‘New solar dish from MIT concentrates sunlight intensely enough to melt steel.’ -

The solar industry is booming. With waves of investment and grants, the solar power industry is for the first time becoming a serious business. New power plants will soon be pumping power out to consumers, while other firms market to sell panels directly to the consumer, providing them with a more direct means of experiencing solar energy.

There are many forms of solar power technology. Today the most dominant is photo-voltaics , which comprise the traditional solar panels that come to mind when one thinks of solar power. However, there are other promising ways of capturing the sun’s energy that are merely less developed.

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Researchers at the A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics in Singapore, led by Chang-yun Jiang, have developed highly bendable “dye-sensitized” solar cells made from zinc oxide nanowire photoelectrodes on plastic substrates. The researchers found that the nanowires are highly resistant to cracking because gaps between the nanowires allow them to efficiently release bending stresses. The devices, which conserve their photovoltaic properties even when they are extremely bent, have a variety of potential application in flexible and portable devices, such as solar-cell mobile phone chargers, clothes, and umbrellas.

The photoanodes in dye-senzitised solar cells (DSCCs) are usually made from a film of titanium dioxide or zinc oxide nanocrystals. The problem is that these thick films are fragile and crack easily when bent. Moreover, nanocrystals work well at high temperatures, which are disastrous for the plastic-film substrates. The scientists solved this problem by creating flexible DSSCs that are based on this substrate, so that their properties are conserved even when bent.

More about the zinc oxide nanowire flexible cells can be found here (translated via Google).

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IBM looks set to join the seriously multi-core set with the Power7 chip. Internal documents seen by The Register show Power7 with eight cores per processor and also some very, very large IBM boxes based on the chip.

The IBM documents have the eight-core Power7 being arranged in dual-chip modules. So, that’s 16-cores per module. As IBM tells it, each core will show 32 gigaflops of performance, bringing each chip to 256 gigaflops. Just on the gigaflop basis, that makes Power7 twice as fast per core as today’s dual-core Power6 chips, although the actual clock rate on the Power7 chips should be well below the 5.0GHz Power6 speed demon.

In fact, according to our documents, IBM will ship Power7 at 4.0GHz in 2010 on a 45nm process. We’re also seeing four threads per core on the chip.

For some customers, IBM looks set to create 2U systems with four of the dual-chip modules, giving the server 64 cores of fun. These 2U systems will support up to 128GB of memory and hit 2 teraflops.

IBM has an architecture that will let supercomputing types combine these 2U boxes to form a massive unit with 1,024 cores, hitting 32 teraflops of performance with 2TB of memory.

And, er, if you are a seriously demanding type, boy, does IBM have the system for you.

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IBM is  planning to build a supercomputer that runs at 10 petaflops in 2011. A petaflop is 10^15 calculations per second. So 10 petaflop would be 10^16.

The military recently built the very first supercomputer to break the 1 petaflop barrier. A tenfold increase within 3 years is no laughing matter.

A 10 petaflop supercomputer would also be powerful enough (according to Kurzweil’s calculations, that is) to simulate a human brain in real time.

The Florida Public Service Commission has “unanimously and enthusiastically” approved a plan to build America’s largest commercial solar-power plant in the state. The committee also gave the green light to a further two facilities, due to go on-line in 2009.

Florida Power & Light have selected SunPower to construct the three solar-power plants in the center of the state. The largest, a 75-megawatt plant in Martin County on the East Coast, will be connected to a natural gas plant. Another 25-megawatt plant in DeSoto County will be the largest photovoltaic facility in the country, while a third, 10-megawatt photovoltaic facility is to be housed at the Kennedy Space Center.

Speaking about the project, Howard Wenger, SunPower’s Senior Vice President, Global Business Units said, “These agreements confirm the growing trend in the U.S. to build solar power plants at a scale rivalling those in market-leading countries such as Germany and Spain.”

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Just when it looked like things were getting dark for solar, the tide has taken a turn for the better.

