This summer at the largest urban mall in Europe, visitors may notice something different at their feet. Twenty bright green rubber tiles will adorn one of the outdoor walkways at the Westfield Stratford City Mall, which abuts the new Olympic stadium in east London. The squares aren't just ornamental. They are designed to collect the kinetic energy created by the estimated 40 million pedestrians who will use that walkway in a year, generating several hundred kilowatt-hours of electricity from their footsteps. That's enough to power half the mall's outdoor lighting. The slabs are produced by Pavegen Systems, a London startup launched in 2009 by Laurence Kemball-Cook, a fresh-faced, 26-year-old Londoner who developed his clean energy idea while earning a degree in industrial design and technology at Loughborough University. The 17.7-by-23.6-inch (45-by-60-centimeter) tiles are designed to be used wherever pedestrians congregate en masse: transportation hubs such as including train,

There’s wind in that thar sky That’s the sort of thing that – conceivably – might be wistfully said by someone who is tasked with looking for locations in which to locate wind turbines. Their job could soon be getting a little easier, however, thanks to a new balloon-based wind-prospecting system. The prototype, which is being developed by a team at the University of Barcelona, consists of a tethered hot air balloon that carries a four-kilogram (8.8-lb) sensor module. That balloon is three meters (9.8 feet) long, and has a shape that’s “similar to a saddled seabream” – that’s a type of fish. Such a distinctive design allows it to withstand wind gusts of up to 150 km/h (93 mph). It can be raised to a maximum height of 150 meters (492 feet), on a cable with a breaking strength of 600 kilograms (1,323 lbs). The idea is that the balloon could be tethered to a buoy in marine environments, then moved around to record the strength and consistency of the wind in different locations, and at different altitudes. Data collected by the sensor module can be sent via Wi-Fi to a land-based monitoring

Quantum physics promises faster and more powerful computers, but quantum versions of basic logic functions are still needed to bring this technology to fruition. Researchers from the University of Cambridge and Toshiba Research Europe Ltd. have taken one step toward this goal by creating an all-semiconductor quantum logic gate, a controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate. They achieved this breakthrough by coaxing nanodots to emit single photons of light on demand. "The ability to produce a photon in a very precise state is of central importance," said Matthew Pooley of Cambridge University and co-author of a study accepted for publication in the American Institute of Physics' (AIP) journal Applied Physics Letters. "We used standard semiconductor technology to create single quantum dots that could emit individual photons with very precise characteristics." These photons could then be paired up to zip through a waveguide, essentially a tiny track on a semiconductor, and perform a basic quantum calculation. Classical computers perform calculations by manipulating binary bits, the familiar zeros and ones of the digital age. A quantum computer instead uses quantum bits, or qubits. Because of their weird quantum properties, a qubit can represent a zero, one, or both simultaneously, producing

When Stan Kuczaj and Lauren Highfill were snorkeling among some rough-toothed dolphins off the coast of Honduras last year, they saw an intriguing game among the animals. Two adults and a youngster were passing a plastic bag back and forth, as in a game of catch, the two researchers wrote in the October issue of the research journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. When the adults passed it to the youth, they did so more carefully than to each other, releasing it just in front of the youth’s mouth, as if to make it easier to catch. After years of studying dolphins at play, Kuczaj and his colleagues have reached some surprising conclusions: dolphin games show remarkable cooperation and creativity. Dolphins seem to deliberately make their games difficult, possibly in order to learn from them. And such pastimes may play a key role in the development of culture and in evolution—both among dolphins and other species, including humans. Games “may help young animals learn their place in the social dynamics of the group,” wrote Kuczaj, a psychologist with the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Miss., and colleagues in a paper to appear in the International

Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have shown that insects are made from one of the toughest natural materials in the world. The study’s findings have been recently published in the leading international biomechanics publication, Journal of Experimental Biology. “All insects are made from a material called cuticle,” said Dr. Jan-Henning Dirks, who studied the properties of this amazing material together with Professor of Mechanical Engineering David Taylor at the Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering. Insect cuticle is the second most common natural material in the world after wood, and it is one of the most versatile. “The whole outer body of the insect is made from cuticle.” said Dirks. “Imagine an entire house built out of one single material: the roof, the walls, the windows, even the door joints. The versatility of cuticle is amazing. We are surrounded by it every day, yet we know almost nothing about its properties.” The hind legs of grasshoppers were one of the first samples the two researchers looked at in detail. “During jumping and kicking, grasshopper legs have to withstand very large forces,” said Taylor. “Thus we were wondering whether the legs were in any way special?” The two researchers then

Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, the core R&D incubator for Samsung Electronics, has developed a new transistor structure utilizing graphene. As published online in the journal Science on Thursday, 17th May, this research is regarded to have brought us one step closer to the development of transistors that can overcome the limits of conventional silicon. Currently, semiconductor devices consist of billions of silicon transistors. To increase the performance of semiconductors (the speed of devices), the options have to been to either reduce the size of individual transistors to shorten the traveling distance of electrons, or to use a material with higher electron mobility which allows for faster electron velocity. For the past 40 years, the industry has been increasing performance by reducing size. However, experts believe we are now nearing the potential limits of scaling down. Since graphene possesses electron mobility about 200 times greater than that of silicon, it has been considered a potential substitute. Although one issue with graphene is that, unlike conventional semiconducting materials, current cannot be switched off because it is semi-metallic. This has become the key issue in realizing graphene transistors. Both on and off flow of current is required in a

Hard to imagine (I know I had to read it twice to be certain), but this solar charger contains a Power Plastic panel that can be stretched under direct sunlight! It’s called the Kuaray, the Guarani word for sun. The Kuaray solar panel, designed by Ruben Freire, is a nifty concept, comprising the aforementioned stretchable solar panel and a lithium-ion battery that harvests and stores the solar energy from the panel. And the Kuaray – with its organic particles of plastic, lithium ions, discarded aluminum soda cans and corn – is not merely autonomous but almost fully recyclable. The plastic case is the intriguing part. Made from Mirel, a patented material made from a biodegradable resin produced by Metabolix, which in 2006 joint ventured with agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland to commercialize Mirel. The founders of Metabolix, Oliver Peoples and Anthony Sinskey, were the first to demonstrate that PHAs (polyhydroxyalkanoates, a naturally occurring form of polyester) could be produced using recombinant organisms in a biological fermentation process.

New results from NASA's NEOWISE survey find that more potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs, are closely aligned with the plane of our solar system than previous models suggested. PHAs are the subset of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) with the closest orbits to Earth's orbit, coming within 5 million miles (about 8 million kilometers). They are also defined as being large enough to survive passage through Earth's atmosphere and cause damage on a regional, or greater, scale. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have led to the best assessment yet of our solar system's population of potentially hazardous asteroids. The results reveal new information about their total numbers, origins and the possible dangers they may pose. Potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs, are a subset of the larger group of near-Earth asteroids. The PHAs have the closest orbits to Earth's, coming within five million miles (about eight million kilometers), and they are big enough to survive passing through Earth's atmosphere and cause damage on a regional, or greater, scale. The new results come from the asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE mission, called NEOWISE. The project