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(Materials Design, Inc.) A Materials Design client and colleague, Dr. Louis G. Hector, Jr. of the General Motors R&D Center, has been honored with two GM R&D Innovation Awards for his research on fundamentals of interfacial tribology and multi-scale modeling of high-temperature deformation in aluminum.

(University of Cincinnati) In natural photosynthesis, plants take in solar energy and carbon dioxide and then convert it to oxygen and sugars. The oxygen is released to the air and the sugars are dispersed throughout the plant -- like that sweet corn we look for in the summer. Unfortunately, the allocation of light energy into products we use is not as efficient as we would like. Now engineering researchers at the University of Cincinnati are doin... More

Computational analysis of existing data bases can dramatically shorten the time required to discover the specific combination of new genes involved in certain biological processes, Stanford University researchers have found. The analytic methods can provide clues about where researchers should look next, such as finding new genes that play a role in developing cancers.More info: Stanford School of Medicine (Source: )

The Federal Communications Commission announced on Monday its long-awaited plan to bring broadband Internet connections to every home and business in the United States. It is aimed at raising the portion of people with high-speed Internet connections to 90 percent, from the current 65 percent, over the next decade and significantly increasing the connection speeds of homes with such service by installing thousands of miles of new fiber-optic cable... More

Researchers at Korea University in Seoul have demonstrated a prototype of a new biomonitoring system that transmits data through the body, replacing wires and minimizing the need for batteries. In a test, they transmitted data at a rate of 10 megabits per second through a person's arm, using a metal electrode coated with a flexible silicon-rich polymer. The Korean team is working with a large electronics manufacturer to develop health-monitoring ... More

Tao Xie at General Motors has twisted and stretched a Nafion strip into three distinct shapes, and found that it will revert to each shape at the appropriate temperature.Nafion is polymer material used in some fuel cells. Previously the best shape-memory polymers were able to remember only two shapes. (Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527515.500-shapeshifting-polymer-pulls-off-amazing-memory-tricks.html)

Researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor have found that a memristor can behave uncannily like the junctions between neurons in the brain.A memristor is a resistor with a memory -- its resistance at any moment depends on the last voltage it experienced, so its behavior can be used to recall past voltages. This is analogous to the way a synapse's electrical behavior is dependent on its past activity. (Source: http://www.newscientist... More

This summer, Rutgers University plans to offer "Special Topics in Sociology: Singularity Studies, the first accredited college course on the Singularity and associated technologies. The three-credit summer course will feature online lectures and discussions every Monday and Wednesday evening throughout the summer and is available to students internationally.The textbook will be The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzwei... More

Twitter's Evan Williams has announced @platform, which will allow publishers to integrate Twitter deeper into their sites.Users will be able to follow a site's or columnist's feed without every having to leave the site, and publishers will be able to find more followers. (Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_announces_anywhere_publishers_platform.php)

In a scene out of the movie Gattaca, researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder have matched three individuals to keyboards they used, based on the genetic makeup of microbes on their skin -- their microbiome. The approach, when developed more fully, could potentially provide information where existing forensic techniques fall short, says Martin Blaser, a professor of medicine and microbiology at New York University. (Source: http://ww... More

(Rice University) Research in this week's Nature Nanotechnology takes aim at a biological icon: the two-dimensional petri dish. Scientists from Rice University and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center have found a simple way to suspend cells in magnetic fields so they grow into three-dimensional cell cultures. Compared with flat cell cultures, the 3-D cell cultures more closely resemble real tissues from the body and should provide ... More

(American Physical Society) A new experiment shows how adjacent regions affect each other in superconductors, and suggests ways that the materials could be improved by controlling their nanoscopic structures.

(Georgia Institute of Technology Research News) A new high-performance anode structure based on silicon-carbon nanocomposite materials could significantly improve the performance of lithium-ion batteries used in a wide range of applications from hybrid vehicles to portable electronics.

If successful, the four-year, 7 million euro, EU-funded AMARSi (Adaptive Modular Architecture for Rich Motor Skills) project (which started this month) will enable humanoid (and quadruped) bots to autonomously learn and develop motor skills in open-ended environments in the same way humans do -- by learning from the data provided by movement and essentially rewiring their circuits to process and store the new knowledge they've acquired. (Source:... More

The Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator competition starts today at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive event, with many of the 200 startup companies focusing on social media and rapidly maturing areas of artificial intelligence. Two panels of judges will select winners in four categories: innovative Web technologies, personal social media, business social media, and entertainment technology.Justin.tv video coverage of SXSW is here. (Source: ... More

The Federal Communications Commission is set to unveil a "national broadband plan" Tuesday that is opposed by industry and without any of the five commissioners voting on it.FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is moving to increase the reach of his agency and expand government control of the Web, with "open access" regulations. And he recommends forcing major broadband providers like Time Warner Cable and Qwest to share their high-speed networks with ... More

Hubble 3D takes us further into space than any motion picture has done before. We not only follow the final servicing mission crew on its paces through training, and then the real thing on orbit, we get to go out deep into space, literally to the edge of the known universe, where the Hubble Space Telescope has photographed the strange and bizarre in ultimate detail. (Source: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Hubble_3D_Opens_In_IMAX_Theaters_Marc... More

When cells move about in the body, they follow a complex "bimodal correlated random walk" pattern similar to what amoebae and bacteria use when searching for food, Vanderbilt researchers have found. The cell travels primarily in one direction and then goes into a re-orientation phase in which it stays in place and reorganizes itself internally to move in a new direction.The discovery has practical value for drug development: Incorporating this bas... More

What if there was a central place for all of humanity to text, tweet, email, blog and click in the essence of their mood in the moment -- a gigantic feelings aggregator that would provide an emotional pulse check on the planet? (Emily Kasriel)That's a concept that Digital Space CEO Bruce Damer suggested Sunday on BBC World Service program "The Forum." "These aggregated feelings would be represented in a color wheel inspired by the mood rings of th... More

Digital Space CEO Bruce Damer presented on BBC World Service Sunday his vision of the EvoGrid -- a worldwide, cross-disciplinary effort to create a digital simulation of the chemical origins of life on Earth from complex combinations of atoms. The concept is to model the most primitive cell by "converting a corner of the Internet into a digital primordial soup to get trillions of atoms, and then molecules," so research chemists can "log in and sta... More

(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) For two decades, scientists have been pursuing a potential new way to treat bacterial infections, using naturally occurring proteins known as antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). Now, MIT scientists have recorded the first microscopic images showing the deadly effects of AMPs, most of which kill by poking holes in bacterial cell membranes.

(Rice University) Rice students put calculations by German physicist Gustav Mie, made in 1908, to the test when they decided to look at the optical properties of single nanoparticles.

(Washington University in St. Louis) Nanocages that efficiently convert light to heat are the basis for a targeted form of phototherapy that would destroy tumors without making cancer patients sick.

(Elhuyar Fundazioa) A team of engineers from the CEIT-IK4 technological center and doctors from the University Hospital of Navarra have designed a new tool for operating on the inner ear with maximum precision, reducing the possibility of damage to the auditory function during the surgery. This is the first micromanipulator specifically for operations involving cochlear and middle ear implants, of which about a hundred are carried out in this hosp... More

By combining 3D-stack-architecture of multiple cores with hair-thin, liquid-cooled microchannels, IBM and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich hope to extend Moore's law for another 15 years. 3D chip stacks with interlayer cooling overcome the bandwidth bottleneck between core and cache memory and allow for systems with a much higher efficiency, so supercomputers won't consume too much energy to be affordable. To solve the cooling challeng... More