Author: JohnVlahos

• Low-Power, Color Displays

  Oxford University researchers demonstrate that materials used in DVDs could make color displays that don’t sap power.

  Researchers at Oxford University have used a type of phase-change material to make devices whose color changes instantly in response to a small jolt of power.  The materials, which are used in some types of DVDs, could lead to ultra-low-power, full-color displays, according to an article describing the work in the journal Nature.

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• Beijing Wants to Understand Its Smog

  New effort would pinpoint the source, type, and dispersal patterns of smog across Beijing to drive street-level predictions and targeted remediation.

  In a new tactic in Beijing’s growing battle on choking smog, sensors and analytics will pinpoint the source and trajectory of polluting particles and forecast levels three days in advance down to the resolution of individual streets.

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• How to Clean the Gas and Oil Industries’ Most Contaminated Water

  A new process can cheaply clean extremely briny water coming up from oil wells.

  In a nondescript site in Midland, Texas, an inexpensive new process is cleaning up some of the most contaminated water around—the extremely salty stuff that comes up with oil at wells. By the end of next month the technology is expected to be chugging 500,000 gallons per day, furnishing water that’s sufficiently clean to use in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for oil and natural gas production (see “Natural Gas Changes the Energy Map”).

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• Will Virtual Reality Reshape Documentary Journalism?

  One documentary filmmaker believes an immersive experience will make a more lasting impression on audiences.

  Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus VR in March 2014 for $4 billion brought a resurgence of interest in virtual reality to the mainstream, almost 30 years after the technology first entered the public consciousness. And while Oculus VR’s initial focus has been on video games, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has described the hardware as “the next major computing platform that will come after mobile.”

• Startup Lets Offices Know Who Just Walked In

  A Boston-based startup is helping companies track their employees around the office using wireless sensor beacons, to improve collaboration.

  In the office of the future, you may not so much walk into a room as log into it automatically. That’s what Sam Dunn, the CEO and co-founder of Boston-based startup Robin, thinks. The company is using wireless sensors to make rooms in office buildings aware of the people in them and let employees know exactly where their co-workers are.

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• IBM: Commercial Nanotube Transistors Are Coming Soon

  Chips made with nanotube transistors, which could be five times faster, should be ready around 2020, says IBM.

  For more than a decade, engineers have been fretting that they are running out of tricks for continuing to shrink silicon transistors. Intel’s latest chips have transistors with features as small as 14 nanometers, but it is unclear how the industry can keep scaling down silicon transistors much further or what might replace them.

• Two-Bladed Wind Turbines Make a Comeback

  Wind-turbine designers are warming up to an alternative to the three-bladed rotors that have been an industry standard for the past quarter century.

  Several major wind-power companies are testing a departure from the industry’s standard three-bladed turbine design by dropping one of the three blades and spinning the rotor 180 degrees to face downwind.

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• Weed’s Chronic Energy Use Becomes a Concern

  Researchers are discovering ways to grow marijuana more efficiently.

  The legalization of marijuana in some U.S. states has energy providers worrying that a boom in indoor growing could put a chronic drain on electricity resources.

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• The Thought Experiment

  In a remarkable study, a paralyzed woman used her mind to control a robotic arm. If only there were a realistic way to get this technology out of the lab and into real life.

  I was about 15 minutes late for my first phone call with Jan Scheuermann. When I tried to apologize for keeping her waiting, she stopped me. “I wasn’t just sitting around waiting for you, you know,” she said, before catching herself. “Well, actually I was sitting around.”

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• Neuroscience’s New Toolbox

  With the invention of optogenetics and other technologies, researchers can investigate the source of emotions, memory, and consciousness for the first time.

  What might be called the “make love, not war” branch of behavioral neuroscience began to take shape in (where else?) California several years ago, when researchers in David J. Anderson’s laboratory at Caltech decided to tackle the biology of aggression. They initiated the line of research by orchestrating the murine version of Fight Night: they goaded male mice into tangling with rival males and then, with painstaking molecular detective work, zeroed in on a smattering of cells in the hypothalamus that became active when the mice started to fight.

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• A Search Engine for the Era of Apps

  A new kind of search engine will make it possible to search inside the apps on your phone.

  Once upon a time there was the Web, a vast universe of information and services that were tangled together by hyperlinks but easy to explore using search engines. Then smartphones came along. Now people are spending less and less time on the Web and more in mobile apps, convenient but isolated packages not open to links or visible to any search engine.

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• For One Baby, Life Begins with Genome Revealed

  How a California father made an end run around medicine to decode his son’s DNA.

  An infant delivered last week in California appears to be the first healthy person ever born in the U.S. with his entire genetic makeup deciphered in advance.

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