sick of silicon? It is getting a bit played, so maybe it’s time to shift some paradigms, and Duke University engineer Chris Dwyer thinks that pure proteins deoxyribonucleic acids are where it’s at. He’s demonstrated a way to force DNA to create shapes all by itself, a process he likens to a puzzle that puts itself together:

It’s like taking pieces of a puzzle, throwing them in a box and as you shake the box, the pieces gradually find their neighbors to form the puzzle. What we did was to take billions of these puzzle pieces, throwing them together, to form billions of copies of the same puzzle.

Right now the waffle-shaped structures he can form aren’t particularly useful, but going forward the hope is that nearly any type of circuitry could be made to build itself in massive quantities at next to no cost. It sounds exciting, promising, almost utopian — exactly the kind of research that we usually never hear of again.

Update: We’ve had a few people commenting on the inaccuracy of the word “proteins” above, so it’s been fixed and we hereby invite all you armchair molecular biologists to get back to curing cancer already.

Self-assembling DNA circuits could power your next computer originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 May 2010 09:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon’s experiment of replacing textbooks with Kindle DXs in classrooms already took a pretty hefty blow from Princeton’s feedback — which described the jumbo e-reader as “a poor excuse” for an academic tool — but here comes some more punishment courtesy of the trialists at Darden. The Business School describes the DX as clunky and too slow to keep up with the pace of teaching, with up to 80 percent of users saying they wouldn’t recommend it for academic use. There is a silver lining to this cloud of hate however, as up to 95 percent of all project participants would be happy to recommend the Kindle DX as a personal reading device. That meshes rather well with the high satisfaction and sales figures e-readers are enjoying, but it does show that the hardware has a long way to go before it convinces us to ditch our paperbacks.

[Thanks, Miles B]

Kindle DX trial at Darden concludes it’s academically woeful, personally enjoyable originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 May 2010 08:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Two years back, consumer research told us the vast majority of DVR users skipped commercials; now, statisticians at Duke University say that’s not the case. More importantly, even those who do hit that oh-so-tempting skip button aren’t necessarily spending less on advertised products as a result. Pulling data from over 1,200 TiVo boxes over the course of three years, Professor Carl Mela and colleagues found that a staggering 95 percent of television was watched live instead of recorded, giving viewers no opportunity to skip, and even when there was an opportunity, users took it only 6.5 percent of the time.

Moreover, every attempt the researchers made to find a “TiVo effect” failed — comparing those who had DVRs with those who didn’t, they found no significant difference in the amount TV watchers spent on nine different goods (including cleaning and grooming products) advertised. This could be for a variety of reasons — perhaps advertising doesn’t work, period, or perhaps those without DVRs “skipped” commercials simply by walking out of the room — but no matter the reason, it seems these days television advertisers don’t have quite so much to fear.

Continue reading Study finds commercial-skipping DVRs don’t affect purchases, ‘TiVo effect’ may not exist

Study finds commercial-skipping DVRs don’t affect purchases, ‘TiVo effect’ may not exist originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 May 2010 21:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Still waiting on that big-screen OLED TV? Yeah, so are we, but here’s some news that could mean they’re coming soon: OLED tech has just been obsoleted. Seriously. We still can’t even afford an 11-inch model and now we have to start pining for something new: OLET. That’s Organic Light Emitting Transistor, tech that researcher Michele Muccini at the Institute of Nanustructured Materials has just proven can be between two and 100 times as efficient as OLED. OLETs rely on three layers of material, with the bottom layers carrying a charge, the middle layer (the meat in this high-tech sandwich) emitting photons when excited by the bottom, and the top layer selectively letting those photos through. All three combined are just 62nm thick. It’s this separation of layers and horizontal flow of current that gives OLET its efficiency and it’s believed that it could not only be used for (next) next-generation displays but also for on-chip optical interconnects. When will an OLET HDTV will hit the market? Don’t even go there.

Organic Light Emitting Transistors might make us forget all about OLED originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 May 2010 13:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Paper-mache, candy, and human cells have all been seen flowing through 3D printers for custom fabrication work, but students and faculty at Canada’s McGill University have a cheaper prototyping material: plain ol’ H2O. They recently modified this Fab@Home Model 1 by replacing the soft goo extruders with a temperature-controlled water delivery system, and set about making decorative ice sculptures and a large beer mug for good measure. While the academic project is officially supposed to explore “economic alternatives to intricate 3D models of architectural objects,” we’re not sure architects will want much to do with prototypes that drip… but tourism might well get a boost from liquor sold in frosty custom containers. We’re thirsty just looking at them.

3D printer creates ice sculptures — just add water originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 May 2010 08:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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