Tag: computer science
-
Report Outlines U.S. Competitive, Innovation Roadmap
The U.S. Department of Commerce released today a report to Congress on “The Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity of the United States” called for by the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010. Secretary of Commerce John Bryson (pictured left) discussed the report’s main findings in a briefing at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress…
-
Ford to Open Silicon Valley Research Lab
Automobile maker Ford Motor Company says it will open a new research facility during the first quarter of 2012 located in the Silicon Valley region of California near San Francisco. The lab will be part of Ford’s Research and Innovation division, according to chief technical officer Paul Mascarenas who made the announcement in a statement…
-
Lizard Tail Feedback Boosts Jumping Robot Stability
A team of biologists and engineers at University of California, Berkeley have documented the way lizards manage to leap successfully even when they slip and stumble, and applied that capability to robots. Berkeley professor of integrative biology Robert Full and colleagues, including graduate and undergraduate students, describe their findings in the 5 January online issue…
-
Global Semiconductor Investment Drops in November
A report from the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) shows investment in semiconductor companies worldwide dropped for the month of November 2011 compared to the same month in 2010, and for the year-to-date. The number of mergers and acquisitions in the industry also decreased for the year so far, but in November a number of new…
-
Software Speeds Database Sequence Searches
Computational biologists at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität (LMU) in Munich, Germany have developed software that makes possible a new search method to identify proteins in databases with similar genomic sequences. The software that the developers say is faster and can discover twice as many evolutionarily related proteins as previous methods, is described online in the journal Nature…
-
Apple Files Patent Applications for Fuel Cell Power
Apple Inc. in Cupertino, California has filed two U.S. patent applications for building fuel cell systems into the power supplies used in their electronic devices. The patent applications were reported yesterday on the Web site AppleInsider. One invention outlines a fuel cell system to directly power a portable electronic device. In this system, a fuel…
-
Energy Dept to Fund R&D on Vehicle Charging Stations
The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) announced grants totaling some $7 million for research and development to help improve the performance and flexibility of electric vehicle chargers on the nation’s power grids. The funds will go to electric vehicle (EV) charging station manufacturers in California, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, who are expected to…
-
Math Model Helps Predict Unknown Drug Side Effects
Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston in Massachusetts have created a new method that combines data from a widely used drug safety database to predict adverse drug reactions. The findings from postdoctoral fellow Aurel Cami (pictured left) and colleagues from the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program, appear online in the the journal Science Translational Medicine (paid subscription…
-
Self-Healing Integrated Circuit Material Developed
A team of University of Illinois researchers in Champaign has developed a self-healing process that restores electrical conductivity to a cracked circuit in barely an instant. Illinois engineering professor Scott White, materials science professor Nancy Sottos, chemistry professor Jeffrey Moore, and colleagues published their findings online in the journal Advanced Materials (paid subscription required). Electronic…
-
UCLA, Korean Institute Collaborate on Smart Grid R&D
The engineering school at University of California at Los Angeles and the Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER) have begun a 10-year partnership to collaborate on smart-grid research and the development of new related technologies. The project, funded on the U.S. side by the Department of Energy and the Los Angeles Department of Water and…