- Ocean-faring Robot Cashes in on Offshore Oil and Gas
Liquid Robotics raised $45 million to build out its fleet of self-propelled marine robots.
Liquid Robotics is betting that autonomous vehicles will emerge as the best way to troll the oceans to gather data.
- Computer Simulations Reveal Benefits of Random Investment Strategies Over Traditional Ones
Central Banks could use random investment strategies to make markets more stable, say econophysicists
- Video Chat That’s a Little Closer to Hanging Out in Real Life
A startup called Rabbit believes consumers will jump for always-on video chatting that lets you watch movies with an infinite number of friends.
With so many video-chat applications already on the market, it sounds like a silly idea: build a new one while pretending the others never existed.
- Your Next Smartphone Screen May Be Made of Sapphire
Manufactured sapphire is incredibly strong and scratch resistant. Now falling costs and technology improvements could make it competitive with glass.
Manufactured sapphire—a material that’s used as transparent armor on military vehicles—could become cheap enough to replace the glass display covers on mobile phones. That could mean smartphone screens that don’t crack when you drop them and can’t be scratched with keys, or even by a concrete sidewalk.
- Lack of Ways to Measure Success Holds Back Mobile Ads
No one really knows if ads on smartphones work.
Where consumer attention goes, ad dollars are supposed to follow. That hasn’t quite happened on mobile devices.
- A Nanofabrication Technique Doubles Hard Drive Capacity
Laboratory advance shows that nano-imprinting could help the hard drive industry meet its long-term goals for data storage capacity.
Researchers at HGST, a major manufacturer of hard disk drives, have shown that an emerging fabrication technology called nano-imprinting could be used to double the data storage capacity of today’s hard disks. They say the patent-pending work, done in collaboration with a company called Molecular Imprints, could lead to a cost-effective manufacturing process by the end of the decade.
Hard disk drives store data in magnetic material on the surface of a spinning disk. During production, this material is deposited as a thin film. Information is then written to the disk by changing the magnetic orientation of distinct individual units of the material, known as “grains.” A group of grains together make up a region that can store a single bit. Since the 1950s, when the technology was invented, hard disk manufacturers have continually found ways to keep increasing data storage capacity by reducing the area required to store a bit, most recently by using fewer and fewer clustered grains for each.
- The Television Will Not Be Revolutionized
An ABC app is only a half-step forward.
The New York Times is reporting that The Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, is developing an app that would live stream ABC content to phones and tablets. Reportedly, the app would likely be available to users as soon as this year, and it stands to reason that the app would be similar to the apps WatchESPN and WatchDisney (the Disney Company owns all three networks). The app would make ABC the first American broadcaster to provide a live Internet stream of programming to users.
- A Stealthy De-Extinction Startup
By reviving lost species, a new company could put a warm and fuzzy face on advanced reproductive engineering.
Two of biotechnology’s most prolific and far-sighted researchers say they’re teaming up to start a company that intends to rewrite the rules of animal reproduction.
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