Ferroelectric Transistor Memory Could run on 99 Percent Less Power Than Flash

We've been keeping an optimistic eye on the progress of Ferroelectric Random Access Memory (FeRAM) for a few years now, not least because it offers the tantalizing promise of 1.6GB/s read and write speeds and crazy data densities. But researchers at Purdue University reckon we've been looking in the wrong place this whole time: the real action is with their development of FeTRAM, which adds an all-important 'T' for 'Transistor'. Made by combining silicon nanowires with a ferroelectric polymer, Purdue's material holds onto its 0 or 1 polarity even after being read, whereas readouts from capacitor-based FeRAM are destructive. Although still at the experimental stage, this new type of memory could boost speeds while also reducing power consumption by 99 percent. Quick, somebody file a patent. Oh, they already did.

 

 

YouTube to Launch ‘Channels’ That Are Like TV Channels

Our favorite Internet place for watching the stars of tomorrow and the stars of yesterday is reportedly preparing to launch at least a dozen new channels in 2012. Unlike Vevo and other existing "channels" that offer whatever unscheduled clips, these new channels will be just like TV channels, with scheduled programs and, one hopes, seemingly endless commercial breaks. Apparently Google, which owns YouTube, wants to pull folks away from their televisions and toward their computer screens? As long as people are staring at some kind of screen, everything will be okay.

Where Were You When Google Was Born 13 Years Ago Today?

Anyone notice the party that is going on at Google's website today? In case you forgot, September 27th is the date Google chose for their birthday.

It's an arbitrary date selected in 2005 to celebrate Google's September milestones. Google first registered Google.com on September 15, 1997 and the company was incorporated on September 7, 1998. Instead of either one of those two dates, Google selected the 27th because they're Google and they can.

It's hard to believe the search engine is now officially entering the troubled teens.

 

 

The iPhone 5 Event Is Officially October 4th

Well, we pretty much knew it already, but now it's Super Apple Official: the next iPhone will show up on Tuesday, October 4th at Apple HQ.

It's a nice looking invitation, ain't it? The icons are perfect: the date is the date, of course, the Maps icon is where to show up (Apple's campus), the clock icon provides the time, (10 AM PST), and the phone icon? That, paired with "Let's talkiPhone" might be a clue that Assistant—Apple's rumored talk-control iOS feature—is going to take a big chunk of the spotlight. We'll see! Start saving your pennies—it could be on shelves only a couple weeks later.

 

 

T-Mobile reveals HTC Amaze 4G

Europe may be enjoying the Sensation XE, but today at Mobilize, T-Mobile's announced that it's getting the exclusive on HTC's Amaze 4G ($259.99 on a two-year contract), while also confirming the hardware whispers. With its 4.3-inch qHD screen and 1.5GHz dual-core CPU, it's one of the first smartphones able to connect to T-Mobile's upgraded 4G (HSPA+ 42Mbps) network and is the first HTC phone featuring an NFC chip.

Pushing its photography credentials, the Amaze 4G's eight megapixel shooter can record 1080p video, with a dedicated camera button (and even a direct-to-camcorder button) to make the most of the handset's promised "zero shutter lag." Its also got that backlit sensor found in its sibling, the myTouch 4G Slide. On the software side, it's running Android 2.3.4, coated in the inevitable Sense veneer and supporting the likes of HTC Watch and T-Mobile TV. Will it be enough to steal the network's king of Android crown away from the Galaxy S II when it ships October 12th? 

 

 

Fujitsu-Toshiba Unveils Waterproof Phone With 13 Megapixel CMOS Sensor

Toshiba may be bowing out of its mobile joint venture with Fujitsu, but not without bestowing this Gingerbread-munching flamingo upon the Japanese market. The Wimax-enabled Arrows Z ISW11F, unveiled today by Japan's KDDI au, is juiced by a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, sports a 4.3-inch 1280 x 720 LCD and, most notably, rocks a 13 megapixel CMOS sensor. It also features a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera and supports 1080p video, along with your standard suite of 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities. Oh, and to top it all off, it's waterproof, too. No word yet on pricing, but KDDI plans to bring this bubblegum to the Japanese market sometime in November.

