Location based services are now commonplace and we have started to use them seamlessly, no longer realising they are there. GPS is what provides the magic: the Global Positioning System leverages on the time it takes to signals to travel from a number of satellites (at least three, better if more) orbiting …

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a system that can scan your iris from 40 feet away and use it to recognise you.  So far iris based recognition required a scan by a device placed a few cm from your eye. With the new system a camera in a department store …

Just run onto an interesting "flash back" article on the evolution of storage and processing celebrating the 50 years of the Moore’s Law. Although it does not contain anything new, it is about history not about the future, seeing all the past flowing by in just two minutes (the time it took …

I have been seeing in these last 30 years technology advancement that defied my belief, robots that perform surgery, cars driving themselves, ubiquitous telecommunications, instantaneous access to world information, smart materials that regain their shape and so on. I dreamed about these things when I was young but that was science …

Researchers at Honeywell International and Georgia Tech Research Institute seem to have solved the problem of creating a chip that can trap ions to be manipulated by laser beams. The construction of a quantum computer involves managing ions and this requires the creation of electromagnetic fields that in terms requires electrodes at the …

Researchers at the University of Houston have found a way to create a very cheap (3 cents) lens that can be easily attached to your smartphone camera just by sticking it on the lens of the camera. The lens is made of polydimethylsiloxane (plastic…), PDMS,  and is produced using an ink-jet like printer. …

3D printing allows for accurate creation of objects that would close to impossible to create in other ways. Doctors at the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital have used 3D printing to save three children from tracheobronchomalacia, a condition that makes breathing impossible because the airways leading to the lungs collapse blocking …

The brain, and not just ours, has always been seen as a tremendously complex machine. As we improve our ways to look at it we get more and more information on its working, however rather than shedding light on the way it actually manages to perform all its diverse activities …

Printed electronics is old story: it has been created several years ago and we have quite a number of applications for it. It is cheap and easy to manufacture requiring basically an ink-jet printer. The key is the ink: it has to be a solution that once printed can provide …

We have a number of very accurate 3D scanning products that are used every day, as an example by museums to make 3D copies of statues.  They have two characteristics: 3D scanning is slow and expensive. It is ok for this sort of application but it does not work for …