Thoughtware.TV

The United States is likely to be the world's largest market for solar power in a few years and this year's solar installations could double, reaching a gigawatt of capacity.The growth had several likely causes, including decreasing prices for solar panels and installation costs, and increasing state incentives. (Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/24498/?a=f)

Rockefeller University researchers have discovered how interaction between water molecules paves the way for understanding how water can be manipulated to facilitate or prevent substances from dissolving in it, an advance that could impact every corner of society, from reforming agricultural practices to improving chemotherapy drugs whose side effects arise from their solubility or insolubility in water. (Source: http://www.physorg.com/news18484... More

The risk of age-associated diseases including heart disease and some types of cancers are more closely related to biological rather than chronological age, European researchers have found, showing that telomere lengths depend on the presence of gene variants near a gene called TERC. (Source: http://www.physorg.com/news184769662.html)

Google's superbowl TV ad dramatizes the personal meaning of Web searching. (Source: )

Darpa is investing $6 million in a project called BioDesign to develop creatures that are genetically engineered to bolster cell resistance to death. (Source: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/02/pentagon-looks-to-breed-immortal-synthetic-organisms-molecular-kill-switch-included/)

Z. Hong Zhou at the University of California, Los Angeles and colleagues have shown that the RNA and proteins in the rabies and vesicular stomatitis viruses wind together in a precise order, starting at the top of the bullet form, to form two nested helices. (Z. Hong Zhou / Science) (Source: http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn15018-pick-of-the-pictures)

Wireless power transmission, resonant magnetic coupling, infrared lasers are three methods of charging home appliances currently being researched, but safety concerns have been voiced. (Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527461.300-unplugged-goodbye-cables-hello-energy-beams.html?full=true)

The Wilkinson Anisotropy Microwave Probe (WMAP) team points out that if something as unlikely as Hawking's initials can be found in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) data, the chances of finding other apparently improbable patterns may also be quite high, and asks readers to mark the shapes they find in the CMB image. "If you think you can see your initials, the face of Jesus or a unicorn, mark it in this interactive image." (Source: http://... More

Princeton University and UC Santa Barbara scientists have succeeded in trapping one or two individual electrons to form spin qubits (quantum bits), allowing the electrons to behave quantum-mechanically for a long period of time.Previous experiments affected all the electrons uniformly in their immediate surroundings and were slow. The new method allows for extremely fast quantum operations in the nanosecond domain and overcomes a major hurdle in ... More

Physical chemist Gregory Scholes of the University of Toronto and his colleagues have observed that energy introduced to light-harvesting systems of two species of photosynthetic algae acted in a distinctly quantum manner, even at ambient temperatures. In these algae, bilin pigments, like other light-harvesting antenna molecules, absorb solar photons, which excite their electrons. The resulting excitation energy then moves to complexes of proteins... More

The National Science Foundation and the Microsoft Corporation have agreed to offer American scientific researchers free access to the company's new cloud computing service.Ed Lazowska, a University of Washington computer scientist who works with the Microsoft researchers, said the explosion of data being collected by scientists had transformed the staffing needs of the typical scientific research program on campus from a half-time graduate student... More

MIT researchers have demonstrated the first laser built from germanium that can produce wavelengths of light useful for optical communication. It's also the first germanium laser to operate at room temperature. (Source: http://www.physorg.com/news184493799.html)

Endgame Systems of Atlanta has come up with a system called the Internet telescope that can map the physical location of computers infected with malicious software, or malware, used to run botnets (thousands of computers taken over to run malware). It can even identify the type of malware on the machine and preempt its next moves. (Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527465.500-a-telescope-that-sets-its-sights-on-cybercrime.html)

NASA and General Motors (GM) are developing humanoid robots that can work side-by-side with humans to help astronauts during dangerous mission and to help GM build cars and automotive plants.Robonaut 2, aka R2, is designed to be a "faster, more dexterous and more technologically advanced" robot than Robonaut 1, using its hands to manipulate small parts, while also having exceptional strength.Video (Source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/... More

Siri, a new iPhone app based on SRI International's ambitious CALO artificial intelligence project, transcribes spoken text and routes these commands to the right web services.The company, for example, pulls concert data from StubHub, movie times from MovieTickets, movie reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, restaurant data from Yelp and you can order a taxi through TaxiMagic. (Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/siri_your_personal_assistant_fo... More

Rice University have discovered a new technique for targeting individual diseased cells and destroying them with exploding "nanobubbles."The nanobubbles are created when gold nanoparticles are struck by short laser pulses. (Source: http://www.physorg.com/news184520297.html)

(National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)) Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have built an enhanced version of an experimental atomic clock based on a single aluminum atom that is now the world's most precise clock, more than twice as precise as the previous pacesetter based on a mercury atom. The new aluminum clock would neither gain nor lose one second in about 3.7 billion years, according to measureme... More

(DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory) Four Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers are among the 69 scientists that will receive five-year research grants as part of the US Department of Energy's new Early Career Research Program.

(Arizona State University) Stuart Lindsay, Arizona State University Regents' professor and director of the Biodesign Institute's Center for Single Molecule Biophysics, has just released the first comprehensive guide to a tiny world a million times smaller than a single grain of sand.

A team of researchers at the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) plans to race an autonomous vehicle up the 14,000-foot Pikes Peak without a driver at race speeds, something never done before.The Audi TTS, nicknamed Shelley, knows exactly where she is on the road by using a differential GPS. Unlike a standard GPS system, hers corrects for interference in the atmosphere, showing the car’s position on the Earth with a... More

Amazon has acquired Touchco, a New York start-up that was developing flexible, transparent, force-sensitive multitouch panels.The acquisition indicates what Amazon might try to do next in response to Apple’s iPad announcement: a future full-color, more-rugged multitouch Kindle. (Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/is-amazon-building-a-superkindle/)

Darwinists say that evolution is explained by the selection of phenotypic traits (heritable biological properties) by environmental filters, but the effects of endogenous structure, such as gene regulatory networks, can wreak havoc with this theory. So say cognitive scientists Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini in a new book, What Darwin Got Wrong."Pigs don't have wings, but that's not because winged pigs once lost out to wingless ones," ... More

Masahiro Hotta at Tohoku University says he has developed a way to teleport energy by injecting quantum energy at one point in the universe and then exploiting quantum energy fluctuations to extract it from another point.Hotta says that his approach also gives physicists a way of exploring the relationship between quantum information and quantum energy for the first time. (Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24759/)

A patient thought to be in a vegetative state was able to correctly answer a series of yes or no questions, with responses interpreted via functional MRI (fMRI) brain imaging, a study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed.Researchers aim to develop simplified, inexpensive alternates to fMRI such as EEG devices, and brain cognitive interfaces that will allow patients to interact with their environment.(UK Medical Research... More

(McMaster University) A new research network to advance Canada's standing in the development of solar photovoltaics will be based at McMaster University. The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada is providing $5 million in funding to establish the NSERC Photovoltaic Innovation Network, which is comprised of 29 top scientists and engineers working in the field of advanced solar cell research at 13 universities across Canada. ... More