Research

Call them a bunch of intellectual lightweights.

Researchers at HRL Laboratories, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Irvine have created what they say is the lowest-density material, a lattice of hollow tubes of the metal nickel.

Its volume is 99.99 percent air, and its density is 0.9 milligram per cubic centimeter--not including the air in or between its tubes. That density is less than one-thousandth that of water.

The metallic microlattice, as the researchers call it, could be useful for absorbing sound, vibration, and shock. Other possibilities, according to HRL: electrodes that could … Read more

Obesity is a growing problem in the U.S. Just this week, researchers at the American Heart Association projected that by 2020, the vast majority of Americans will be overweight or obese, with more than half of the country either diabetic or pre-diabetic.

Amidst all the bad news, however, researchers at Johns Hopkins University are offering a small ray of light. Their recent study on telephone counseling by health coaches finds it to be just as effective a means of losing weight as more traditional in-person programs.

That's particularly important because in-person programs are, by nature, more time-consuming and … Read more

The daily recharge of smartphones may become a thing of the past if battery researchers can get lithium ions to behave in a different way.

Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory this week published advances on research that takes on lithium ion batteries' weak spot: the electrodes that hold electric charge. Both efforts reflect the quest among researchers to improve batteries by improving the anode and cathode material used in today's lithium ion batteries.

With a better anode, a cell phone could be charged in 15 minutes and have 10 times the energy storage capacity of current lithium ion … Read more

If you've been avoiding all touch-screen devices because you love the feel of physical buttons, a new kind of tactile screen may have you singing a different tune.

Researchers at the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) have come up with next-generation haptic technology that creates the feeling of pressing actual buttons on a touch screen.

"We're adding the sense of touch to tactile surfaces," said Christophe Winter, a Ph.D. student at EPFL's Integrated Actuators Laboratory (LAI) who is writing his thesis on the subject. "The term 'touch screen' that's used to describe current technology is really a misnomer, because they only provide visual and auditory feedback."

To achieve this, the scientists at the LAI used a piezoelectric material that vibrates when voltage is applied to it. The vibrations are undetected by human touch, but they create a thin layer of air between the touch screen and a user's finger to give the feeling of a raised surface. … Read more

If Qualcomm Atheros President Craig Barratt had his way, the whole world would work like his house in Silicon Valley.

Barratt lives in the ideal vision of the connected home. He has precise control over things like temperature, energy consumption, the TV, stereo, and security system--all accessed remotely through his laptop. There's no remote control at home; he and his family can switch on the lights, open and close the curtain, and make sure the lawn is watered by using a connected iPod Touch.

Of course, it helps that Barratt actually wrote the software that powers everything in the … Read more

Ph.D. student Chris Seaton, who studies computer science at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, witnessed firsthand the horrors of serious burns while deployed in Afghanistan, Kenya, and elsewhere during his four years as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps.

So with the help of plastic surgeons at the University of Liverpool, Seaton developed Mersey Burns, an app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch that helps reduce errors when treating burn victims.

Mersey Burns has already won an innovation award, and it is set to be featured in the January issue of the Bulletin of the Royal College of Surgeons.… Read more

When it comes to imagining the future of computing, the biggest constraint is electrical power rather than raw computing horsepower.

During a keynote talk today at the SC11 conference on supercomputing in Seattle, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said that the graphics processor company now thinks in terms of "power limits" as it designs future products because power has become a limiting factor.

The company makes graphic processing units (GPUs) for video game consoles and professional workstations but its processors are also being used in high-performance computing. One of the primary reasons the Barcelona Supercomputing Center chose to build its system with Nvidia's GPUs and ARM-based CPUs … Read more

Do you hurt everywhere? Can't find any lasting solutions? Before you start popping pills, consider a little talk therapy--by telephone.

Chronic widespread pain, a condition called fibromyalgia, affects as many as 1 in 10 Americans, and is notoriously tricky (and expensive) to manage.

In the first six months following diagnosis, it costs on average $3,481 for medications, consultations, tests, and emergency room visits, according to researchers at the University of Aberdeen and the University of Manchester, both in the U.K.

So the researchers decided to investigate two less expensive alternatives: exercise and cognitive behavioral therapy (by phone).… Read more

Now that's some serious bandwidth.

The Department of Energy today is scheduled to officially unveil the Advanced Networking Initiative, a network that will connect three supercomputer centers at 100 gigabits per second.

The network, which the DOE says is 10 times faster than commercial Internet speeds, will allow for collaborative research in a variety fields, including mining data from the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, predicting changes in the climate, and genetics. Linking the the first three supercomputers at DOE national labs will be announced today at the SC11 supercomputer conference going on this week in Seattle.

Energy Secretary … Read more