Feature Channels: Technology

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Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a technique for efficiently suppressing errors in quantum computers. The advance could eventually make it much easier to build useful versions of these potentially powerful but highly fragile machines, which theoretically could solve important problems that are intractable using today's computers.

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When an employee has so many complex passwords to remember that he keeps them on a sticky note attached to his computer screen, that could be a sign that your organization needs a wiser policy for passwords, one that balances risk and complexity. New guidelines for institution-wide password management issued by NIST could help.

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Many of the piezoelectric transducers used for medical ultrasound imaging will soon be replaced with capacitive transducers, which are fabricated using techniques borrowed from the microelectronics industry.

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Two very different types of kiosks fashioned from recycled electronics took top honors in their respective categories in the first Sustainable E-waste Design Competition recently at the University of Illinois.

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced today it is accepting proposals for a program to support high-impact scientific advances through the use of some of the world's most powerful supercomputers located at DOE national laboratories. Approximately 1.3 billion supercomputer processor-hours will be awarded in 2010 through the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program for large-scale, computationally intensive projects addressing some of the toughest challenges in science and engineering.

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Low-power, high-efficiency electronic memory could be the long-term result of collaborative research led by Cornell materials scientist Darrell Schlom. The research, to be published April 17 in the journal Science (Vol. 324 No. 5925), involves taking a well-known oxide, strontium titanate, and depositing it on silicon in such a way that the silicon squeezes it into a special state called ferroelectric "“ a result that could prove key to next-generation memory devices.

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Teams of high school students from all over Iowa will compete in the second annual IT-Olympics at Iowa State University. They'll do their best to defend computer networks from hackers, build LEGO robots capable of sumo-style moves and design educational computer games.

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A Northeastern University physicist and his team tracked the spreading potential of Bluetooth and multimedia messaging service (MMS) viruses and predict that these viruses will become a real threat to users of smartphones, like iPhone and Blackberry, once an operating system increases its market share.

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Most science research programs that run on high-performance computers like the IBM Blue Gene/P Intrepid at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) generate enormous quantities of data that represent the results of their calculations. But scientists can also use the ALCF to visualize, explore and communicate their findings as highly accurate simulations and often beautiful images.

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Fran Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, will visit China later this month, where she will speak about the challenges of managing the exponentially increasing amount of digital information, and how a coordinated cyberinfrastructure will accelerate solutions to societal challenges, such as predicting the effects of large-scale earthquakes.

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Preliminary due diligence and fund development of new medical device technologies can cost up to $75,000 and take up to three months. But innovators, device manufacturers, service providers, venture capital firms, researchers, healthcare providers and others now have access to a new online membership community with software that shortens this process to about 90 minutes for only a few thousand dollars.

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Baby Steps is a multimedia system that combines sentimental snapping with medical record-keeping. The experimental product feels like a fun toy for parents, but researchers found in a pilot study that parents who used it regularly collected twice as much medically relevant information about their child's developmental progress.

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Research could make it easier for cell phone uses in a given area to share information and save money doing so.

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Local Buffalo scientist Dr. Russ Miller is leading the rollout of "Magic," one of the most powerful computers in New York State to qualified users worldwide for solving computationally-demanding problems.

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Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a mobile application known as Sun Dial, which alerts Muslim users when it's time to perform the five daily prayers known as salat. The device is being discussed this week at the human-computer interaction conference, CHI, in Boston.

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Engineers are developing a technique for mass producing computer chips made from the same material found in pencils. Experts believe that graphene -- the sheet-like form of carbon found in graphite pencils -- holds the key to smaller, faster electronics. It might also deliver quantum mechanical effects that could enable new kinds of electronics.

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According to a report issued in late March by the FBI and National White Collar Crime Center's Internet Fraud Complaint Center, Internet fraud increased by 33% in 2008, rising for the first time in three years and continuing to grow as the country suffers through a deepening recession.

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There are Web cams focused on falcons, ferrets and fish, virtual tours of the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, and robotic dogs, seals and even dinosaurs. But what about the real deal: observing animals in their natural habitat, hiking the John Muir Trail or a playing with a live pet?

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Thursday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, game studies researchers presented their list of the top 10 most unexpected findings for video game designers over the past year.This year audience members "” both at the panel and via Twitter "” ranked the findings in order of their importance.

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A new nanogenerator may charge iPods and cell phones with a wave of the hand. Scientists from Georgia describe technology that converts mechanical energy from body movements or even the flow of blood in the body into electric energy that can be used to power a broad range of electronic devices without using batteries. The study is scheduled for presentation in March at the 237th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society

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One day in the not-too-distant future, you'll be able to type a query into an online search engine and have it deliver not Web pages that may contain an answer, but just the answer itself, says Weiyi Meng, a professor of computer science at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

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Engineers at Vanderbilt University's Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) have developed a system that turns individual soldiers into "smart nodes" in a low-cost sensor network that can identify the location of enemy shooters in three dimensions and accurately identify the caliber and type of weapons they are firing.

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Radio frequency identification (RFID) devices have widely been used for tracking for years; recently, scientists from U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have developed a unique tracking technology that also monitors the environmental and physical conditions of containers of nuclear materials in storage and transportation.

