Weekly Tech Summary 2

Big stuff:

Researchers find first potentially habitable exoplanet
Its current name is Gliese 581g and it is one of at least six planets in the system. It’s around 20 light years from us and orbits a small red dwarf star.

Researchers and industry news:

Quantum thermoelectric device could turn waste heat into electricity
Researchers at ASU have shown that you could use a thin polymer layer sandwiched between two electrodes and exposed heat flow to generate electricity. The simplicity and small size of the device could make it more economical than current alternatives.

Higher speed measurements of individual atoms now possible
IBM researchers have developed a new method of using scanning tunneling microscopes to record ultra high-speed electromagnetic properties of structures down to the size of individual atoms. This new technique should be useful for further research in quantum computing and high-density information storage.

Light-activated muscle activation demonstrated in mice
Stanford researchers have been able to activate muscles in mouse legs with LEDs placed on the nerves controlling the muscles. The mice are genetically modified to have a kind of light receptor in some of their nerves. This kind of technology has previously been used to activate certain parts of mouse brains, but this kind of direct muscle control could eventually lead to big advances in biomechanics of human movement.

DoD funds research into methods to help rewire injured brains
Researchers are in the process of developing and testing a technology incorporating a brain-computer-brain interface that will help a brain get properly rewired after large injuries. It may help people who’ve had strokes, been in car crashes, or other accidents regain normal behavior and movement.

Nanostructured display technology should allow for smaller, more efficient displays
It should allow displays to be more efficient and reduce the size of possible pixels by 8 to 10 times, compared to current LEDs.

Raytheon releases their second-generation exoskeleton
It’s reduced its power consumption by 50% and is lighter, stronger and faster than the previous version. It should also be more resistant to environmental effects. Raytheon says it should be in use on the battlefield in 5 years or so.

Cool projects:

Google funds five projects to improve the lives of the largest number of people
The winners are Khan Academy (providing a free education to anyone through Youtube videos), FIRST (promoting science and engineering education through team competitions), Public Resource.org (making government more transparent by providing access to legal documents), Shweeb (making human-powered medium distance monorail systems), and the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (which graduate-level math and science study in Africa).

NIH gives $40M of funding to the Human Connectome Project
The project will scan 1200 human brains over the next five years. They’ll also record behavioral and physiological data and release the results as a publicly viewable database. The hope is that this large concerted effort will give us a clearer picture of how different parts of the brain relate to each other, and how much variability we can expect in an individual brain’s features.

On the horizon:

China aims to make world’s biggest supercomputer
The US currently has 282 of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, but China’s got 24 but they’re pouring huge amounts of money into making more. Researchers predict that by 2020 we’ll have a supercomputer that can do 1 exaflops, which is a thousand times higher than any current supercomputer and a one million trillion floating point operations per second