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10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life

The Hydrogen Economy: Expected to replace oil economy.

Therapeutic Cloning: Cancerous or damaged organs could be replaced by new, disease-free clones of themselves.

Computing Power: Moore’s law still holds good and expected to be valid for some more time.

Desktop 3-D Printing: When your favorite gadget of the future breaks, you might select a replacement model online, download its design file and make a true 3-D replacement on your home printer.

Location-Based Computing: Location based services will evolve that could bridge real and virtual worlds seamlessly.

Better, Cheaper Solar Cells: The cost of photo voltaic cells will come down drastically and solar power expected to wide spread in use in house hold usage, space and vehicles.

Mobile Robots: Why drive to the deli to pick up your order when you can just send your robot car?

Pervasive Wireless Internet: WiMAX, 3G, 4G, etc., all point to a pervasive wireless Internet, where being on-line everywhere, all the time, will be routine.

Gene Therapy and Stem Cells: scientists are working to change the genes causing inherited diseases and trick defective cells into growing correctly.

Digital Libraries: The time will come when any straightforward factual question can be answered immediately, online.

Courtesy: Livescience.com

Electronics Breakthrough Could Revolutionize Memory Chips

Tenacity, audacity, intuition, patience, a lot of talent and a little luck are healthy qualities for a young scientist. Jun Yao has them all.The fifth-year graduate student at Rice University believed so strongly in his discovery two years ago that he went to the mat for it. What Yao found could be a game-changer in the budding field of nanoelectronics. While working on a project to create memory devices based on graphite, he discovered that he could form nanocrystalline pathways in silicon oxide, an insulator that was underlying the graphite, simply by applying voltage. Smaller pulses of about 8 and 3.5 volts would repeatedly break and reconnect the pathway. Better yet, the technique became the basis for a two-terminal resistive memory bit about 5 nanometers wide.

The breakthrough brings high-capacity 3-D memory chips a step closer to reality; Rice's commercial partners are already working on prototypes that they expect will compete well with the technologies striving for dominance in next-generation computer memory. Yao's revelation caused a splash in the press when his National Science Foundation-supported paper, co-authored with fellow graduate student Zhengzong Sun and three Rice professors, was published in Nano Letters. That same day, the story appeared on Page 1 of the New York Times. It was the payoff for two years spent struggling to explain to a host of skeptics, including his lab partners, that the silicon oxide itself was all one needed to build next-generation computer memory.

Courtesy: Livescience.com

Flake of Carbon Behind 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics

With a piece of adhesive tape, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov managed to obtain a flake of carbon from a piece of graphite (as is found in ordinary pencils) with a thickness of just one atom. The seemingly simple feat led to their groundbreaking work on graphene – the thinnest and strongest material – and this year's Nobel Prize in Physics.

Athough graphene had been studied theoretically, before 2004, scientists didn't think it was possible to isolate stable sheets of this form of carbon. And so it was a surprise when Geim, 51, and Novoselov, 36, managed to do just that, according to NobelPrize.org. The duo published their results in October 2004 in the journal Science.

Graphene is a single layer of carbon packed in a honeycomb lattice, with a specific distance between carbon atoms. It is the first truly two-dimensional crystalline material and it now represents a class of 2-D material that have been produced since 2004. As a conductor of heat it outperforms all other known materials. It is almost completely transparent, yet so dense that not even helium, the smallest gas atom, can pass through it. The ability to extract and study graphene makes various practical applications now possible, including graphene transistors as well as transparent touch screens and light panels.