I’m not going to stand by idly while this revolution is taking place. I’m buying alternative energy stocks, damnit!

Another recent energy-related article of interested is the one about Al Gore’s ambitious plan to go 100% carbon neutral in only 10 years.

Enjoy the read.

Imagine the scene: You’re driving your car to an office building in New York City, five minutes from a job interview. No worries. You have already dialed into the car’s memory the parking garage where it’s going to stay, and prepaid the bill. You shut the door. And off it goes. Driverless. And the chances of the car getting into an accident while it travels five or six treacherous city blocks are less than if the hopeful job applicant had tried to park it himself under time pressure.

Does it sound too good to be true? A sign of the end of civilization as we know it? Too far into the future to care? It depends on whom you ask. But some researchers, engineers, and auto companies believe that such automation is not only on the way to becoming commonplace in the next 20 years, but essential to reducing the carbon footprint of vehicles from the U.S. to China and everywhere else. Oh, and as the technology necessary to achieve the “autonomous” car arrives in stages every few years — some of it is already here, in options such as electronic stability control and blind-spot detection — it promises to sharply reduce traffic fatalities.

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There are already lots of ‘digital assistents’ in the cars already manufactured today or in the near future. The article names a few…

• Electronic stability control
• Adaptive cruise control
• Blind-spot detection
• Lane-departure warning
• Collision mitigation

Over the coming years. we will see more and more technology sneak into our cars. And the technology will become more capable. Slowly but surely, cars will go from assisting us to taking over control of the car.

There are many benefits to this. I’m looking forward to it, although I do not expect truly autonomous cars sooner than 10 years from now.

A group of researchers at the Technical University of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen have developed models of neural networks that make it possible to simulate how the body protects itself from disease and predict the immune system’s access codes. The human body has its own natural inbuilt defence mechanism which uses access or “pincodes” to stop microorganisms that invade the body from discovering how the entire human immune system works. Every human being on the planet has their own unique version of this defence mechanism. But the sheer complexity of the immune system has, up until now, also made it difficult for researchers to understand how the immune system functions and develop precise immunological treatments. Last year, the research team led by Associate Professor Morten Nielsen and Professor Søren Buus successfully decoded some of the pincodes. Now, the team has completed work on their project and put together a complete picture of how the immune system checks the inner and outer components of our cells for dangerous invaders. The research could have significant consequences for the treatment of cancer, infectious diseases and also for transplant operations.

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Perspectives: Decoding the immune system to target disease

For the individual patient, the artifical neural networks mean that if scientists can identify the patient’s tissue type molecules (pincodes), they can then predict all the possible samples that would be taken by the tissue type molecules and displayed in the two display windows. If the patients own immune system, for example, does not react to a particular disease the knowledge could be used to stimulate (find, isolate and produce) the necessary T cells that can see the disease antigens (viruses, cancer cells etc). On a global scale, the neural network method could help researchers to deal with all the variants/single components of a global epidemic.

“We’ll be able to find candidates for vaccines which can both help the individual as well as the whole of humanity” explains professor Søren Buus. The neural networks provide the most comprehensive knowledge of the immune system to date.

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No more solar cells covering a roof, but around the edges of a flat glass panel, as shown in the artist’s representation by NSF.

MIT engineers say they’ve created a new approach to harnessing the sun’s energy that provide windows with a clear view and illuminate rooms at the same time without the need for tracking devices.

According to a news release from MIT , the solar concentrator collects light at the edges, and dye molecules coated on the glass absorb sunlight and re-emits it at different wavelengths. The light is trapped within the glass and transported to solar cells along the edge, creating electricity and allowing light into the room as well.

The mixture of dyes is applied to the surface of the glass and allows light to travel a much longer distance. Mapel said, that as a result, light transportation losses were significantly reduced, resulting in a “tenfold increase in the amount of power converted by the solar cells.”

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Also see See-Through Solar Hack Could Double Panel Efficiency and New Windows Double As Solar Panels.

