Researchers are in a race against increasingly dense and powerful laptops that will melt themselves if they get much hotter. One possible solution involves putting spin on electrons to record and process information, says Jairo Sinova, a Texas A&M University physics professor, who has joined forces with researchers from Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory, the Institute of Physics ASCR, University of Cambridge and University of Nottingham. Read more
A new iPhone 3GS app that turns the mobile device into an English-Spanish/Spanish-English speech translator is the brainchild of Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Professor Alex Waibel. The application is being sold via Jibbigo, a company launched by Waibel.
CMU says the app has a vocabulary of about 40,000 words and is ideal for world travelers and medical doctors. Speak a couple of sentences intothe phone and it spits back an audible translation. Read more
The University of Florida, Cornell University and a handful of other schools have been awarded $12.2 million to build a social/collaborative network for scientists and researchers. The idea is to make it easier to find research and like-minded researchers in an effort to speed new discoveries.
The project, funded via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, will initially take of the form of networks within each of the 7 founding schools but within two years could expand across the country. Eventually, the network will go worldwide, grant recipients hope. Read more
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Intel Labs Pittsburgh have built an experimental energy-efficient computing cluster that combines flash memory and the sort of processors used in netbooks. Their name for it? Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes (FAWN). Read more
Google's "doodle" Wednesday on its search home page is a bar code that presumably translates into the word "Google". Read more
Charles Kao, whose work in the 1960s laid the foundation for today's long-distance fiber-optic networks, has won a share of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics. Read more
Researchers this week published a paper describing how they broke Vanish, a secure communications system prototype out of the University of Washington that generated lots of buzz when introduced over the summer for its ability to make data self-destruct. Read more
Google Wave has gotten a ton of attention this week in the Read more
AT&T Labs-Research, Yahoo Research and other members of the Bellkor's Pragmatic Chaos team are celebrating their win in the 3-year-long Netflix Prize contest. Read more
A computer algorithm developed at the University of Washington has been used to create a digital reconstruction of Rome, including landmarks like the Colosseum. Eventually, the technology could find applications in everything from architecture to building video games. Read more
Two University of California, Berkeley professors have come up with a good idea for a blog: It focuses on the top 10 pending cyberlaw cases, including those involving Google Books, net neutrality, warrentless wiretapping and Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The copyright case vs. Google over Google Books is No. 1 on their list. Read more
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates will share words of wisdom on Sept. 22 at the opening ceremony for a computer science center bearing his name at Carnegie Mellon University, the home of the nation's first such department in 1965. Read more
The National Science Foundation has pledged $400,000 over five years to fund research into mobile application management at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. The Mobile Application Management project is led by Jeannie Albrecht, an assistant professor of computer science who has background working on the GENI research network, and will involve creation of a software toolkit that could help mobile apps developers better deal with everything from device configuration to tracking errors. Read more
The Ethernet Alliance has extended an open invite to those interested in attending its all-day Technology Exploration Forum on 40G and 100G Ethernet taking place in Santa Clara on Sept. 15. Read more
University of California at San Diego researchers Tuesday are presenting a paper describing software they say they say could make data center networks much more scalable. Read more
We've written about Carnegie Mellon researchers raising Charles Darwin from the dead, building a robo-tank and developing a gigapixel camera for the masses. Read more
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded more than $1 million to Colorado State University professors tasked with making computer systems and networks robust enough to handle everything from lightning strikes to terrorist attacks.
The engineering professors, whose grant comes via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, will devise models and algorithms focused on resource management and gauging system failure probability. Read more
I'm a sucker for research projects with catchy names and a slew of them will be discussed at next week's Usenix Security Symposium in Montreal. Here's a sampler:
Gazelle Read more
Google Research is joining forces with Harvard, Georgia Tech, MIT and a handful of other schools this fall in an attempt to bring mobile application development into basic computing courses. Google wants to show off just how easy it is to build applications, from social networking programs to location-based systems, using platforms such as Android, even for those not concentrating in computer science.
Think of the annual Pwnie Awards delivered at the Black Hat conference as a geek version of athe Oscars - if they were combined with the tongue-in-cheek Razzies that celebrate the worst of Hollywood.
10 networkiest movies of all time
Twitter, Linux and Red Hat were among honorees that didn't go unscathed this time around. Read more
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