Dr. Jonathan Spanier from Drexel University has come up with a novel way to greatly increase data storage density: water. Specifically, they propose using hydroxyl ions to stabilize minute ferroelectric wires. These wires could be many times smaller than what is possible today, enabling data densities in the neighborhood of 12-13 PB per cubic centimeter. While there are still many problems to be resolved before drives using these can be manufactured this technology does seem promising. For one thing, it would be non-volatile, but could apparently be made to act as RAM. The fact that this is coming out of a university gives me hope that this technology won't turn out to be just so much vapor.

Facing problems in its efforts to train insects or build robots that can mimic their flying abilities, the U.S. military now wants to develop "insect cyborgs" that can go where its soldiers cannot.

The Pentagon is seeking applications from researchers to help them develop technology that can be implanted into living insects to control their movement and transmit video or other sensory data back to their handlers.

In an announcement posted on government Web sites last week, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, says it is seeking "innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect cyborgs," by implanting tiny devices into insect bodies while the animals are in their pupal stage.

The objective is to transform the insects into "predictable devices that can be used for various micro-UAV missions requiring unobtrusive entry into areas inaccessible or hostile to humans."

An outfit which is experimenting with using huge high definition tellies to simulate a 3d virtual environment, thinks that it is getting closer to creating a Star Trek style holodeck.

Holodek’s test site has 42 gaming stations with PCs and high definition screens ranging in size from 17 inches (43cm) to 20 feet wide and 12 feet high.

However it has also built something called the sphere, which is 20 feet in diameter and eventually will offer a 360° view. It works a bit like a flight simulator.

Fewls, don't they realise that if something ever went wrong on a Starship, it was usually as a direct result of a sodded up holodeck. The Enterprise and Voyager would have had far less problems if they had pulled the plug on the thing.

Cleanliness, efficiency, compactness, cool-factor... for a variety of reasons, automatic doors have become a standard feature of Japanese shops. While the typical sliding star-trek style design has proven itself, the tanaka auto door aims to improve upon a good concept. This new design entails strips equipped with infrared sensors that open to the approximate shape of the person or object passing through, minimizing entry of dust, pollen, and bugs while keeping precious air-conditioning in. The technology for the new design seems to be in it's infancy, but Japan has proven once again that it’s a least 10 years ahead of everyone else.

Ian Pearson, head of the futurology at BT told the Observer that such technology will be possible for the very rich in about 50 or so years. The rest of us will have to wait, but of course we will have more interesting lives to record.

He said that will mean that when you die it's not a major career problem, you just work from inside the computer rather than having to use a monitor. His rationale is that Sony's new PlayStation 3 is 35 times more powerful than the model it replaced, and in terms of processing is "one per cent as powerful as a human brain".

Pearson thinks that the next computing goal would be replicating consciousness. His crystal ball also forecasts that computer systems will be able to feel emotions so that aeroplanes will be programmed to be more terrified of crashing than their passengers, meaning they would do whatever possible to stay airborne.

In popular science fiction, the power of invisibility is readily apparent. Star Trek fans, for example, know that the devious Romulans could make their spaceships suddenly disappear.

Electronic engineers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia are researching a device they say could make objects "nearly invisible to an observer." The contrivance works by preventing light from bouncing off the surface of an object, causing the object to appear so small it all but disappears.

The concept is based on a "plasmonic cover," which is a means to prevent light from scattering. (It is light bouncing off an object that makes it visible to an observer).

John Pendry, the Imperial College physicist, said that light-shielding covers would have to be customized to match the properties of each and every object they hide.

Have you ever dream of 100 terabyte of data per 3.5-inch disk? New patented innovation nanotechnology from Michael E. Thomas, president of Colossal Storage Corporation, makes it real.

The expected cost of the Atomic Holographic DVR disc drive will be from $570 to $750 with the replacement discs for $45.

One 10 terabyte to 100 terabyte 3.5 in FEdisk would be EQUAL to a 10,000 to 100,000 Gigabyte disk drive. That's greater 1,000 times any State of the Art hard disk technology with 100 Gigabytes on one disk. 2 EXABYTES of NEW data is generated every year world wide, and growing.

"In 1974 I was making 5 Megabyte disk packs - the biggest at that time in the world. At the same time, IBM, Burroughs, Honeywell, and other Computer professionals said no one would ever need that much storage," says Michael. "In 1989 Bill Gates (the Chairman of Microsoft) said that the personal computer would never need more than 256 Kbytes of cache memory and 40 megabytes of hard drive storage. Today's PC has on average 64 megabytes of cache and 20 to 60 gigabyte hard drives. The need for new storage technology is evident to only to those having backgrounds in data storage."

The concept of an atomic or molecular switch by "Photon/Laser Induced Electric Field Poling" existed. By using UV photons of lesser quantum energy it was possible to use diffraction and interference from the binary states of the molecule.

Inventors usually try to come up with things that will change people's lives. But Robert Barrows is hoping to make an impact after their death. He is patenting video-equipped tombstones to let cemetery visitors watch messages from the dead.

Barrows, of Burlingame, California, has filed a patent application for a hollow headstone fitted with a flat LCD touch screen (US 2004/85337). It also houses a computer with a hard disc or microchip memory that allows the deceased to speak from the grave through a video message.

Barrows is not first to come up with an electronically enhanced tombstone. Scott Mindrum, president of Making Everlasting Memories in Cincinnati, Ohio - which hosts memorial tributes on the internet - has a patent on a gravestone that displays a collection of the deceased's photographs, alongside tributes from their friends.

The Recording Industry Association of America has discovered that digital radio broadcasts can be copied and redistributed over the Internet, and so it is pushing the FCC to adopt an audio broadcast flag, which would likely prevent users from sending copyrighted radio programs over the Internet. But it could also hamstring other legitimate uses by preventing a digital radio program from leaving the device on which it was recorded. The FCC has initiated a notice of inquiry (pdf), typically a step leading to formal rule-making. The public may submit comments to the FCC between June 16 and July 16. A lobbyist friend sent me copies of the private correspondence on the subject between RIAA president Cary Sherman and Consumer Electronics Association president Gary Shapiro, and Cryptome just posted them here (pdf) and here (pdf). Yes, they're legit. Mindjack just posted an article I wrote on the subject titled, 'Will Digital Radio Be Napsterized?

The Defense Sciences Office of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is looking for a few good proposals to exploit soldiers in ways Rommel and Tojo could only have dreamed of.

"The vision for the Metabolic Dominance Program is to develop novel strategies that exploit and control the mechanisms of energy production, metabolism, and utilization during short periods of deployment requiring unprecedented levels of physical demand. The ultimate goal is to enable superior physical and physiological performance by controlling energy metabolism on demand," DARPA explains.

Rather, DARPA is interested in forcing soldiers' bodies to metabolize their own fat reserves, eliminating the need for food. It would like to overclock muscle mitochondria, increasing output beyond levels that the skeleton can withstand. It would like to suppress the painful signs of fatigue, so that soldiers can be pushed beyond the limits of human endurance without realizing it, at least until something breaks.