Who doesn’t long for household help at times? Service robots will soon be able to relieve us of heavy, dirty, monotonous or irksome tasks. Research scientists have now presented a new generation of household robots, the “Care-O-bot® 3”.

The one-armed robot glides slowly to the kitchen table. With its three fingers, it carefully picks up the bottle of apple juice and puts it next to the glasses on the tray in front of it. Then it glides back into the lounge and serves the drinks to the guests. This is how artificial assistants might work in future.

Only 1.45 meters high, Care-O-bot® 3 is the prototype of a new generation of service robots designed to help humans in the household. The quick-to-learn assistant was developed by research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart.

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Unlike its predecessors, it can even recognize and respond to gestures,” explains Graf. Numerous household articles are stored in the robot’s databases. It knows, for example, what a cup looks like and where to find it in the kitchen. It can also learn to recognize new objects. The user simply places the unfamiliar object in the robot’s hand so that it can gain a three-dimensional impression of the item. However, the new robot does not look like a human being. “We deliberately moved away from the existing, humanoid service robots when we designed Care-O-bot® 3,” stresses Care-O-bot-3 project manager Christopher Parlitz of IPA.

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It’s a good thing they moved away from the ‘real’ human being look. The real look just isn’t real enough and that makes it creepy. And you don’t want that look for a home robot.

For everybody who does want to see creepy human like robots, have a look at this Cracked article.

Some people have a mutation that makes them amazingly resistant to HIV — and now, scientists may have found a way to give that immunity to anyone.

Viruses enter cells and take them over, but to get inside, they need a handhold. HIV pulls itself in by grabbing onto a protein called CCR5, which decorates the surface of T-cells, which are one of the two major types of white blood cells and play an important role in helping the body fight infections. Back in the 1990’s, researchers took interest in a handful of promiscuous gay men who were able to engage in sexual relations with their HIV-positive partners with impunity. Most of them had a mutation that kept their cells from producing normal CCR5 protein.

Armed with that knowledge, scientists have developed several tactics to block the production of CCR5 or perturb its shape so that the HIV virus can’t grab onto it during the first step of its hijacking attempt. The strategy is much akin to cutting your hair before a wrestling match: It gives your opponent one less thing to grab onto.

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Another great step towards curing humanity’s ailments.

This is probably only the beginning. I expect many more diseases to be cured in the coming biotech-decade.

In 2006, Sinclair and National Institute on Aging gerontologist Rafael de Cabo, also a co-author of the Cell Metabolism study, used resveratrol to improve the health and extend the lives of obese mice on high-calorie diets. The latest study involved both obese and normal mice, fed standard, low- and high-calorie fare.

Regardless of mouse weight and diet, resveratrol worked wonders. At two years of age, or the mouse equivalent of senescence, the mice were more coordinated than their non-dosed counterparts. Their bones were thicker and stronger, their eyes free of cataracts, their hearts beating strong. At the cellular level, tissues displayed gene-level changes almost identical to those produced by caloric restriction.

The mitochondria of resveratrol-taking mice also proved healthy. Mitochondrial degeneration has been implicated in a variety of diseases, leading some researchers to believe that heart disease, cancer and dementia — all the so-called diseases of aging — have a common root.

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I can’t believe what’s possible in mice these days.

I’ve seen’em heal from spinal paralysis, get a cure for sickle cell anemia, and more. And now they’re getting longer and healthier life in which they’re allowed to eat all they want.

Makes me wish I was one of them.

With gas prices going through the roof and regulators requiring cars to be ever more miserly, Volkswagen is bringing new meaning to the term “fuel efficiency” with a bullet-shaped microcar that gets a stunning 235 mpg.

Volkswagen’s had its super-thrifty One-Liter Car concept vehicle — so named because that’s how much fuel it needs to go 100 kilometers — stashed away for six years. The body’s made of carbon fiber to minimize weight (the entire car weighs just 660 pounds) and company execs didn’t expect the material to become cheap enough to produce the car until 2012.

