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With eBooks becoming more and more popular these days, the technology of electronic ink is gradually improved too. The electronic ink shown here is made up of millions of tiny microcapsules, each of which contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. So when a positive or negative electric field is applied, these particles will then move to the top of microcapsules, displaying some words or graphs on the screen. This new technology has several notable features, e.g. it can be applied onto almost all kinds of surfaces, especially idea to large-screens; it’s durable, can last a long time; and it’s still visible to naked eyes even under the sunshine.

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Ever wished to be born with blue eyes? You soon could be, with Dr Gregg Homer’s Lumineyes technology that can permanently change a person’s eye color in just 20 seconds. The amazing technology uses laser tuned to a specific frequency to remove brown pigment from the top layer of the iris, and then blue color will emerge in two or three weeks’ time. Currently the technology is still experimented and may hit the market in several years with a price of about 5000 US dollars.

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Cool! Using a code mashup of Jason Saragih’s facetracker and Kevin Atkinson’s image clone code, Arturo Castro successfully puts on the faces of Paris Hilton, Fidel Castro, Steve Jobs, Vladimir Lenin, Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, Mao Tse-tung, Brad Pitt, Michael Jackson, Salvador Dali and President Barack Obama.

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With 3D technology processing by big steps, now 3D printers can manufacture many more amazing things than we can imagine, from toys, swimwear, food and even artificial blood vessels.

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Making an airplane is no longer a complex course, because the Southampton University has “printed” out an aircraft in merely a couple of days. [Read the rest of this entry...]

No one would believe that glass can be stronger and tougher than steel, if they hadn’t seen the new type of damage-tolerant metallic glass collaborated by Berkeley Lab and the California Institute of Technology. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Toshiba recently announced the world’s first “Wipe” technology that can automatically wipe sensitive data from self-encrypting drives when a system is powered down or the HDD is removed from the system. By that means, your data will get effectively protected. But the technology cannot really wipe the data, but actually invalidates the security key used to encrypt the stored user data. To users of printers and photocopiers that have storage devices on board, the “Wipe” technology is quite worth waiting for, and they’ll soon see Toshiba’s first product—2.5″ 7200rpm SED HDD model on the market.

Can the LCD TVs become much thinner and lighter? Obviously the answer to that question has been known with complete certainty, after the researchers at Japanese chemical company Teijin and Yamaguchi University claimed that they’ve come up a new production method to reduce the weight of LCD displays. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Recently, scientists from South Korea have achieved a transmission rate of up to 10Mbps in an experiment with human arm, rather than the conventional internet connections. The research is based on skin’s high efficiency of transmitting date. Compared with wireless devices that rely on batteries, the device could reduce the energy needs for a monitoring network by 90% or so, and that’s really a significant discovery for us to save the limited energy. Hopefully that will be soon developed into medical devices, which could reduce the needs of messy electrical wires, by monitoring the blood sugar or electrical activity in the heart. [Read the rest of this entry...]

After lengthy years of research and development, an Austria-based company is ready to launch their first brain-computer interface, the ‘Intendix’. It utilizes an electrical cap worn on the user’s head to capture brainwaves, which will then be transferred to the computer to complete certain commands. Since what you have to do to control your computer is to think, you’ll have your hands and mouth free, and that’s also why the system is believed perfect for hands-impaired people. But at present, it is only being used for writing and playing advanced video games. [Read the rest of this entry...]

While most researchers are trying to improve the touchscreen interfaces used on PC, cellphones and MP3 players, Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft have developed a touch-interface for your skin. That’s really terrific! The ‘Skinput’ includes a micro-sized pico projector, which is embedded in an armband to beam an interface on the skin. But it actually uses an acoustic detector —which would match the sound frequencies with specific skin locations—to recognize which part  you’ve tapped. The revolutionary technology also supports wireless applications like Bluetooth.

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I bet most guys in front of the screen have taken these airplanes as miniature scale models. Of course you’re totally wrong, because they’re real airplanes taken using the Tilt-Shift Photography technology. Tilt-Shift is an innovative technique that uses special lenses to make ordinary scene seem much smaller in the pictures. Also improved by increasing color saturation and contrast to simulate the bright paint of scale models, the technique is particularly effective on buildings and vehicles.

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After a lengthy nine months of development, IBM has recently announced its new thin-film solar cell, which is made from cheaper materials while features an efficiency of 9.6% (40% higher than previous prototypes). The new thin film technology uses copper, tin, zinc, sulfur and selenium to take the place of traditional copper indium gallium selenide or cadmium telluride. Besides, the researchers also adopt a new kind of solvent- hydrazine, which is less costly and decomposes more easily. Instead of manufacturing the cells, IBM claims that they’d prefer to license out the new technology when the time comes. [Read the rest of this entry...]

What if you could change the window glass, the table surface, or even a piece of plastic into a sensitive touch screen? That sounds attractive, right? Then you’ll be quite interested in the thin film invented by Displax. Easily stuck onto common materials like the glass, plastic and wood, the film could turn most flat surfaces that are range from 3-inches to 120-inches into touch screens. It features a transparency rate of up to 98 percent and comes with an outstanding ability to detect 16 fingers on a 50-inch screen. The first thin film will be available in July. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Researchers at Nokia Research Center unveiled the ‘Mobile Radar’ during “Demo House 2010″. Using the same technology adopted by the police to give you a ticket for speeding, the device could measure an object’s distance, speed and direction. Therefore, you can control your cellphone via simple gestures without touching it. For example, you only need to wave your hands in front of your phone if you want to adjust its music player’s volume. Check out the video below to see how the ‘Mobile Radar’ is used. [Read the rest of this entry...]