We collect an astonishing amount of digital information. But as the Economist recently pointed out in a special reports , we’ve long since surpassed our ability to store and process it all. Big data is here, and it’s causing big problems. More

When chipmakers slim down their silicon, they need finer and finer tools to organize all that circuitry. With MIT’s latest self-assembling chips , the detail work is handled by molecular strands that, freakishly, just know where to go. More

As concerned as we are about memory , we haven’t done much to preserve it. Most of our hard drives don’t last past 30 years. But soon, using diamond-like carbon nanotubes , even your Gizmodo comments could last practically forever. More

Lithium-ion batteries are already close to the 20-hour life promised back in 2007 for laptops, but Lithium-sulphur batteries being worked on at Stanford University may improve battery life by 300 per cent. More

Huzzah! Yet another discovery for us to add to our ever-expanding list of “awesome things that’ll never actually happen!” Ibrahim Abou Hamad and colleagues from Mississippi State University have reportedly devised a method of charging batteries that could hasten the process rather significantly, and better still, it could provide “an increase in battery power densities” as well. The only problem? Lithium-ion batteries have been disappointing tech users for years, and so long as Energizer and Duracell are calling the shots, we kind of doubt a lot will be done to improve the longevity of ‘em. Skepticism aside, the new method involves some fancy black magic surrounding molecular dynamics simulations, and researchers have found a way to boost charging time by “simulating the intercalation of lithium ions into the battery’s graphite anode.” We know we just went way over your heads on a Friday afternoon, but if techobabble’s your thing, all you can handle is right there in the Source link. Scientists discover method for rapid charging Li-ion batteries originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Mar 2010 03:19:00 EST

Man, MIT is making all of these other places of higher learning look silly. For what seems like the fortieth time this month , scientists at the university have revealed yet another breakthrough that might just change the way we compute in the future. Polyethylene, which is about as common a polymer as they come, could very well become a vital part of the way your next processor is cooled, as MIT boffins have figured out how to cause said polymer to “conduct heat very efficiently in just one direction, unlike metals, which conduct equally well in all directions.” If you’re still struggling to figure out why this matters, have a listen at this: “this may make the new material especially useful for applications where it is important to draw heat away from an object, such as a computer processor chip.” In fact, even Intel is taking notice of the development, though no one’s saying outright when exactly this stuff will leave the lab and hit Dell’s supply chain. There’s no time like the present, guys. [Thanks, Kevin] MIT gurus use polyethylene to suck heat away from your next CPU originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds .

Martian rovers with wheels are so 2009, man. And they get stuck in the sand way to easily. What we need is an army of tumbleweed beach ball robots surveying hundreds of miles of Martian surface. NASA’s on the case. The concept is mind-numbingly simple: It’s a big, bouncing ball that’s light enough to be pushed around Mars by nothing but the planet’s wind

If you want peace and quiet, current technologies involve a compromise: settle for thick, unsightly foam or use thinner panels that don’t block bass. A new technology developed in Hong Kong, however, is both super thin and super effective. The researchers at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Kowloon have made their noise-canceling strides with the simplest of materials: latex and plastic. The latex is stretched over a grid of plastic squares that’s only 3mm thick, with a small piece of plastic in the middle of each square. Depending on the weight of that plastic button, the panel can be tuned to cancel out a different frequency. Five of these panels stacked together effectively canceled 70 to 550 hertz and was still only as thick as a ceramic tile.

A quantum physics breakthrough that can predict the kinetic energy of electrons in simple metals—and semiconductors—will enable computers to simulate the behavior of new materials up to 100,000 times faster than they currently can. That’s huge. Princeton engineer Emily Carter led the project, which took an equation by Llewellyn Hilleth Thomas and Enrico Fermi that calculates how many electrons are distributed in a theoretical gas with evenly distributed electrons and figured out how to apply it to real, imperfect materials: “The equation scientists were using before was inefficient and consumed huge amounts of computing power, so we were limited to modeling only a few hundred atoms of a perfect material,” said Emily Carter, Princeton engineer who led the project. “Important properties are actually determined by the flaws, but to understand those you need to look at thousands or tens of thousands of atoms so the defects are included. Using this new equation, we’ve been able to model up to a million atoms, so we get closer to the real properties of a substance.” The results of that effort mean that principles of quantum mechanics, previously limited to small bits of matierals, can now be applied on a large scale

With all the intrigue around China hacking Google and Google hacking back , it’s easy to overlook the real-world consequences of what further escalation might lead to. Specifically: Chinese researchers and scientists could see the plug pulled on their work process. A full 84% of Chinese scientists said that blocked access to Google would “somewhat or significantly” hamper their research, in a recent survey by Nature News . While there are alternative search engines like Baidu, none are nearly as effective at searching English-language sites or research papers as Google. Google Scholar, in particular, is an invaluable resource for tracking down academic papers. It’s an apt analogy from the unnamed scientist quoted above: research without Google really is like life without electricity