But VW’s decided to build the car two years ahead of schedule.

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If this type of technology is feasible, then why has the world gotten its panties in a bunch over the energy problem?

Oh yes, I forgot. Big oil.

This news article is good news, though. Good enough to take our minds off how bad we’re getting screwed by the upper 1%.

If even for a few seconds…

Gandhi once said, describing his critics, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

After declaring, essentially out of nowhere, that he had a program to end the disease of aging, renegade biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey knows how the first three steps of Gandhi’s progression feel. Now he’s focused on the fourth.

“I’ve been at Gandhi stage three for maybe a couple of years,” de Grey said. “If you’re trying to make waves, certainly in science, there’s a lot of people who are going to have insufficient vision to bother to understand what you’re trying to say.”

This weekend, his organization, The Methuselah Foundation, is sponsoring its first U.S. conference on the emerging interdisciplinary field that de Grey has helped kick start. (Its first day, Friday, will be free and open to the public.) The conference, Aging: The Disease - The Cure - The Implications, held at UCLA, is an indication of how far de Grey has come in mainstreaming his ideas.

Less than a decade ago, de Grey was a relatively unknown computer scientist doing his own research into aging. As recently as three years ago a cadre of scientists wrote in the Nature-sponsored journal EMBO Reports, that his research program, known as Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, was “so far from plausible that it commands no respect at all within the informed scientific community.” Also in 2005, MIT-sponsored magazine Technology Review went so far as to offer a $20,000 prize to anyone who could prove that de Grey’s program was “so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate.” (No one won.)

Now, though, some scientists are beginning to view his approach — looking at aging as a disease and bringing in more disciplines into gerontology — as worthwhile, even if they still look askance at his claims of permanent reversible aging within a lifespan. The Methuselah Foundation now has an annual research funding budget of several million dollars, de Grey says, and it’s beginning to show lab results that he thinks will turn scientists’ heads.

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This man will be the one to bring about biological immortality. He will be revered for it for centuries to come, too.

That is my current prediction.

That’s what it was over two years ago, when I posted The Quest For Immortality and that is what my prediction will probably remain for the coming years.

Just have a look at these articles that have recently appeared:

1. Cheaper Solar Power
2. Another Silicon Valley?
3. Cost Of Solar Panels Expected To Plummet
4. IBM Research Reveals Breakthrough In Solar Farm Technology
5. Solar Power Goes To Extremes For 5Cents Per Kwh
6. Solar Power Just About Ready For Prime Time
7. It’s Solar Power’s Time To Shine

We may or may not be running out of oil, but it would still be better for the environment if our energy was clean.

Then, ofcourse, there’s always people who want to stop solar in its tracks because of environmental concerns.

Say wha?

Yes, you read it right. Worried about the environmental impact of solar…

[update]

The moratorium has been lifted.

This shows more common sense than I had anticipated.

The Bureau of Land Management has buckled under the heavy pressure from the public.

If only things would go the same way for stem cells… but that’s probably too much to ask.

Scientists at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center are about to embark on a human trial to test whether a new cancer treatment will be as effective at eradicating cancer in humans as it has proven to be in mice.

The treatment will involve transfusing specific white blood cells, called granulocytes, from select donors, into patients with advanced forms of cancer. A similar treatment using white blood cells from cancer-resistant mice has previously been highly successful, curing 100 percent of lab mice afflicted with advanced malignancies.

Zheng Cui, Ph.D., lead researcher and associate professor of pathology, will be announcing the study June 28 at the Understanding Aging conference in Los Angeles.

The study, given the go-ahead by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, will involve treating human cancer patients with white blood cells from healthy young people whose immune systems produce cells with high levels of cancer-fighting activity.

The basis of the study is the scientists’ discovery, published five years ago, of a cancer-resistant mouse and their subsequent finding that white blood cells from that mouse and its offspring cured advanced cancers in ordinary laboratory mice. They have since identified similar cancer-killing activity in the white blood cells of some healthy humans.

