Hasta La Gadget!

Scientists at Hewlett-Packard will soon announce advances in atomic-sized memristors, or memory resistors, that could set the stage for replacing transistors in today’s computers, the New York Times reports.

Memristors aren’t a new idea; a fellow by the name of Dr. Leon O. Chua first proposed them in 1971 at the University of California, Berkeley, but it’s only now that they’re becoming possible.

Memristors are smaller than semiconducting transistors; current 3-nanometer prototypes are an order of magnitude less than the smallest transistors available today. They store information even without an electrical current, and can be used for data processing as well as storage, according to the report. They could even form the core of analog computing systems that act as biological brains.

“Our brains are made of memristors,” he said, referring to the function of biological synapses, in the article. “We have the right stuff now to build real brains.” Scared yet? (Via Engadget) (Image credit: IEEE Spectrum/Wikimedia Commons)

NASA announced that its frozen Phoenix Mars Lander has “one last chance” to send a signal–any signal–indicating that it survived the Martian winter.

The Mars Odyssey orbiter will listen in for the third time in four months, Space.com reports, to see if the Phoenix Mars Lander sprang to life once again.

The lander wasn’t designed to survive such a harsh arctic winter, the report said. Phoenix landed on Mars in May 2008, and lasted about two months longer than it was originally designed for. That raised hopes the lander would somehow survive the winter. But it has been a year and a half since we last heard from it.

And it’s a go: CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, has finally achieved a record-breaking 7 trillion electron volts by circulating twin 3.5-TeV beams, opening up a new era in physics research that could unveil the elusive Higgs Boson, or “God particle.”

The collisions have set a record in the 17-mile-long accelerator for the highest energy crashes of subatomic particles ever, ScienceNews reports.

There was some difficulty earlier in the morning thanks to some electrical issues at CERN. But in the first hour of collisions, scientists already collected more data than they had in the weeks prior to that, the report said.

The LHC will run at 7 TeV for the next 18 to 24 months, after which time it will be shut down and prepared to run at 14 TeV–its maximum energy level–sometime in 2013.

We’ve seen examples before of the iPhone acting as a remote control for something–but EclipseCon 2010 attendees have gone a step further.

Conference attendees were challenged to create a robotic control system to drive a NASA-built robot across a prototype Mars landscape. As Slashdot reports, developers had to either prove their e4 programming skills by creating an e4-Rover client, or use an existing e4 client to operate the rover through a series of tasks to collect points.

The winning entry was designed by Peter Friese and Heiko Behrens, who together coded up an iPhone client that controls the robot using the iPhone’s accelerometer. Watch the video after the break for a short demonstration.