A lot of people talk to their TVs, but they usually say things like "What's gone wrong this time?" That might change with the growing sophistication of digital video recorders (DVRs) and set-top boxes, according to Ken Morse, vice president of Scientific Atlanta speaking at the IPTV 2006 conference taking place in San Jose on Wednesday.

Voice recognition may become one of the options for navigating through the long video menus that will become more prevalent in the near future as video-on-demand becomes more popular, he said.

Another likely feature for living room entertainment will be burn-to-order … Read more

Attention Canadians. If you just trudged in from a blizzard, you may want to take a look at ToastyFeet. The company sells shoe insoles that can keep feet warm despite snow and ice. You can stand on a block of dry ice, chilling at minus 106 Fahrenheit, and your feet will still be 72 degrees.

The technology for the insoles comes from Aspen Aerogels. Aerogels essentially are blankets of air: five percent of a sheet of insulating aerogel material might be fiber but the rest will be air. Because air insulates better than most materials, a thin layer of aerogel … Read more

Scientists at UC Berkeley have accelerated evolutionary development of a common, but largely harmless, virus in humans in hopes that these designer organisms could help provide gene therapy.

The adeno-associated virus, or AAV, contains two genes and is found in about 90 percent of the population. Although largely benign to humans, antibodies inside our bodies recognize the capsid protein shell of the virus and quickly throttle it. David Schaffer, associate professor of chemical engineering, along with Narendra Maheshri, James T. Koerber and Brian Kaspar, directed the process of genetic mutations. In two generations of accelerated evolution, requiring about two months … Read more

Researchers at MIT, Northeastern and the Naval Research Laborartory have come up with a sensor system that will track fish shoals, or populations, over a 10,000 square kilometer area. Current technology only scans for 100 square meters.

Under standard scanning techniques, ships send high-frequency sonar beams into the ocean. Scientists then track the bouncing of the sonar waves to determine the size of objects in the ocean. The new system uses low-frequency sonar that can travel much greater distances and still return useful information.

"The world's fish stocks are being depleted at a horrible rate," said … Read more

While some insist that nanotech is a fad, venture capitalists more than doubled the amount of money invested in U.S. nano companies in 2005.

Venture investments in U.S. nanotech companies came to $434.3 million in 2005, up 121 percent over the previous year's $196.4 million, according to an analysis of the MoneyTree Survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, Thomson Venture Economics and the National Venture Capital Association conducted by Small Times Magazine. (The Magazine works with the other organizations on analyzing the numbers.)

Some of the bigger deals involved Aspen Aerogels, which makes a space age insulation. The … Read more

If every living thing on Earth died tomorrow, would future generations be able to detect that animals and plants once covered the globe.?

Well, sure, if they got lucky and found the broken head of the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand, but two UC Berkeley researchers have so far not found distinguishing fingerprints left by the presence of life--such as erosion patterns--that could definitively determine whether or not life existed on a particular planet.

William Dietrich, professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, and grad student J. Taylor Perron examined different geological … Read more

Jim Armstrong, managing director at Clearstone Venture Partners, says his firm is looking at investments in China and India like everyone else, but believes the next "big" opportunity for venture capitalists might be in those cities on the US Airways circuit.

Investing in the regional tech pockets in the U.S will get big over the next 36 months, he said. The tech talent is out there, but it's being underserved by the firms on Menlo Park's Sand Hill Road. Historically, these firms have preferred to invest in companies a car drive away.

"You've … Read more

Sales of silicon-based car sensors will reach more than $10 billion this year, up 11 percent from last year, according to a new report from research firm Strategy Analytics.

That means carmakers plan to outfit more vehicles with fancy features such as lane-departure warnings, which are still new to only a few luxury cars. Lane-departure warnings, with the use of infrared optics and cameras, alert drivers when they're headed off-road or into another car's lane.

Similarly, sensors for boosting car performance and safety will also drive the market, according to the report. So much so that Strategy Analytics … Read more

Thirty three percent of teens surveyed in the Lemelson-MIT Invention Index predicted the demise of gasoline powered cars by 2015. Only 26 percent, however, expected compact disks to become obsolete in the next decade.

Teens were also somewhat optimistic that technology could ameliorate many of the world's pending environmental problems. 91 percent thought tech could tackle the issue of clean water while 89 percent were optimistic about solving world hunger. 84 percent felt that technology could provide answers for pollution reduction.

"Perhaps more than any preceding generation, today's young people are completely comfortable with rapid technological change,&… Read more