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 …

America is poised to loosen its control over cyberspace
FORTY years ago this month American academics sent the first message over the ARPANET, a military network that was the precursor of today’s internet. A legacy of those efforts is that the American government continues to control the internet’s underlying technology—notably the system of allocating addresses. This is about to change, albeit slightly.
For the past decade America has delegated some of its authority over the internet to a non-profit organisation called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)—an arrangement other …

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 …

The internet giant seeks new ways to foster innovation
FEW companies are as creative as Google, which serves up innovations almost as fast as its popular search-engine serves up results. This week the firm unveiled a new version of its Chrome web browser and launched Fast Flip, which lets users scroll through the contents of an online newspaper in much the same way that they leaf through its pages in print. On September 30th the company will roll out another fledgling product, Google Wave, for a test involving some 100,000 people. …

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 …

By Maggie Shiels
Mobile providers have said that US proposals to ensure all traffic on the internet is treated equally should not be applied to wireless traffic.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants rules to prevent providers blocking or slowing down bandwidth-heavy usage such as streaming video.
Providers claim a two-tiered system is essential for the future vitality of the net.
Mobile operators said any regulation would damage innovation.
FCC chairman Julius Genachowski said doing nothing was not an option.
In his first major speech since his appointment earlier in the summer, he told an …