“In mice, we’ve been able to eradicate even highly aggressive forms of malignancy with extremely large tumors,” Cui said. “Hopefully, we will see the same results in humans. Our laboratory studies indicate that this cancer-fighting ability is even stronger in healthy humans.”

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The wheels of biotech keep on churning out impressive cures for all that ails us.

Curing 100% of mice with agressive cancer is more than impressive.

The cure is definitely coming. I understand people have made failed predictions about this in the past, but they were only wrong in their timing, not in their ability to see possibilities.

The difference between then and now is that today, we are seeing actual proof of the fact that cancer can indeed be cured.

A single cell is the most awesomely sophisticated molecular machine yet produced.  A self-directing, self-replicating micro-factory capable of complex constructions, automated repair and even (like all good sci-fi-sounding devices) self-destruct.  The first cells, however, were much less “complex mechanisms” and significantly more “Shake and Bake” - a model that we’re now ready to build ourselves.

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It’s amazing how life apparently bootstraps itself together when you just throw together some basic chemicals.

We’re actually talking about a DNA replicating cell, synthesized from scratch, apparently.

How long before I get to design my own pets?

The 350-pound MAARS (Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System) machine can carry a 40mm grenade launcher or a M240B medium machine gun. Or, if the robot’s operators want their killer ‘bot to be a little less-lethal, the thing can be equipped with a laser dazzler, a loudspeaker, or pepper spray.

After years of safety testing and modifications, three of MAARS kill-bot predecessors were sent to Iraq in 2007. But after nearly nine months in the field, safety concerns (among other reasons) have kept those machines from firing a shot in combat.

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Dean Kamen showed some video of the impressive, mind-controlled prosthetic robot arm he’s invented today at D6 in Carlsbad. Kamen has been showing the arm off since early 2007, usually via video clips like what he showed today. But today’s demonstration at D6 was impressive enough that it’s got the gadget blogs and the Twitterverse all aflutter today.

Deservedly so: Kamen’s arm, dubbed “Luke” (after Skywalker, I assume), is an incredibly sophisticated bit of engineering that’s lightyears ahead of the clamping “claws” that many amputees are forced to use today. The arm is fully articulated, giving the user the same degrees of movement as a natural arm, and is sensitive enough to pick up a piece of paper, a wineglass or even a grape without mishap.

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In the May 11 issue of Nature Genetics, Maria Karayiorgou, M.D., professor of psychiatry, and Joseph A. Gogos, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of physiology and neuroscience at Columbia University Medical Center explain how they uncovered a previously unknown alteration in the production of microRNAs of a mouse modeled to have the same chromosome 22q11.2 deletions previously identified in humans with schizophrenia.

“We’ve known for some time that individuals with 22q11.2 microdeletions are at high risk of developing schizophrenia,” said Karayiorgou, who was instrumental in identifying deletions of 22q11.2 as a primary risk factor for schizophrenia in humans several years earlier. “By digging further into this chromosome, we have been able to see at the gene expression level that abnormalities in microRNAs can be linked to the behavioral and cognitive deficits associated with the disease.”

The investigators modeled mice to have the same genetic deletion as the one observed in some individuals with schizophrenia and examined what happens in the expression of over 30,000 genes in specific areas of the brain. When they discovered that the gene family of microRNAs was affected, they suspected that the Dgcr8 gene was responsible. The Dgcr8 gene is one of the 27 included in the 22q11.2 microdeletion and has a critical role in microRNA production, so this was a logical hypothesis. Indeed, when they produced a mouse deficient for the Dgcr8 gene, and tested it on a variety of cognitive, behavioral and neuroanatomical tests, they observed the same deficits often observed in people with schizophrenia.

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The British regulator, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), has warned that such controversial experiments cause “large ethical and public interest issues”.

News of the development comes days before MPs are to debate legislation that would allow scientists to use similar techniques in this country.

