The New Scientist, examines the efforts to reduce ship drag using tiny bubbles, slippery polymers and trapped sheets of air. As a ship moves through water it encounters three types of drag: wave drag, pressure drag and frictional drag. Wave resistance is mainly a problem at high speed, and can be minimised with a carefully …
Swarmanoids are a follow up to swarmbots Will initially have eye-bots, hand-bots and foot-bots Swarm robotics is inspired by the social insect metaphor, and emphasises aspects such as decentralisation of control, limited communication abilities among robots, use of local information, emergence of global behaviour, and robustness. Most current studies in swarm robotic systems have focused …
The US army has some small funding for a Slingatron. Initial studies have demonstrated the fundamental feasibility of the Slingatron concept. This program will explore the concept’s bounding limits and seek to develop uses for the technology within those limits. Included in this program will be studies of the key technologies that will allow the …
Springer and the Nano Research Society have announced a new partnership to publish Nanoscale Research Letters (NRL), which will be the first nanotechnology journal from a major commercial publisher to publish articles with open access. Look for it at springerlink July 2006 Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger …
In Dec, 2005, Fujitsu announced that they were able to connect carbon nanotube bumps to the miniature electrode of a high power transistor. Carbon nanotubes have thermal conductivity of 1400W/(m-K) – a level much higher than that of metal(4), and because it is possible to connect carbon nanotube-based bumps very near to the heat-generating miniature …