Technological Revolution

LOS ANGELES, Kalifornia (PNN) - April 19, 2015 - Scientists at UCLA's Kalifornia NanoSystems Institute have developed a new device that combines the high energy densities of batteries and the quick charge and discharge rates of supercapacitors. The hybrid supercapacitor is reportedly six times as energy-dense as a commercially available supercapacitor and packs nearly as much energy per unit volume as a lead-acid battery.

SHANGHAI, China (PNN) - April 15, 2015 - If you want to drive with something more personal than a heads-up display, Mini is hoping to bring technology to your car in the form of a pair of connected eyewear. Called Mini Augmented Vision, the smart glasses work a bit like Google Glass or ODG’s smartglasses, projecting information in front of you relevant to your drive. Information appears in your field of vision, but in such a way that it doesn’t obstruct your view of the road. BMW showed off a working prototype of the glasses earlier this month at the Shanghai Auto Show.

WASHINGTON (PNN) - April 11, 2015 - One unfortunate fact of modern life is that functional new software becomes non-functional old software with depressing regularity. For most people, this means predictable episodes of frustration, but for the Fascist Police States of Amerika military, it's a more serious problem. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) new Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems (BRASS) project aims to take a major shot at avoiding this obsolescence by developing software systems that can still operate properly a hundred years from now.

WASHINGTON (PNN) - March 26, 2015 - The Hindenburg wasn’t brought down by lightning, static, or sabotage. History’s most famous airship was destroyed by helium. Or rather, the lack thereof. The zeppelin’s Nazi builders balked at the price of this rare, lighter-than-air gas. So instead, they filled the blimp with hydrogen, which is much less expensive, just as buoyant, but way more explosive. So no matter what chain of events led up to the explosion, it was helium’s scarcity that killed the airship. Today, the same gas - rare as ever - is putting a major cramp in deep-sea diving operations.