The effects of changing an embryo would be permanent. Genes added to embryos or reproductive cells, such as sperm, will affect all cells in the body and will be passed on to future generations.

The technology could potentially be used to correct genes which cause diseases such as cystic fibrosis, haemophilia and even cancer. In theory, any gene that has been identified could be added to embryos.

Ethicists warn that genetically modifying embryos could lead to the addition of genes for desirable traits such as height, intelligence and hair colour.

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Six months after treatment, 11 out of 19 patients had grown new hair, UK researchers told an Italian conference.

However, a UK specialist said further work would be needed so that the new hair looked right.

Hair loss affects two-fifths of men over 50, and can be a long-term problem for some people following radiotherapy or burns.

Currently available methods of hair transplantation involve taking large clumps of remaining follicles under local anaesthetic and moving them to the desired area, a technique dependent on the amount of hair left, as no new hair is created.

The new method, called “follicular cell implantation”, developed by UK firm Intercytex, claims to be able to provide a limitless supply of replacement hair cells, and, if other trials show it to be safe and effective, could be available within five years.

Doctors take only the dermal papilla cells - cells found in the follicle which are responsible for hair growth.

They are harvested from areas on the back of the head, which usually still have hair growth, and then bathed in a specially-developed chemical in the laboratory, before being placed back into bald areas of the scalp.

The early results suggest that most patients appear to benefit after just a few months, although the numbers involved in the trial are relatively small.

Dr Paul Kemp, Intercytex’s Scientific Officer, said that the presence of the dermal papilla cells encouraged skin cells to start building a brand new hair follicle, or rejuvenated follicles which have stopped producing hair properly.

He said: “It will revolutionise hair care, I think. People will use this when they are starting to go bald - they’ll come and see us, we’ll take a few dermal papilla cells, grow them up in the lab, freeze most of them, and inject some.

“They can keep coming back as the balding process continues. I’m convinced it will work, it’s just a question of fine-tuning the technique.”

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Now they don’t even have to be built; some nanomachines can build themselves, according to an upcoming study.

“Most things that people build are top-down. You cut down a tree to build a table,” said James Tour, a scientist at Rice University and co-author on the upcoming study, which will appear in the upcoming issue of the new journal Tetrahedron.

“But what if you could make the table from assembling molecules together from the bottom up?” said Tour.

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These nanoworms, composed of magnetic iron oxide and coated with a polymer, are able to find and attach to tumors. The nanoworms are superparamagnetic and show up very well on MRIs.

Using these nanoworms, doctors could eventually be able to target and reveal the location of developing tumors that are too small to detect by conventional methods.

With the use of this nanoworms concept, researchers are developing chemical attachments that will help to reach specific targets in the body, and are adding drugs that would be released when these targets are reached.

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3-D chip stacking uses a technology referred to as “through silicon via” (TSV) to build processors vertically, rather than just horizontally. By using both dimensions, CPU engineers can reduce wire delay, improve CPU efficiency, and significantly reduce total power consumption. We’ve previously covered both Intel and IBM’s efforts in this area; readers should consult those articles for a more comprehensive treatment of the subject.

Thermal dissipation, however, is the Achilles’ heel of any three dimensional processor. The more layers in a processor, the more difficult it is to effectively remove heat emanating from the lower levels. CPU architects can compensate for this by placing the hotter parts of a core on upper layers and by avoiding designs that stack core hotspots vertically, but the complexity of the problem increases with every additional layer. Simply leaving more space between the individual layers is not a solution, as this would quickly recreate the wire delay problems three-dimensional processors are meant to alleviate.

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NAND Flash architecture is one of two flash technologies (the other being NOR) used in memory cards such as the CompactFlash cards. It is also used in USB Flash drives, MP3 players, and provides the image storage for digital cameras.

According to the statement released by Intel and Micron the chip is the only monolithic device at this density that fits into a standard 48-lead thin small-outline package, providing a cost-effective path to higher densities in existing applications.

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As portrayed in the 2007 movie “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” locked-in patients are conscious, but fully paralyzed except for their eyes.