Samsung's Omnia W: Mango, 3.7-inch Super AMOLED, 1.4GHZ processor

Samsung just took the wraps off its Omnia W, which looks like a non-US variant of the Focus Flash. The handset will debut in Italy and start spreading across the Old World and Latin America from next month. It'll sport Windows Phone 7.5 out of the box, a 3.7-inch 800x480 Super AMOLED display, 1.4GHz processor, VGA webcam on the front and rear 5MP shooter with 720p video recording. Iit'll go head-to-head with HTC's 3.8-inch Radar when the War of the Mangoes finally kicks off.

 

 

Facebook Cookie Tracks Users Even When They’re Logged Out

It's no secret that Facebook and privacy have had some issues. Take today, for example. Thanks to a modified cookie, Facebook knows where you are online—even when you're not logged into Facebook.

So says hacker Nik Cubrilovic anyway, after he discovered during a series of tests that Facebook alters its tracking cookie code the moment you log out, instead of deleting them. Then, when a user being tracked in this manner heads to a web site that contains a Facebook button or widget, the browser continues to send "personally identifiable information" back to Facebook.

"With my browser logged out of Facebook, whenever I visit any page with a Facebook like button, or share button, or any other widget, the information, including my account ID, is still being sent to Facebook," Cubrilovic wrote in a blog post describing the find today. More here.

 

 

eT-shirt From Spain Looks After Your Heart

Spain -- the land of pasión, jamón ibérico and flamenco is throwing a stylish solución towards themedical community's way. Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid have created an intelligent eT-shirt (looks more like a tank top to us) for biomonitoring of hospital patients. The wearable, washable chaleco is embedded with electrodes that monitor its wearer's vitals, and a removable thermometer and accelerometer for the collection of temperature and positioning data. A separate in-pocket GPS dongle is also used to locate individuals "within a two-meter margin of error," but the team plans to incorporate this localizer directly into the shirt in future iterations. Tested at the Cardiology unit of Madrid's Hospital Universitario La Paz, the collaborative LOBIN (Locating & Biomonitoring by means of Wireless Networks in Hospitals) project prototype could help reduce in-patient stays, delivering SMS alerts to off-site, connected medical staffs. No word on whether this'll be offered in S, M, L or XL, but hey, at least that black is slimming. ¿Hablas español?

 

 

DNA Proves Your Fancy Suit Isn’t a Fake

Wool from Yorkshire in Northern England is so fabulous that bad guys want to counterfeit it. So wool merchants are shooting it up with proprietary DNA to prove it's the real thing. Applied DNA Sciences provides the anti-counterfeiting service, which involves a proprietary method of injecting the fabric with a unique botanical DNA during manufacturing.

The Huddersfield, UK Textile Centre of Excellence is coordinating the effort to get wool merchants on board with the anti-counterfeiting effort. It's incumbent upon individual wool-purveyors to insert the DNA into their wool. The Center of Excellence has installed a forensic lab to analyze company's woolens and give its stamp of approval. So far participating companies include Dormeuil, Taylor and Lodge, and Holland and Sherry, among others, which supply fabric to some of the fanciest designers around the world including Duncan Quinn and Tom Ford, who made Daniel Craig's suits for Quantum of Solace .

Applied DNA Sciences has sold similar programs to Supima cotton, the wine industry, electronics manufacturers and law enforcement.

 

 

How Steve Jobs Ruined Comics

Before the iPhone, "This image would clearly be understood without the voice balloon, or the character's open mouth," says cartoonist Tom Pappalardo, who jokes that Steve Jobs ruined comics.

It's kind of cool to read comics on the iPad, but Apple's shiny gadgets have wreaked havoc on how the people who create those comics tell their stories. After the cartoonist realized that drawing newfangled devices presented new problems for explaining what was happening in comics panels, he grabbed a sketchpad and started to collect his thoughts. What resulted was a series of panels he put in a blog post titled "Cartooning vs. Technology: How Steve Jobs Ruined Comics."

It's a smart and funny read, but the 37-year-old graphic designer and author of weekly web comic The Optimist said he hopes it's understood he meant no disrespect to Jobs himself, or Apple's products.

"As devices get smaller and feature less exterior detail, more overt context and visual cues need to be provided by the artist/writer to explain what the device is," Pappalardo said in an e-mail to Wired.com. "I think Steve Jobs is responsible for the creation of beautiful, wonderfully refined objects (the title of my blog post is hopefully read with tongue firmly in cheek)."

