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Sensors keep evolving extending their range of application. One area where lot of work is going on is the one of body sensors to track our health status. They can be used to monitor pathological conditions, the body reaction to a cure or to a truing session. In particular a lot …

Scientists are at work, both in Europe and in the US, to understand the Brain. There are different approaches to do that, and there is also a lot of debate on the validity of each, as there were (and still are) many on the kind of knowledge that can be …

Ever heard of plant nanobionics? Neither had I. I stumbled on it reading a report by MIT Technology Review on Bionic Plants. A team of researchers at MIT have managed to boost the capability to harvest light and producing electrons by 30% by embedding carbon nanotube in the chloroplasts. Additionally, they have shown how it …

Yesterday I had the opportunity of visiting Wuxi, China, and meeting with several Telecommunications Companies, with a few industries and representatives of the Jiangnan University, and visiting the Research Centre on Internet of Things, 2,000 researchers strong.  I learnt that the Chinese Government has decided in 2009 to appoint Wuxi as the …

We have available an amazing transportation capacity through optical fibre, trillions of bits per second and more. The limits are actually far higher but we are constrained by the electronic-photonic transformation process. Today electronics can reach 40 Gbps in the conversion from electrons through photons via a laser and these laser are, …

Image recognition keeps making progress. Face recognition is already a commodity we find on mass market point and shoot camera that recognise the faces and detect when a smile appear to take the picture. We have a number of automatic tagging application that looking at certain ratio among facial characteristics …

We usually have a pretty good idea on what we are thinking, just because we are thinking! However, what we perceive is just a fraction of the whole story that is going on in the hundred billion neurones in our brain. Most of what goes on is actually disregarded like …

The US Department of Energy has issued a directive to have systems able to store hydrogen in cars at a density of 5.5% in weight by 2017 and at 7.5% in 2020. As we know hydrogen is very light (55 times lighter than iron) and therefore creating a storage system that …

Happy Easter to all, to those who celebrate it and to those who don’t!  In the English speaking Countries the Easter Egg is sometime substituted, or flanked, by the Easter Bunny (and Easter has its English roots in the goddess Eostra, goddess of fertility and Spring). I am presently in Hong …

Long, long time ago I did my post doc in elementary particle physics and quantum properties where on the menu. Still, I remember I had problem in really understanding quantum properties and I used to console myself with the words of Niels Bohr: "If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, …