By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, San Francisco
By 2015 more than 12 billion devices will be capable of connecting to 500 billion hours of TV and video content, says chip giant Intel.
It said its vision of TV everywhere will be more personal, social, ubiquitous and informative.
“TV is out of the box and off the wall,” Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, told BBC News.
“TV will remain at the centre of our lives and you will be able to watch what you want where you want.”
Mr Rattner said: …

By Mark Tutton
For CNN
LONDON, England (CNN) — Over the past 20 years, robotics have revolutionized surgery, and new innovations are continuing to push the boundaries of medicine.
Mike Rustic, senior lecturer at the mechanical engineering department at Imperial College, London, says machines such as the “da Vinci” system have had a huge impact on surgery.
The “da Vinci” first appeared in 1991 and lets surgeons carry out keyhole surgery remotely, allowing them to control robot arms from a console that also provides a three-dimensional image of the proceedings.
While the “da Vinci” …

By Brandon Keim
(WIRED) — Scientists are one step closer to knowing what you’ve seen by reading your mind.
Having modeled how images are represented in the brain, the researchers translated recorded patterns of neural activity into pictures of what test subjects had seen.
Though practical applications are decades away, the research could someday lead to dream-readers and thought-controlled computers.
“It’s what you would actually use if you were going to build a functional brain-reading device,” said Jack Gallant, a University of California, Berkeley neuroscientist.
The research, led by Gallant and Berkeley postdoctoral researcher …

Elizabeth Landau
Forgot to charge your cell phone last night? Imagine that you could power it by walking. Weirder still, you might be able to just spray a new battery on.
These concepts are being developed by two leading nanotechnology researchers who are developing cleaner, more efficient ways of delivering electrical power. In working toward making these ideas realities, they are making use of structures that are 100 nanometers or smaller, where one nanometer is a billionth of a meter.
“[The nanoscale] can make the components small, sensitive and high-performance,” said Zhong Lin …

By John D. Sutter
Oliver Yeh is the kind of guy who cooks up ideas so kooky, so out-of-this-world, that even his fellow MIT students tend to roll their eyes when they hear them.
But that never stops him.
His latest concept — to launch a camera into near-space using a weather balloon, a cell phone, hand warmers and a drink cooler — fell flat when he sent out an e-mail message to dozens of his classmates, asking for help.
Unfazed, Yeh managed to find one friend willing to chip in. And on September …

How a Taiwanese firm became one of the world’s fastest-growing chipmakers
MOST technology firms fall into one of two brackets: those that sell individual components, such as Intel, a chip giant, and those that offer finished products, such as Apple of iPhone fame. MediaTek sits somewhere in between: it sells most of the innards of mobile phones in a single package, but not the phones themselves—a strategy that has made it one of the world’s fastest-growing chipmakers. On August 4th it said its second-quarter profits were 80% higher than a year …

Two novel approaches to making electricity from sunlight
ISRAEL is a country with plenty of sunshine, lots of sand and quite a few clever physicists and chemists. Put these together—having first extracted the oxygen from the sand, to leave pure silicon—and you have the ingredients for an innovative solar-power industry. Shining sunlight onto silicon is the most direct way of turning it into electricity (the light knocks electrons free from the silicon atoms), but it is also the most expensive. The scientists are what you need to make the process cheaper. …

(WIRED) — The Obama Administration will lend Tesla Motors $465 million to build an electric sedan and the battery packs needed to propel it. It’s one of three loans totaling almost $8 billion that the Department of Energy awarded Tuesday to spur the development of fuel-efficient vehicles.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that the Department of Energy is also lending $5.9 billion to Ford to retool factories in five states. Nissan will receive $1.6 billion to refurbish a factory in Tennessee to produce electric cars.
The loans are the first awarded under …

ISLAMABAD: Despite the fact that dumping old computers in developing countries has been declared as violation of international law, Pakistan was being used as dumping ground for over 50,000 tons of e-waste that hurts local industry and also creates environmental and health hazards.
Despite being a signatory to the Basel Convention that restricted importing used/old computers, more than 500,000 used computers are finding ways into Pakistani computer market each year.
These concerns were voiced at a discussion ‘Cost effective or technology defective’ held here on Tuesday.
The speakers from both public and private …

Netbooks and the New Open Source Movement Converts
Saad Sarwar Muhammad
The Open Source Movement (OSM) has come a long way since the inception of the concept by computer geeks and programmers as an alternative to proprietary software where intellectual property rights are not impugned with the use and free distribution of the software. The virtual monopolization of system software by Microsoft led these revolutionaries to alter the market space through the introduction of Linux, an Open Source system software. The software also proved more reliable as compared to Microsoft Windows with …