This Display Is a Quantum Leap

  Quantum-dot displays promise to be cheap, beautiful,  and energy efficient, but some major hurdles remain. One of the first working full-color quantum-dot displays was shown off at a conference this week by a startup company that is working to commercialize the technology. Quantum dots are nanoparticles made of inorganic materials that very efficiently emit a specific color of light (depending on the size of the dot) when they're excited either by a beam of light or by an electrical current. Quantum-dot displays promise low power consumption and rich, beautiful color, much like organic light-emitting diode displays (OLEDs). But...

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Software Transforms Photos Into 3-D Models

  Photofly uses overlapping photos to create high-detail 3-D copies of anything from bugs to Mount Rushmore. Ever wished you could take an object in a museum home with you instead of settling for some photos? The design software company Autodesk will release free software next week that could turn those snapshots into your own personal replica from a 3-D printer. Called Photofly, the software extracts a detailed 3-D model from a collection of overlapping photos. "We can automatically generate a 3-D mesh at extreme detail from a set of photos—we're talking the kind of density captured by a laser scanner," says Brian Mathews, who leads...

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A Worldwide Nuclear Slowdown Continues

  Aftershocks from Fukushima shake political confidence in nuclear—and provide a boost for renewables. The bad news from Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant continues to reverberate around the world, dimming nuclear energy's future and boosting the fortunes of low-carbon power sources. Last week's decision by Japan's prime minister to scrap plans for 14 new reactors is just the latest sign of a global nuclear slowdown, and the technology faces renewed scrutiny even in countries with pronuclear governments, including the U.S., China, and France. "Due to both the time needed for integrating the lessons learned from Fukushima...

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A Car Battery at Half the Price

  A startup hopes to commercialize anovel  design that features fluid electrodes. Last year, the battery startup A123 Systems spun out another company, called 24M, to develop a new kind of battery meant to make electric vehicles go farther and cost less. Now a research paper published in Advanced Energy Materials reveals the first details about how that battery would work. It also addresses the challenges in bringing the battery to market. A big problem with the lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids is that only about 25 percent of the battery's volume is taken up by materials that store energy. The...

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Do Biofuels Reduce Greenhouse Gases?

  A new study fuels the debate over  the impact of growing crops for fuel. Greenhouse-gas emissions from biofuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, may be lower than many researchers have estimated, according to a new study. The findings could further fuel a debate over whether biofuels actually reduce greenhouse-gas emissions compared to gasoline, and if so, by how much. Some recent studies have suggested that the indirect effects of biofuels production, such as higher food prices, could encourage farmers to clear forested land to grow more crops—thereby worsening climate change. At least one study suggested that the emissions resulting...

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The Invisible iPhone

  A new interface lets you keep your phone in  your pocket and use apps or answer calls by tapping your hand. Over time, using your smart-phone touch screen becomes second nature, to the point where you can even do some tasks without looking. Researchers in Germany are now working on a system that would let you perform such actions without even holding the phone—instead you'd tap your palm, and the movements would be interpreted by an "imaginary phone" system that would relay the request to your actual phone. The concept relies on a depth-sensitive camera to pick up the tapping and sliding interactions on a palm,  software to...

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Bing Gets Friendlier with Facebook

Starting tomorrow, recommendations from your Facebook friends will become a regular part of Web search results, at least if you use Microsoft's Bing search engine. A slew of new Bing features will use Facebook data to make its results more personalized, and to create opportunities to discuss what you are searching for with friends.   Search me: Bing will let users ask their Facebook friends for shopping advice through its search results.  Credit: Microsoft "All the stuff we've deployed previously for Web search doesn't acknowledge the human, social side of our users," says Stefan Weitz, director of Bing search. "We were looking...

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A Touch Screen that Plays Sticky

The touch screen uses high-frequency vibrations to create a thin layer of air between the glass and the user's finger. The finger slips easily over the layer of air but catches slightly on the glass when the vibrations are turned off. Varying the vibrations as the user's finger moves can cause different parts of the screen to feel slick or sticky."It adds a feeling of realism," says Vincent Lévesque, a computer scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. "It's more physical. It feels like there are real buttons that actually exist." Lévesque and colleagues demonstrated a prototype of the device at the ACM Conference...

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Hold that Call, and Focus on the Road

Microsoft researchers could help prevent accidents by automatically putting calls on hold when the road demands more attention. The researchers found that the system could significantly reduce the risk of an accident while driving.According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), using a cell phone while driving impairs a driver's reaction time by as much as having a blood alcohol concentration at the legal limit of .08 percent. Most U.S. states have banned the use of handheld phones while driving, and more than half forbid novice drivers and school bus drivers from any cell phone use at all while driving.Shamsi...

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Google to Debut Chromebooks Next Month

Next month, Google will attempt to reinvent the personal computer as little more than a browser and a screen and a keyboard. On June 15, the first lightweight Chromebook laptops, which run the company's Web-centric operating system, Chrome OS, will be available to buy from Samsung and Acer. Google hopes that every category of computer user—home users, businesses, and educational institutions—will buy in to a vision of computing that does away with locally installed software and instead accesses everything through a Web browser.Google previewed Chrome OS late last year, and gave out notebooks designed to run the operating system in December 2010.Samsung...

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