Pappalardo's panels don't target just Apple devices - Bluetooth headsets and giant flat-screen TVs are also up for discussion. Throughout, he addresses an interesting problem. In a medium built entirely around flat visuals, it is pretty hard to figure out how one square slab (an iPhone) can be differentiated from another (an electric shaver). More here.

 

 

Microsoft Patents Modular Windows Phone with Swappable Batteries, Keyboard, and Gamepad

We've seen slider phones with speakers, gamepads, and of course, the standard keypad -- but what if you want to swap out your slider accessory for something new? A new patent from Microsoft is exploring the possibility, showing off a concept smartphone with a sliding modular bay. Tired of that keyboard? Replace it with a gamepad, or a life-giving battery pack. According to the patent claims, some of the modular components would even function wirelessly, citing a touchscreen module which doubles as a wireless handset or a media remote.

 

 

NASA’s Satellite Crashes In the Pacific Ocean

The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite that has been befuddling NASA scientists with its unpredictable reentry path has finally fallen back to Earth. We... just don't know where yet exactly. But you're safe to look up now.

According to NASA, the satellite penetrated the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean between 11:23 p.m. and 1:09 a.m. last night, making it likely that it's floating out in open water somewhere. As expected, most of the 20-year-old, 12,500 pound satellite probably burned up upon reentry. It's a wonderful the send off, too. The UARS was launched in September 1991 as part of a mission with the just-decommissioned Space Shuttle Discovery. It measured ozone and chemical levels in our atmosphere until 2005, when the Bush administration pulled the plug on it.

And now it's home. It must have been quite the light show. The Christian Science Monitor reports that debris fell over Okotoks, Canada late last night. No one was hurt. Also, people from Maui all the way out to Florida report having seen the metal debris burn up in the night sky.

 

 

Scientists Design A Magnetic Cloaking Device

Scientists from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona designed a magnetic cloak that'll both shield an object from an outside magnetic field and prevent an internal one from leaking out. It's an antimagnet and it'll have various military and medical applications.

The antimagnet uses a superconducting material that blocks the internal magnetic field of an object and several dampening layers to block the effect of the superconductor on the external magnetic field. Sounds complicated, and it is, but it could save your life some day.

Take, for example, a person with a pacemaker who needs an MRI. The magnetic field of the MRI would damage the pacemaker and potentially harm the patient. Likewise, the pacemaker's metal would interfere with the MRI's magnetic field and throw off the machine's results. A magnetic cloak could potentially negate these effects and let patients with a pacemaker receive a successful MRI scan.

It would also work to protect military ships from mines that detonate when they detect a magnetic field. If the magnetic field is cloaked, then the mines can't detect it and there's no devastating explosion.

The cloaking technology is in the design stage and will move into production so it can be tested in the real world.

 

 

Heads up! Space Junk Falling to Earth

There's no need to get too worked up about it, but you may want to keep an eye on the sky for the next day or so, just in case. NASA says the odds of a person getting hit by a piece of space debris is 1 in 3,200.

A U.S. research satellite is expected to plummet back to Earth sometime tomorrow and although much of the bus-sized satellite will burn up upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, about 26 significant-sized chunks are expected to remain.

"There is a lot of space junk out there and continually there are satellites and other pieces of space junk that are entering Earth's atmosphere," she says, adding that a piece of this size returns to Earth about once a year.

NASA's website states there have been no confirmed reports of injury or significant property damage due to falling satellites thus far. An Oklahoma woman was apparently hit on the shoulder by a small piece of a rocket in 1997, but was not hurt.

NASA says there are about 21,000 pieces of "orbital debris" - man-made objects in orbit which serve no useful purpose - that are larger than 10 centimetres (four inches). It estimates there are about 500,000 pieces of space junk sized between one and 10 centimetres (0.4 and four inches) and probably tens of millions that are smaller than one centimetre (0.4 inches).

Since the space program started, about one piece of space junk falls to Earth each day. NASA predicts the 26 pieces of space junk expected to hit the Earth from this satellite will have a combined weight of 532 kilograms (1,173 pounds), the largest of which is expected to weigh 158 kilograms (348 pounds).

