Feature Channels: Technology

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Ammono, a little company out of Warsaw, is beating the tech titans in a key technology of the 21st century: growing the crystals on which blue lasers are fabricated.

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Inside a cellphone clutched in a murder victim's hand may be the clues that lead to her killer.

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Personal computers in enterprise environments save energy and money by “sleep-working,” thanks to new software called SleepServer created by computer scientists from the University of California, San Diego.

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Sixty years ago this week, NIST dedicated the first programmable computer in U.S. history.

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Two new NIST-developed standards to counter bomb threats will allow managers of transit centers – and other venues as well – to know exactly how a given receptacle model has been tested against blasts and precisely what a passing grade means in terms of resistance.

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High School Students are competing to develop applications for Google’s Android Mobile Platform Program. This FAU program combines arts, computer science and business to rapidly develop high technology products and services with potential for commercialization.

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The University of Delaware Institute of Energy Conversion (IEC) is part of an industry-academic team that has been awarded $3.8 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development office of the U.S. Department of Defense, to demonstrate solar cells that can stand up to battle conditions and environmental extremes.

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Four unmanned autonomous vehicles designed and built by a team of engineering students at Virginia Tech using the TORC Robotic Building Blocks product line, are headed to Hawaii to participate in the 2010 Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) war games in July.

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Superconductor cable prevents electric grid blackouts.

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Iowa State's Song Zhang regularly hears from Hollywood, video game and music video producers. They're all interested in his unique 3-D imaging technology. With the help of some simple hardware and some powerful software, Zhang can make real-time, high-resolution, 3-D images.

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A team of Georgia Tech students will be showing off their game, Vision by Proxy, at the IndieCade Showcase at E3 this week. To play the game visit Georgia Tech's Digital Lounge (details inside).

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Now iPhone users who find oiled birds and marine life in the Gulf region can transmit the location and a photo to rescue networks using a new app, MoGO, or Mobile Gulf Observatory. It was developed to make it easier for the public to help save wildlife exposed to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

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A breakthrough external beam radiotherapy technology that is fast and has optimal dose delivery to targeted tumors is the latest radiotherapy weapon that specialists are using at Stony Brook University Medical Center.

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How is it that some people who apparently freeze to death can be brought back to life with no long-term negative health consequences? New findings from the laboratory of Mark B. Roth, Ph.D., of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center may help explain the mechanics behind this phenomenon.

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Paul M. Kintner, an expert on GPS and satellite communication and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University, comments on the impact of an upcoming period of increased solar flare activity on satellite communications, cell phones and global positioning systems.

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As workers battle the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and officials attempt to decontaminate a clam boat that dredged up old munitions containing mustard gas, a Texas Tech University researcher said his product Fibertect® can handle both dirty jobs.

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NIST has been designated by Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra to accelerate the federal government's secure adoption of cloud computing by leading efforts to develop standards and guidelines in close consultation and collaboration with standards bodies, the private sector, and other stakeholders.

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In an advance that sounds almost Zen, researchers at NIST and JILA, a joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado at Boulder, have demonstrated a new type of pulsed laser that excels at not producing light.

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Spectrum Dynamics announced it has begun clinical studies to show that its D-SPECT™ technology can accommodate significantly lower doses of radiopharmaceutical agents so the total radiation exposure to patients and staff is much lower compared to conventional cardiac imaging.

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Wireless sensors that monitor your heart even though they do not actually touch your skin are at the center of UC San Diego electrical engineering PhD student Yu Mike Chi’s dissertation. This technology – and the plan for commercializing it – earned Chi and his Cognionics team the top spot in the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge. The prize includes $25K in cash for the startup and $15K in legal services.

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As part of the effort to reduce childhood lead poisoning, scientists at RTI International, under contract with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), have developed a new field method for measuring the amount of lead in paint that is faster and less expensive than current methods.

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Developed expressly to assist passengers with special needs, the Mobile Transit Companion, a North American made mobile application, uses context-aware self-adaptive computing to deliver live, customized data to Paris Metro passengers en route. The inclusive application, complete with useful information for all passengers, was created through a partnership between Ryerson University’s Digital Media Zone (DMZ) and Sweden’s Appear Networks.

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Moore’s law marches on: In the quest for faster and cheaper computers, scientists have imaged pore structures in insulation material at sub-nanometer scale for the first time. Understanding these structures could substantially enhance computer performance and power usage of integrated circuits, say Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and Cornell University scientists.

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360° surveillance video promises high-res detail, multiple views, and DVR features.

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360° surveillance video promises high-res detail, multiple views, and DVR features.

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Technology developed by University of Virginia inventors involving adipose stem cells – adult stem cells found in fatty tissue – could one day be used to treat severe wounds and other conditions. The technology has just been licensed to the GID Group.