Thanks to advances in life-support technology and rising survival rates following brain-stem strokes, there may now be as many as 50,000 locked-in patients in the United States, the National Institutes of Health estimates.

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British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield, helping to save thousands of lives.

Prototypes could be on the front line by the end of the year, scuttling into potential danger areas such as booby-trapped buildings or enemy hideouts to relay images back to troops safely positioned nearby.

Soldiers will carry the robots into combat and use a small tracked vehicle to transport them closer to their targets.

Then they would swarm into the building and relay images back to the soldiers’ hand-held or wrist-mounted computers, warning them of any threats inside.

BAE Systems has just signed a £19million contract to develop the robots for the US Army.

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Future versions of RiSE will use dry adhesion to climb sheer vertical surfaces such as glass and metal. Boston Dynamics is developing RiSE in conjunction with researchers at University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, Stanford, and Lewis and Clark University. RiSE is funded by the DARPA Defense Sciences Office.

You can view a movie of RiSE in action at the source, or you can directly download it by clicking here.

Nass, who’s being funded in part by automakers, is not the only guy working on this. Microsoft wants to bring Google-style advertising to your dashboard.

“From the point of view of advertisers, the driver is a great captive audience,” Nass says. “You have the ability of knowing where the person is, so you can have very location-specific advertising.”

But if advertisers know where you are, your insurance company will too. And that’s where things get problematic.

“The insurance company could say, ‘Look, you’ve been parking in high-risk areas. I’m going to raise your collision insurance,’ or ‘We’ve detected that you’ve been driving at 80 miles per hour; that will affect your liability rates.’ So there are huge social issues about the car,” he says.

Still, Nass stresses there’s more to the technology than being spied on or pitched products. Your car could recommend a someplace to get a decent pizza, for example, and your insurance company would know you obey the speed limit and don’t speed up for yellow lights and so cut you a break on your premium.

“Insurance rates are a sensitive topic, but you could have a much more efficient insurance market with better data,” Nass says.

A thinking car also could make you a safer, happier driver. A large part of his research focuses on how a car’s voice can influence your emotional state. He believes that as the car of the future studies the driver’s voice, facial expressions and emotional state using a camera and even blood pressure monitors in the steering wheel, it could change its tone to match your mood. In other words, it’ll know when you’re about to blow your top because someone cut you off, and soothe your nerves with a friendly voice.

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“Paige’s brain surgery represents a technical achievement in the use of image-guided robotic technology to remove a relatively complex brain tumour,” Sutherland told a press conference.

“This is wonderful and represents the beginning of something new in surgical care,” he said.

“I had to have the tumour removed anyway, so I was happy to help by being a part of this historical surgery,” Nickason said in a press release on Friday.

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Researcher Daan Hobbelen of TU Delft has developed a new, highly-advanced walking robot: Flame. This type of research, for which Hobbelen will receive his PhD on Friday 30 May, is important as it provides insight into how people walk. This can in turn help people with walking difficulties through improved diagnoses, training and rehabilitation equipment.

If you try to teach a robot to walk, you will discover just how complex an activity it is. Walking robots have been around since the seventies. The applied strategies can roughly be divided into two types.

The first derives from the world of industrial robots, in which everything is fixed in routines, as is the case with factory robots. This approach can, where sufficient time and money are invested, produce excellent results, but there are major restrictions with regard to cost, energy consumption and flexibility.

TU Delft is a pioneer of the other method used for constructing walking robots, based on the way humans walk. This is really very similar to falling forward in a controlled fashion. Adopting this method replaces the cautious, rigid way in which robots walk with the more fluid, energy-efficient movement used by humans.

PhD student Daan Hobbelen has demonstrated for the first time that a robot can be both energy-efficient and highly stable. His breakthrough came in inventing a suitable method for measuring the stability of the way people walk for the first time. This is remarkable, as ‘falling forward’ is traditionally viewed as an unstable movement.

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