"You might expect there to be some damage if (a piece) fell on some property. It would probably damage it significantly,"

Given that, it would be nice to know if one should stay inside tomorrow or not, but not only is it difficult to predict the time the satellite debris will land, it's pretty well impossible to pinpoint with any accuracy where it will land.

"If there was a trajectory that this hunk of metal was travelling through and it was unimpeded, then we would be able to predict very well (where it will land), but there are all sorts of influences it may experience," Edwards says, including wind.

NASA expects the chunks will all land within 800 kilometres (500 miles) of each other - it's just not quite sure where that 800-kilometre stretch will be. Even within about two hours of the expected re-entry time, the best it will be able to do is predict within about 12,000 kilometres (7,500 miles) of the landing point.

In other words, if you happen to get hit by a piece of the landing satellite, you are very, very unlucky indeed. This particular satellite was launched in 1991, but was decommissioned in 2005.

 

 

In-app Purchasing Fail on iTunes is Starting to Bug Developers

In-app purchases via iTunes have apparently been failing in a big way for the last ten hours and app creators who depend on this heavily taxed income are getting antsy. The problem may be connected to fake purchase receipts getting into the system. Whatever the cause, developers are "losing lots of sales" for apps that use receipt verification and is "threatening to more-or-less take down the entire IAP ecosystem." Seeing as Apple insists on this being the only route for in-app purchasing, they'd better fix it pretty darned quick.

 

 

UK Gets First Hydrogen Refueling Station

UK-based treehuggers can bust out the internet high fives now. Merry ol' Swindon just got the British isles' first ever commercial hydrogen refueling station. Part of a collaborative effort between industrial gas company BOC (which built and maintains the pumps), the Forward Swindon economic initiative and Honda, owners can roll their clean energy machines into the automaker's manufacturing lot for a fill-up.

BOC's hoping the experience, which reportedly looks and functions much like a traditional gas station, will serve as an example of the private - public partnerships required to rollout infrastructure for alternative energy adoption. So, it's good news for the fuel cell-equipped handful of you cruising about Swindon town, or just passing through on a 'round the world tour.

 

 

You Can Test Drive a Bionic Hand Without Actually Losing Your Hand

Bionics are an amazing technology that most of us will hopefully never have to use. But being able to move a robot hand with your brain is incredibly cool, and Touch Bionics' new Virtu-LIMB lets you try a bionic hand without "installing" it.

Virtu-limb works with either the i-LIMB Ultra—the update to the really awesome i-LIMB—or with some custom software that renders the hand's actions in real time. It works by gathering the same myoelectric signals that the bionic limb would normally gather from a patient, but routing it through a computer instead of a surgically attached limb.

The test drive feature has a few uses beyond just being a cool toy for nerdboys playing Terminator. It's good for helping determine which muscles are best suited to sending the prostheses myoelectric signals and helping to train patients to control muscle signals. And it can also be used by prospective patients before having the limb added. It's absolutely a really great technology, but I'm just wondering how long until some intrepid nerd tries it out and decides to replace a fully functional hand. More here.

 

 

Two Megapixel Mini-Camera Measures in at Under a Cubic Inch

Remember that one-inch Chobi Cam One spotted in Japan earlier this year? Well, its tiny self has now reappeared on US shores, ready to be lost in a sofa or coat pocket near you. Unimaginatively titled "The World's Smallest Camera," it's priced at $99.95 and packs a petite, two megapixel autofocus sensor capable of recording VGA video. Resembling a Lego Man's DSLR, storage is done on a microSD card, though you're more likely to run out of battery juice than space -- the battery will give a maximum of 30 minutes use from one hour's charge. "The world's smallest" are words we hear a lot at Engadget, and we're inclined to agree with CNET that JTT's previous camera, the Chobi Cam, is actually smaller by volume. The Chobi Cam One arrived with extra detachable lenses, but there's no word yet on whether these add-ons will appear in Hammacher Sclemmer's online store -- not that we really want to be lugging around a whole bunch of tiny lenses with us. Get it here.

 

 

Facebook May Let You Listen To Music With Your Friends

A Facebook employee accidentally spilled the beans on an upcoming "Listen With Your Friend" feature that could launch as part of Facebook's new Music service.

According to the now deleted tweet, when a friend is listening to a track, you'll be able to join them and listen to the same song at the same time. It'll be like sharing headphones over the Internet, but only better since it's on Facebook.