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Butterfly wings are the key to glare-free phone displays
Butterflies have proven to be a surprising source of inspiration for technology, and that trend isn't about to slow down any time soon. German researchers have discovered that irregular, nanoscopic structures on the glasswing butterfly's namesake transparent wings eliminate most reflections at any angle -- perfect for phones, camera lenses and most any other device where display glare is a problem. The scientists have yet to completely recreate this surface in the lab, but they foresee a future where you're not struggling to read your smartphone outdoors. And the kicker? Prototypes are already self-cleaning and water-repellant, so you wouldn't need extra coatings to keep your screens largely smudge-free. [Image credit: Radwanul Hasan Siddique, KIT]
Researchers store memory bit on a lone molecule, could pave the way for petabyte SSDs
The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) just deflated the size of a bit down to a solitary nanometer -- the length of an organic molecule. The international research team managed it by first embedding a magnetized iron atom into a molecule made up of 51 atoms, then taking advantage of so-called memristive and spintronic properties. By applying a current, they flipped the atom's magnetic charge, altering the resistance of the molecule as well -- which they subsequently measured, storing a bit. Compared to a typical magnetic drive which needs 3 million atoms per bit, a device made this way could theoretically store 50 thousand times as much data in the same size -- and would be an all-electric device, to boot. If the research ever pans out, a terabyte magnetic drive could turn into a 50 petabyte solid state unit -- hopefully ready in time for all those 4K home movies you'll need to store one day soon.
German engineers want to halve EV manufacturing costs by 2018, seem confident about it
Yearning for an EV that can fit within your budget? You may not have to wait too long, according a group of engineers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), who are aiming to halve plug-in manufacturing costs by 2018. It's all part of something called Competence E -- a €200 million ($273 million) initiative that will draw upon the expertise of 250 scientists from 25 different institutes, in the hopes of creating new and more cost-effective methods of producing power trains and batteries. Under the publicly funded project, which was announced at last week's International Motor Show, KIT's researchers will construct a "research factory" where they'll develop and demonstrate their processes and technologies. According to project leader Andreas Gutsch, the idea isn't to create concepts that could bear fruit a few decades down the road, but to develop more pragmatic solutions that can be integrated at the industrial level within a relatively short time frame. "We are no longer focused on studying individual molecules or components, but on developing solutions on the system level, which meet industrial requirements," Gutsch told Science|Business. "We are actively approaching industry and will even intensify these efforts...We are conducting excellent research for application, not for the drawer." A full 50 engineers will begin working on Competence E next year, with the project scheduled to wrap up by 2018. Purr past the break for more details, in the full press release.
Researchers create 26 terabit-per-second connections with just a single laser
Remember that pair of 100 terabit-per-second connections we told you about earlier this moth? Impressive? Sure, but not entirely practical thanks to the massive banks of lasers (370 to be exact) that guzzled several kilowatts of electricity. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany haven't hit 100Tbps yet, but they were able push 26Tbps using just one, lonely laser. The new single-laser fiber-optic speed record was set using a technique called fast Fourier transform that pulses light at an incredibly high rate with data encoded in 325 distinct colors across the spectrum. A detector at the receiving end is able to distinguish between the various colored data streams, based on tiny differences in arrival time, and recombine them into a high-speed torrent of ones and zeros. The scientists behind the project believe that, eventually, the technology could make its way into commercial use and be integrated into silicon chips. Now, someone needs to hurry up and jack our FiOS connection into this thing -- all this talk of terabits-per-second and graphene modulators, yet we're still jealous of grandma Löthberg.
3D invisibility cloak fashioned out of metamaterials
Those HDTV manufacturers did tell us that 3D was going to be everywhere this year, didn't they? Keeping up with the times, scientists investigating potential methods for rendering physical objects invisible to the human eye have now moved to the full three-dimensional realm. The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has developed a photonic metamaterial that can make things disappear when viewed from all angles, advancing from previous light refraction methods that only worked in 2D. It sounds similar to what Berkeley researchers developed not too long ago, and just like Berkeley's findings, this is a method that's still at a very early stage of development and can only cover one micrometer-tall bumps. Theoretically unlimited, the so-called carpet cloak could eventually be expanded to "hide a house," but then who's to say we'll even be living in houses by that time?
Lip reading mobiles are wunderbar, still at the prototype stage (video)
We came across this lip reading prototype during our exploration of the CeBIT 2010 halls, and while we're a bit tardy in bringing it to your attention, there's a certain timeless quality to strapping your face with wired sensors that transcends conventional restrictions of timeliness. That's our story anyway. Devised by researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, it picks up the motion of speech (via electromyography) without requiring the sound, and then translates it into audible communication via a delightfully cold and robotic voice. The purposes of such a project are obvious -- from helping people who've lost their speech to making private telephone conversations actually private -- but the fun is in seeing someone use the thing in its current unrefined form. You'll be able to do that just past the break.
