organic

As scientists unveil artificial organs and prosthetics to improve the function of our hearts, kidneys, hands, and even eyes, it's easy to gloss over these devices' Achilles' heel: power.

Even building devices that run on very low power, such as pacemakers, tend to require additional invasive surgeries just to replace their batteries. Meanwhile, artificial limbs can be huge energy hogs, with the power source needing to be swapped out as frequently as every few weeks. Impractical is an understatement.

Biofuel cells could very well solve this problem. Researchers around the world are investigating how to use a body's own energy to power various devices, and one team out of France last year successfully implanted in a rat a biofuel cell that uses glucose and oxygen to generate electricity.… Read more

Four months after it was releaed in June at Apple's WWDC, iOS 5, the next major version of the software that powers Apple's iPods, iPhones, and iPads, will release today. By now, you're probably ready for the handy new features, tweaked UI, new Twitter integration, and everything else (read what we've learned so far of iOS 5), but is your iOS device ready?

To make sure your iPhone is set up for the launch of the latest iOS, we've put together a step-by-step guide for making sure it is primed for the update.

Editors' note: … Read more

If you think that engineering functional human body parts using a printer and laser is a sign of the end of time, you might want to proceed with caution. If you think such a development portends the saving of lives, read on.

Because researchers from an interdisciplinary group of five Fraunhofer institutes in Germany are announcing their successful creation of completely functional blood vessels using 3D printing and intense laser impulses.

First, advances in 3D printing have enabled researchers to print organs inexpensively and quickly using a modified inkjet printer. As in, very modified.

Using special inks, the researchers were … Read more

Wunderlist is a beautifully designed, multiplatform task management tool that can sync with the cloud and even add tasks via e-mail.

The beauty of Wunderlist lies in its simplicity. Its interface is made up mostly of Tasks and Lists. Lists are essentially groups of tasks, great for organizing projects or categories of to-dos.

To get started, tap the Lists tab on the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen, then create a new List. From there, you can tap the List and add new Tasks to it. You can prioritize Tasks with a star, create due dates, and add … Read more

Researchers have developed a way to find novel solar cell materials: throw computers at the problem.

In a paper published this week in Nature Communications, the researchers said their method of sifting through millions of possible molecules has yielded a compound that holds promise as a material for organic solar cells.

The Harvard University-led project, which started more than two years ago, is a collaboration with IBM to manage and supply the computing resources for the World Community Grid, where people supply idle PC time to contribute to research projects lacking sufficient compute resources.

Traditional solar cells are made from … Read more

GoToApp gives you a more organized, tab-based alternative to the default Android app drawer. You can create any number of tabs, and rearrange your apps among them as you see fit.

When you first run GoToApp, it does a bit of housekeeping for you by creating Main, Game, Tools, and Others tabs and dividing your existing apps among them. Of course, it doesn't categorize every app perfectly, but it's really simple to move things around and create new tabs as necessary. You can also create child folders within tabs to further organize your apps. And you can choose … Read more

Organizer binders and laptop PCs take up about the same amount of space in your backpack, but that's about as far as the similarities go. Laptops kick ring binders back to chalk-and-blackboard days, where they belong, and they can stay there, too, thanks to usefully cool freeware like IslandSW's StudentDOG, the school organizer designed "by students for students." It's got everything students need to stay organized, on time, and productive both in and out of school.

StudentDOG unifies all its functions in one tabbed interface. It packs a lot in each view, but it never … Read more

So you're in business, and you've got a PC and a scanner. You're dutifully scanning and saving all your business documents (hopefully not jumbled together in your scanner's default archive). Simple Doc Organizer Free Edition is a free document organizing utility designed specifically for small- and medium-size businesses. It makes it easy to store and find your scanned, saved, or imported documents.

We downloaded and extracted the program's zipped installer, which then downloads and installs the program files. We also had to disable our User Account Control settings, which required a reboot. A Configure Wizard … Read more

Size matters, and LG is upping the ante in the fiercely competitive TV market by announcing its plans to debut a 55-inch OLED (organic light-emitting diode) giant in mid-2012. At the moment, the chaebol is already shipping a 15-incher based on the same technology and previously showcased a 31-inch prototype at the IFA trade show in Berlin last year.

OLED allows manufacturers to produce exceptionally thin TVs without compromising picture quality, although larger screens remain very costly to make. Early adapters will have to pay a huge premium to own these 55-inchers and we reckon that a 3D-capable version could be in the pipeline, too.

(Source: Crave Asia via Engadget HD) … Read more