The Texas Petawatt laser reached greater than one petawatt of laser power on Monday morning, March 31, making it the highest powered laser in the world, Todd Ditmire, a physicist at The University of Texas at Austin, said.

When the laser is turned on, it has the power output of more than 2,000 times the output of all power plants in the United States. (A petawatt is one quadrillion watts.) The laser is brighter than sunlight on the surface of the sun, but it only lasts for an instant, a 10th of a trillionth of a second (0.0000000000001 second).

Parkinson’s disease affects daily tasks that people take for granted. Brushing teeth, getting out of bed and walking become a problem for these patients because of dopamine depletion, which results in stiffness or slowing of movement and fine motor dysfunction.

While occupational therapy is frequently used in the comprehensive care of Parkinson’s patients, evidence is needed to support its short- or long-term effectiveness, says says Dr.

Amit Kagian, an M.Sc. graduate from the TAU School of Computer Sciences, has successfully “taught” a computer how to interpret attractiveness in women.

The notion that beauty can be boiled down to binary data and interpreted by a mathematical model is nothing new. More than 2,000 years ago the Greek mystic, philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras observed the connection between math, geometry and beauty. He reasoned that features of physical objects corresponding to the “golden ratio” were considered most attractive.

But there’s a more serious dimension to this issue that reaches beyond mere vanity. The discovery is a step towards developing artificial intelligence in computers. Other applications for the software could be in plastic and reconstructive surgery and computer visualization programs such as face recognition technologies.

As much as people love wireless technology, current systems such as WLAN or Bluetooth have their limits: They transmit the data with clock rates in the gigahertz range at most, a billion vibrations per second.

In order to increase the quantity of transmitted data, especially for things like high-definition wireless video, clock rates need to become much higher.

Terahertz waves (1000 billion vibrations per second) look like the successor to Bluetooth; for short distances, like within rooms. Transmitting power has been an obtsacle to go beyond that.

And they broadcast Futurama. Excellent choice.

Garments that can measure a wearer's body temperature or trace their heart activity are on the market but the European project BIOTEX has taken it a step further - they have developed miniaturised biosensors in a textile patch that can analyze body fluids, even a tiny drop of sweat, and provide a much better assessment of health.

A cluster of EU research projects (SFIT Group) is supporting this burgeoning field of smart fabrics, interactive textiles and flexible wearable systems. Jean Luprano, a researcher at the Swiss Centre for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM), coordinates the BIOTEX project.

AI or ANN? Designers of artificial cognitive systems have tended to adopt one of two approaches to building robots that can think for themselves: classical rule-based artificial intelligence or artificial neural networks.

Both have advantages and disadvantages, and combining the two offers the best of both worlds, say a team of European researchers who have developed a new breed of cognitive, learning robot that goes beyond the state of the art.

The researchers’ work brings together the two distinct but mutually supportive technologies that have been used to develop artificial cognitive systems (ACS) for different purposes. The classical approach to artificial intelligence (AI) relies on a rule-based system in which the designer largely supplies the knowledge and scene representations, making the robot follow a decision-making process – much like climbing through the branches of a tree – toward a predefined response.

A silent, ultra-thin, low-power and low maintenance cooling system for laptop computers and other electronic devices has been developed based on silent air purifier techniques.

The compact, solid-state fan is the most powerful and energy efficient fan of its size. It produces three times the flow rate of a typical small mechanical fan and is one-fourth the size.

Dan Schlitz and Vishal Singhal of Thorrn Micro Technologies, Inc., of Marietta, Ga. will present their RSD5 solid-state fan at the 24th Annual Semiconductor Thermal Measurement, Modeling and Management Symposium (Semi-Therm) in San Jose, Calif., on March 17, 2008. The device is the culmination of six years of research that began while the researchers were NSF-supported graduate students at Purdue University.

Researchers have developed a new micro-fan only slightly larger than a dime. The new fan can generate winds on the same scale as a laptop computer fan, but uses far less energy and should require far less maintenance. Credit: Dan Schlitz and Vishal Singhal, Thorrn Micro Technologies

The aim of the ‘Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms’ project, or ‘Symbrion’, is to understand the principles that govern how robots can form themselves into a single artificial organism. The technique enables them to interact collectively with the physical world, and might ultimately be applied to real-world tasks such as rescuing earthquake victims.

‘Multi-robot organisms’ are made up of large swarms of individual robots, each slightly larger than a sugar cube, which work together to form a single artificial life-form. The organisms are able to share information and energy with one another, and to manage their own hardware and software.

Modern day logic and embedded systems are all around us. They are so ubiquitous and their design so efficient, say researchers at the RUNES (Reconfigurable Ubiquitous Networked Embedded Systems) project in Europe, that these miniature self-contained computers could be optimized to create on-the-fly wireless networks and assist in traffic control and even emergencies.

They use the example of a fire in a mountain tunnel. Ordinarily a tunnel full of smoke and fire would be a difficult situation because it would take time to pin down the location of the blaze and where people were trapped.

Wireless sensors, oblivious to smoke and heat, could make sense from chaos and route maps and instructions to firefighters through handheld terminals or helmet-mounted displays. But there's a caveat - because each system would need to be customized, the wireless networks basically have to be able to build themselves.

An interesting security imaging technology that can 'see' explosives, liquids, narcotics, weapons, plastics and ceramics hidden under clothing from 25 meters away is due to be unveiled at the Home Office Scientific Development Branch (HOSDB) Exhibition next week.