Electroluminescence has come a long way since its discovery at the start of the 20thcentury. For many years the scientists who pioneered its development struggled to come up with practical applications for electroluminescent technology – early uses of the discovery lacked the lifespan to work as practical lamps and light sources, whilst its unreliability made it difficult to use in displays and interfaces.
Undeterred by their setbacks, the boffins working on electroluminescence didn’t give up, and thank goodness, because today electroluminescent light has evolved into a technology that has myriad applications all over the planet. (more…)
Leibniz’s “SuperMUC” named Europe’s fastest supercomputer
MUNICH – 18 Jun 2012: The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), in collaboration with IBM, today announced the world’s first commercially available hot-water cooled supercomputer, a powerful, high-performance system designed to help researchers and industrial institutions across Europe investigate and solve some of the world’s most daunting scientific challenges.(more…)
Children who are skilled in understanding how shapes fit together to make recognizable objects also have an advantage when it comes to learning the number line and solving math problems, research at the University of Chicago shows.
The work is further evidence of the value of providing young children with early opportunities in spatial learning, which contributes to their ability to mentally manipulate objects and understand spatial relationships, which are important in a wide range of tasks, including reading maps and graphs and understanding diagrams showing how to put things together. Those skills also have been shown to be important in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. (more…)
Windows Azure offered Pottermore the flexibility required to build a massively scalable website in just three months.
REDMOND, Wash. – June 6, 2012 – Eagerly awaiting the launch of Pottermore (www.pottermore.com), the website based on the popular Harry Potter stories, Brittany Talbot and her sister, Priscilla, raced to sign up when the site went live on April 14, 2012.
They weren’t alone. Within hours, thousands of Harry Potter fans were flooding the site and just two weeks after the Pottermore website went live, it received one billion page views, making it one of the most popular sites on the Web. To date, 10 million unique visitors have visited the site, with 25,000 new users signing up every day.
With Harry Potter one of the largest entertainment phenomena of all time, fans of all ages couldn’t wait to experience the world-famous stories, social, and interactive experiences the site offered. “I like being able to go up there and do potions and spells, and walk around where Harry was,” Brittany says. “I read the first book in the first week because I was so excited.” (more…)
CEOs embark on a new era of leadership as they embrace a more connected culture
ARMONK, N.Y. – A new IBM study of more than 1,700 Chief Executive Officers from 64 countries and 18 industries worldwide reveals that CEOs are changing the nature of work by adding a powerful dose of openness, transparency and employee empowerment to the command-and-control ethos that has characterized the modern corporation for more than a century.
The advantages of the fast-moving trend are clear. According to the IBM CEO study, companies that outperform their peers are 30 percent more likely to identify openness – often characterized by a greater use of social media as a key enabler of collaboration and innovation – as a key influence on their organization. Outperformers are embracing new models of working that tap into the collective intelligence of an organization and its networks to devise new ideas and solutions for increased profitability and growth. (more…)
The first purely silicon oxide-based ‘Resistive RAM’ memory chip that can operate in ambient conditions– opening up the possibility of new super-fast memory – has been developed by researchers at UCL.
Resistive RAM (or ‘ReRAM’) memory chips are based on materials, most often oxides of metals, whose electrical resistance changes when a voltage is applied – and they “remember” this change even when the power is turned off.
ReRAM chips promise significantly greater memory storage than current technology, such as the Flash memory used on USB sticks, and require much less energy and space. (more…)
New approach is a promising first step toward the development of tiny devices that harvest electrical energy from everyday tasks
Imagine charging your phone as you walk, thanks to a paper-thin generator embedded in the sole of your shoe. This futuristic scenario is now a little closer to reality. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to generate power using harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity.
The scientists tested their approach by creating a generator that produces enough current to operate a small liquid-crystal display. It works by tapping a finger on a postage stamp-sized electrode coated with specially engineered viruses. The viruses convert the force of the tap into an electric charge. (more…)
New Find From Joint BioEnergy Institute Could Help Reduce Biofuel Production Costs
In the search for technology by which economically competitive biofuels can be produced from cellulosic biomass, the combination of sugar-fermenting microbes and ionic liquid solvents looks to be a winner save for one major problem: the ionic liquids used to make cellulosic biomass more digestible for microbes can also be toxic to them. A solution to this conundrum, however, may be in the offing.
Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a multi-institutional partnership led by Berkeley Lab, have identified a tropical rainforest microbe that can endure relatively high concentrations of an ionic liquid used to dissolve cellulosic biomass. The researchers have also determined how the microbe is able to do this, a discovery that holds broad implications beyond the production of advanced biofuels. (more…)
