Joey Seiler on February 21, 2008 4:49 PM
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Is there no end to the wonder that is a carbon nanotube? The things can be used to make really black bulletproof objects and slow, tiny computers!
Those computers are hard to make, though. Nanotubes are, well, small and sometimes hard to work with, resulting in a lot of failure. IBM has a different take, though. Instead of arranging the nanotubes to replace traditional circuits by hand (or, more likely, traditional tools), Big Blue is stringing them together with DNA molecules. Once it's all put together, you slip the DNA out, and--ta dah!--you've got a grid of nanotubes
Continue reading 'IBM builds nanotube chips out of DNA; HAL waves hello to Deep Blue' >
Ted Alvarez on January 17, 2008 2:54 PM
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It's no secret that I've always wanted Terminator eyes — you know, the kind where a head-up display pops into your field of vision, updating you about your surroundings via head-up display and instructing you how to say things like a normal human, and not a killing machine.
My dream is one step closer to reality, now that engineers at the University of Washington have built flexible, biologically safe contact lenses that incorporate lights and circuits. These prototypes contain electrical circuits as well as red-light emitting diodes for the display; when tested on rabbits for 20 minutes, the animals showed no adverse effects, except a sudden desire to search for and eliminate John Connor.
A full-fledged display isn't available yet, but basic displays with a few pixels of info could be readied for applications in the very near future.
Continue reading 'Contact lenses with circuits could pave the way for superhuman and — yes! — x-ray vision' >