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GW University's National Emergency Medical Services Preparedness Initiative announces the launch of Zero Hour: America's Medic, a high-tech video game based learning tool that is designed to train and exercise the first responder and EMS communities through a series of virtual simulations based on the 16 national planning scenarios developed by US Department of Homeland Security. When playing the game and confronted with biological, explosive, chemical and earthquake disasters, first responders must meet the challenges they would face during an actual disaster.

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"Creating Games: Mechanics, Content, and Technology," by Morgan McGuire of Williams College and Odest Chadwicke Jenkins of Brown University, was recently published by A K Peters, Ltd. The book is targeted at three different audiences: students, independent developers, and new professionals in the gaming industry. It offers different approaches for each audience group and incorporates a series of worksheets that facilitate the drafting of a game industry design document.

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ASML chief scientist Bill Arnold explains how the diverging paths of memory and logic will shape the future of lithography, and makes the case for extreme ultraviolet lithography as the only feasible next step for chip manufacturing.

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The University of Massachusetts Amherst is hosting a two-day conference April 16-17 that examines the electoral impact of user-created YouTube content on the 2008 election. Conference participants will also discuss new technical and analytic opportunities associated with new media technologies and politics.

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Computer scientists at NIST are playing a major role in making sure that, when entering Web addresses in your browser, what you type is what you get. A draft update of NIST's guidelines for DNS (Domain Name System) security is now available for public comment.

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A group of Georgia Tech students has crafted a device that allows individuals to constantly compute the amount of calories they burn "“ even as they sleep.

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With the launch of the debut "Go Huskies" application for Apple's iPhone platform, Northeastern University's Department of Athletics is leading the pack as one of the very first university athletics departments with an official, comprehensive application.

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Ruggedized, self-contained cameras, similar in concept to the black box used in aircraft, would record video data that could be retrieved by investigators following a catastrophic incident.

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Residents of rural Kenya now have e-mail accounts and Internet access thanks in part to the work of University of Michigan engineering students who enabled satellite-based service at three locations there. Their work was supported by Google.

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Experts say distractions while driving are a major cause of traffic accidents, but a new driving simulator at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) could help to make the roads safer.

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Collaborative research agreements, invention licenses and several other technology transfer activities of the federal government trended upward between 2002 and 2007, according to a new, summary report.

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Telecommuting has freed many to work far from the confines of the office via laptop, but the price of working from a cafe table is the danger that a public network will not keep the data that passes through it safe. Now, to combat the risk inherent in remote access, NIST has updated its guide on maintaining data security while teleworking.

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First responders could boost their radio communications quickly at a disaster site by setting out just four extra transmitters in a random arrangement to significantly increase the signal power at the receiver, according to theoretical analyses, simulations and proof-of-concept experiments performed at NIST.

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Prosthetic-arm engineering is learning from open source, crowdsourcing, and the video-game industry.

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The day that robot playmates help children with autism learn the social skills that they naturally lack has come a step closer with the development of a system that allows a robot to monitor a child's emotional state.

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New imaging and high capacity wireless communications systems are one step closer to reality, thanks to a millimeter wave amplifier invented at the University of California, San Diego and unveiled on Feb 11, 2009 at the prestigious International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, Calif.

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Educational software for cell phones, a suite of tools developed at the University of Michigan, is being used to turn smart phones into personal computers for students in two Texas classrooms.

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Children with mobility issues, like cerebral palsy and spina bifida, can't explore the world like other infants and that could affect their cognitive development. So, University of Delaware researchers have created robot-enhanced mini wheelchairs to give those infants greater mobility. An infant will drive the robot next week in Las Vegas to display the work.

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In these difficult economic times, everyone is seeking a better way to manage their personal finances. And at a time when even the newly elected president can't be separated from his wireless device, two undergraduates from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed an open source solution that combines smart personal financial management with your smartphone.

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A unique laboratory at The University of Alabama in Huntsville combines psychology with technology to focus on the interaction between humans and complex systems. Experimentation and research projects include human operator interaction with complex systems.

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As the country prepares for the mandated digital broadcast conversion of television airwaves on Feb. 17, an Iowa State University communication professor questions its benefit to consumers and the government's involvement in the conversion process.

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Electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego have achieved world-record speeds for real-time signal processing in an effort to meet ambitious goals set by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop the first Terabit-scale technology for optical processing. The technology could have widespread ramifications for networking, computing, defense and other industries.

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Building a solar-powered plane to fly around the world, creating visually stunning effects in Bollywood films, designing smart robots to search for survivors at disaster sites--you wouldn't believe what some engineers get to do for a living.

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Antenna experts Richard Schneider and John Ross sort out the new and sometimes complex world of the digital television antenna.

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If everything goes as planned, on Feb. 17 the long-awaited switch from analog to digital broadcasting will take place and millions of analog television sets across the nation will go black. A Temple University an expert in both analog and digital communications, has answered some questions about this digital TV transition and what it will mean for consumers.

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Rapid transfer of a high-definition movie from a PC to a cell phone "“ plus a host of other media and data possibilities "“ is approaching reality. The Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has produced a CMOS chip capable of transmitting 60 GHz digital RF signals.

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Ocean research has been thrust into fast-forward with the Platform for Ocean Knowledge Management (POKM). The network enables scientists to piece together research from institutions across the globe to better understand issues from coastal flooding to marine animal behaviour.