Technology

...The Augmented Living Goods Program (AUG) submitted by a group of recent Savannah College of Art and Design graduates. Their design entered today's competition in 8th place after online voting closed, and I have to admit, I originally dismissed this idea as probably too ambitious to ever catch on. But they wowed the judges, and hopefully the modest cash award (a few thousand dollars, I think) will help get the program on its feet. The basic idea behind AUG is to provide consumers with extended information about where their "living" foods (produce, meat and dairy) come from, and to encourage…

In a study in Nano Letters, scientists report that they have developed a flexible, biocompatible rubber film called Piezo-rubber for use in implantable or wearable energy harvesting systems. The material could be used, for instance, to harvest energy from the motion of the lungs during breathing and used to run pacemakers without the need for batteries that must be surgically replaced every few years. Popular hand-held consumer electronic devices are using smaller and smaller amounts of electricity. That opens the possibility of supplementing battery power with electricity harvested from body…

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists and engineers have devised an undersea optical communications system that—complemented by acoustics—enables a virtual revolution in high-speed undersea data collection and transmission. Its developers are likening the new technology to the cell phone and wireless Internet access. Their report will  be presented Feb. 23 at the 2010 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland Ore. Compared to communication in the air, communicating underwater is severely limited because water is essentially opaque to electromagnetic radiation except in the…

This Thursday, the 2010 Greener Gadgets Conference, a daylong event featuring discussions about energy efficiency, sustainable design and product manufacturing, packaging and recycling, will culminate with a Greener Gadgets design competition. Individuals and companies from all corners of the world submitted their ideas for sustainable products, from self-powered gadgets to those that minimize electricity consumption by another device. The Greener Gadgets website features 18 finalists for the design competition, and users were allowed to vote for their favorites leading up to the conference.…

You know what I would like? An Internet camera. It would be just like the digital camera I have today: it would take pictures, compress them into JPEG files, and store them on an SD card in the camera. Of course, it would also have a GPS receiver, and it would include the GPS information in the file’s metadata, so the photos would automatically be geotagged. Nothing we aren’t already doing. The difference, though, is that it would also have WiFi and 3G capabilities (and maybe Bluetooth as well). Using that, it would connect to the Internet (perhaps through your mobile phone, with…

Heads up, banner-plane pilots: you, like so many before you, could lose your job to a sleek, 21st century technology that not only performs better than you, but looks way cooler doing it. A new project out of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab aims to create interactive, 3D displays in real space – not on a touch screen or with the help of gaudy glasses. They created tiny, remote-controlled helicopters equipped with LEDs to act as single pixels, which can be maneuvered in real time. While current technology only allows the researchers to orchestrate a few heli-pixels at once, they can easily…

No, this isn’t a close-up of the surface of a golf ball. It’s a new type of material, one that is porous and elastic, lighter than solid aluminum yet stronger than steel, one that its creators are calling an “ultra high-strength metal matrix composite foam.” A bit of a misnomer, really, considering the foam is made up entirely of stainless steel. But one particular feature of this metal foam, its modulus of elasticity, is what makes it so lucrative for the biomedical, aerospace and transportation industries. This measure is essentially the relationship between a force applied to an object…

Last week, the New York Times published an item about putting wireless Internet on a school bus. Using a $200 router and $60/month for Internet service, a school district in Arizona has equipped a bus, and is allowing students to use the Internet connection on the way to and from school. It’s working wonderfully, not only giving the students a chance to use the dead time, but also making the bus ride more serene: Morning routines have been like this since the fall, when school officials mounted a mobile Internet router to bus No. 92’s sheet-metal frame, enabling students to surf the Web. The…

This is a science site and not a political or economics one and therefore we have poor grasp of things we know nothing about, like how missing cigarette tax revenue can possibly be responsible for bloated governments being unable to pay their bills. But apparently it is and a new method of securing cigarette tax stamps from counterfeiting and falsification could save nations otherwise losing more than $50 billion annually - which, like 'jobs saved' is a number you can believe if you want, because someone said it - that's all according to a group of companies that make holograms designed to…

Using graphene, Swedish and American researchers say they have succeeded in producing a new type of lighting component which they claim will be inexpensive to produce and can be fully recycled. The invention was published in ACS Nano by scientists at Linköping University and Umeå University, in Sweden, and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Ultra-thin and electricity-saving organic light diodes, so-called OLEDs, have recently been introduced commercially in mobile phones, cameras, and super-thin TVs. An OLED consists of a light-generating layer of plastic placed between two…