A robotics company IN Utah have come up with a working "Iron man" suit, which is able to multiply a person's strength and endurance by up to 20 times when wearing it.

The 70kg mechanical suit has a computer "brain" that is able to sense the movement of the person wearing it, and then amplify those movements almost instantaneously through a series of hydraulic valves mimicking the tendons in the human body.

Megaboffins at the HP Labs in Palo Alto have conjured up something that was theorised back in 1971 (by Leon Chua at UC Berkeley), a fourth basic element of electronics: the memristor.

A memristor works by altering its resistance between two states (read like a 0 or a 1), and retains the state when powered down. However, they do this very fast, DRAM-fast.

This technology has the potential to provide the speed of DRAM with the storage ability of non-volatile memory, gradually replacing both.

Since RAM would effectively become non-volatile, the risk of data loss through power failure would become almost negligible.

This could also spell doom for HDD, DRAM and Optical disk tecnologies – one at a time - although there is no set timeframe for this technology to reach our computers.

On Friday, rumor spread fast that Toshiba was about to bail on HD DVD, following a string of unhappy news for the HD DVD camp, beginning with Netflix and Best Buy's decisions to throw their weight behind Blu-ray earlier in the week.

The loss of Warner Brothers demoralized the HD DVD camp, and when it was clear that deep price cuts weren't going to give HD DVD a second wind, the writing was on the wall.

Toshiba and its partners are concerned to show that they have plans that can minimize the financial damage resulting from the shutdown, presumably to keep shareholders happy. But the damaging announcements from Best Buy, Netflix and Wal-Mart have forced an acceleration of the company's plans.

The material, dubbed "Litrosphere," can cover a standard sheet of paper for a cost of about 35 cents, and comes in a variety of colors. It's also flexible, and can take the form of either paint or injection-molded plastic. The material is not affected by the heat or cold, can withstand 5,000 pounds, and stays on constantly.

According to the company's patent, the material is based on betavoltaics and uses the radioactive gas tritium as the power source. The beta particles from the tritium radiation can be safely contained by phosphor-coated microspheres. Tritium has a half-life of about 12 years.

"This has potential to save billions in energy costs world-wide," said Steve Stark, MPK engineer. "Litroenergy surpasses all known available lighting options for cost/durability/reliability and safety."

The technology behind 3-D printers isn't new. Rapid prototyping machines have existed in myriad forms since the early 1980s, but the pace at which new capabilities and printing materials are being added to the machines is astonishing, says Scott Summit, the co-founder of San Francisco-based industrial design firm Summit ID.

As the technology has evolved, 3-D printers are now capable of printing out fully functional finished products. For example, according to Summit, battleships and aircraft carriers now make extensive use of selective laser sintering (SLS) printers, which can "print out" materials like titanium, cobalt chromium and polyamide, to fabricate spare parts on the spot instead of carrying huge warehouses full of replacements.

"(3-D printers) are basically like the new car that landed in everybody's driveway," Summit concludes. "(Every designer) wants to try them out and see what they can do."

Storage vendors have been sieging the large business market with solid state drive offerings for years - but cost and capacity restrictions have mostly kept them at the gate.

Take BitMicro for instance, which this week unveiled a flash memory-based solid state drive with up to 1.6TB capacity. The company's E-Disk Altima, expected to ship in Q1 2008, will come in a 3.5-inch format and support 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel.

BitMicro says the Altima offers sustained rates of more than 230MB/s and upwards of 55,000 I/O operations per second. To compare, a fast disk drive will get about 400 I/O operations per second.

Bill Buzbee offered the first public demonstration of the open-source Minix OS — a cousin of Linux — running on his homebrew minicomputer, the Magic-1, at the Vintage Computer Festival in Mountain View, Calif. The Magic-1 minicomputer is built with 74-series TTL ICs using wire-wrap construction, and implements a homebrew, 8086-like ISA. Rather than using a commercial microprocessor, Buzbee created his own microcoded CPU that runs at 4.09 MHz, and is in the same ballpark as an old 8086 in performance and capabilities. The CPU has a 22-bit physical address bus and an 8-bit data bus.

The Railway Technical Research Institute in Kokubunji, Tokyo, has developed a streetcar powered by a lithium battery that can recharge in under a minute.

Powered by the onboard battery, the vehicle runs at a maximum speed of 40 kph for 15 kilometers and is capable of converting 70 percent of its deceleration energy into electricity, which it sends back to the battery.

The streetcar powered by a lithium battery has been designed to be barrier-free and has a low floor. According to the institute, it uses about 10 percent less power than existing streetcars.

Researchers have developed a low-cost, low-power computer memory that could put terabyte-sized thumb drives in consumers' pockets within a few years.

Thanks to a new technique for manipulating charged copper particles at the molecular scale, researchers at Arizona State University say their memory is, bit-for-bit, one-tenth the cost of -- and 1,000 times as energy-efficient as -- flash memory, the predominant memory technology in iPhones and other mobile devices.

PMC memory stores information in a fundamentally different way from flash. Instead of storing bits as an electronic charge, the technology creates nanowires from copper atoms the size of a virus to record binary ones and zeros.

Meet the fit-PC, a tiny 4.7 x 4.5 x 1.5-inch PC that only draws 5-watts, consuming in a day less power than a traditional PC consumes in one hour. By today's standards, the fit-PC has very little horsepower, which makes it apt for web browsing and light applications; today's games need not apply. Loyd Case over at ExtremeTech reviews the fit-PC and puts it through its paces, noting that performance is not this PC's strength, but rather its small size and price tag of $285.