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"Frustrated" systems -- those in which the interacting components cannot reach a single minimum-energy state -- are of enormous interest to fields from neural networks and protein folding to social structures and magnetism. But they have been difficult to study because even systems with small numbers of objects cannot be modeled on the best conventional computers. Now a research team has devised a scalable quantum-mechanical simulation.

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Iowa State students are busy preparing to race the university's tenth solar-powered car. They'll attempt to prove and qualify their car during the June 12-18 Formula Sun Grand Prix in Texas. If that goes well, they'll enter the June 19-26 American Solar Challenge, a race from Tulsa, Okla., to Chicago.

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The Georgia Institute of Technology announces the release of the developer preview of Kamra, the first mobile augmented reality (AR) browser for the KHARMA (KML/HTML Augmented Reality Mobile Architecture) development platform based on open Web standards. The developer preview will be released at ARE2010 - Augmented Reality Event in Santa Clara, CA June 2.

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What’s evolving, says researcher, is a multi-dimensional way of communicating.

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Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) are designing, fabricating and testing planar ion traps that can be more readily combined into large, interconnected trap arrays. In the future, these arrays may be used to create a useful quantum computer. Details of the research effort will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics on May 26 and 27.

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Lasers haven't yet been able to shoot swarms of missiles out of the sky, but they sure can zap mosquitoes.

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Using magnetic induction to send power over distances of up to a few tens of centimeters is readily possible, but the prospects of using this technique to charge consumer electronics at much greater distances is dim.

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W. Ross Morrow, who's just finishing his first year at Iowa State University, believes engineers have a place in public policy debates. He's had some first-hand experience: A report he helped write as a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs attracted the attention of a New York Times blog, Rush Limbaugh and Bloomberg Television.

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Quantum dots may be small. But they usually don’t let anyone push them around. Now, however, JQI Fellow Edo Waks and colleagues have devised a self-adjusting remote-control system that can place a dot 6 nanometers long to within 45 nm of any desired location. That’s the equivalent of picking up golf balls around a living room and putting them on a coffee table – automatically, from 100 miles away.

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Despite the distraction potential of laptops in college classrooms, new research shows that they can actually increase students' engagement, attentiveness, participation and learning.

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Approximately 100,000 volumes from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library, the world’s largest oceanography library, have been digitized and are being made publicly accessible as part of a partnership between Google, the University of California and the UC San Diego Libraries.

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Kansas State University researchers have found that Nintendo's Wii Fit helped improve balance for a soldier with a traumatic brain injury, a problem many soldiers are facing after serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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Space satellites that detect nuclear events and environmental gasses face a data logjam because their increasingly powerful sensors produce more information than their bandwidth can easily transmit. Sandia National Laboratories experiments at the International Space Station indicate that sending more complex computer chips into space to pre-reduce the large data stream sent Earthbound could be the answer. But how well do the latest, most sensitive computing electronics fare in the harsh environment of outer space?

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Scientists at the Nuclear Science and Technology Division of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are merging decades of nuclear energy and safety expertise with high-performance computing to effectively address a range of nuclear energy- and security-related challenges.

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Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Electronics Visualization Laboratory have received a grant to develop what they call the "next-generation" CAVE -- an acronym for Cave Automatic Virtual Environment -- that will be a 3-D research tool for use in science, industry and other applications.

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Researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a new nanotechnology-based “microlens” that uses gold to boost the strength of infrared imaging and could lead to a new generation of ultra-powerful satellite cameras and night-vision devices.

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RENCI experts in informatics and computational performance will work with Cambridge Intelligent Systems (CIS) to improve biometric systems used to track and identify suspected terrorists as they enter and leave the U.S.

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Changes in a virtual human’s photorealism and motion quality had no significant effect on female viewers, but did influence decisions of male viewers.

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NIST has issued the final draft of its Guide for Assessing Security Controls in Federal Information Systems and Organizations and is seeking public comments.

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NIST has unveiled the first 'phantom' for calibrating MRI machines -- widely used medical tools that rely on magnetic fields and radio waves to visualize the body's internal structures, especially soft tissues -- that is traceable to standardized values.

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A group of Northeastern University student researchers have developed an automated emergency alert system to help elderly people in sudden need of medical attention.

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Iowa State University engineers are developing new and improved poles to carry electricity across the countryside. They say the new structures -- which can bend and deflect an extreme load -- would be cheaper, easier to install, more secure and more resistant to cascading failures. That means better electrical service for everybody.

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Physicists at McGill University have developed a system for measuring the energy involved in adding electrons to semi-conductor nanocrystals, also known as quantum dots – a technology that may revolutionize computing and other areas of science.

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University of Virginia students who converted a Honda to run on electricity will now try to power it – at least partly – with solar energy.