Robotics Update

New supercomputer can see well enough to drive a car:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/new-supercomputer-on-a-chip-%E2%80%98sees%E2%80%99-well-enough-to-drive-a-car-someday

Robotics Update

"Researchers have created electronic sensors for artificial skin that can detect the slightest touch, for use on prosthetic limbs or robots":

http://www.kurzweilai.net/stanford-researchers-new-high-sensitivity-electronic-skin-can-feel-a-flys-footsteps

Robotics Update

Touch-sensitive artificial "e-skin" lets robots feel and touch objects:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/98671

Robotics Update

Touch-sensitive artificial "e-skin" lets robots feel and touch objects

Alternative Energies Update

"Solar funnel" concentrates solar energy 100 times using carbon nanotubes, which should allow the development of much smaller and more powerful solar arrays:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/solar-funnel-concentrates-solar-energy-100-times

Cybernetics Update

DARPA funding a method to connect nerves to fiber optics to allow "true" bionics that transfer signals like the real thing:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/fiber-optic-interface-to-link-robotic-limbs-human-brain

Nanotechnology Update

"Graphene, a one-atom-thick layer of graphitic carbon, has great potential to make electronic devices such as radios, computers and phones faster and smaller. But its unique properties have also led to difficulties in integrating the material into such devices.... A group of UCLA researchers demonstrate how they have overcome some of these difficulties to fabricate the fastest graphene transistor to date":

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-chemists-engineers-achieve-169811.aspx

"Graphene, a one-atom-thick layer of graphitic carbon, has great potential to make electronic devices such as radios, computers and phones faster and smaller. But its unique properties have also led to difficulties in integrating the material into such devices.... A group of UCLA researchers demonstrate how they have overcome some of these difficulties to fabricate the fastest graphene transistor to date":

Singularity Update

Here's a good reminder of how fast things are changing. But be aware this is from 2008 and thus out of date...but STILL impressive. Here it talks about taking a full YEAR to equal all the information generated in the past 5,000 years. Now it supposedly takes TWO DAYS to generate the same amount of info:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY

Computing Update

"Rice University scientists have created the first two-terminal memory chips that use only silicon to generate nanocrystal wires as small as 5 nanometers — far smaller than circuitry in even the most advanced computers and electronic devices. The technology breakthrough promises to extend the limits of miniaturization subject to Moore’s Law, and should be easily adaptable to nanoelectronic manufacturing techniques":

http://www.kurzweilai.net/silicon-nanocrystals-break-miniaturization-barrier-for-memory-chips

Computing Update

Memristors will go to market in 2013, allowing greater storage and instant switch on capability for computers and other devices:

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/26157/?a=f

"The goal is to be at least double whatever flash memory is in three years--we know we'll beat flash in speed, power, and endurance, and we want to beat it in density, too."

Computing Update

"In recent years the limits of physics and finance faced by chip makers had loomed so large that experts feared a slowdown in the pace of miniaturization that would act like a brake on the ability to pack ever more power into ever smaller devices like laptops, smartphones and digital cameras." But recent developments should allow miniaturization to far smaller scales:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/science/31compute.html?_r=1

Computing Update