Jeff Lichtman hopes to elucidate brain development and disease with new technologies that illuminate the web of neural circuits.

Displayed on Jeff Lichtman’s computer screen in his office at Harvard University is what appears to be an elegant drawing of a tree. Thin multicolored lines snake upward in parallel, then branch out in twos and threes, their tips capped by tiny leaves. Lichtman is a neuroscientist, and the image is the first comprehensive wiring diagram of part of the mammalian nervous system. The lines denote axons, the long, hairlike extensions of nerve cells that transmit signals from one neuron to the next; the leaves are synapses, the connections that the axons make with other neurons or muscle cells. [ read more ]

Alex Zettl’s tiny radios, built from nanotubes, could improve everything from cell phones to medical diagnostics.

If you own a sleek iPod Nano, you’ve got nothing on Alex Zettl. The physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have come up with a nanoscale radio, in which the key circuitry consists of a single carbon nanotube.

Any wireless device, from cell phones to environmental sensors, could benefit from nanoradios. Smaller electronic component­s, such as tuners, would reduce power consumption and extend battery life. Nanoradios could also steer wireless communications into entirely new realms, including tiny devices that navigate the bloodstream to release drugs on command. [ read more ]

This could be the 2008 sartorial equivalent of that 1980s classic, the Piano Tie, but it is certainly a lot more useful. Researchers at Iowa State University have glued solar panels onto the symbol of male corporate oppression and hooked it up to a Nokia phone, which sits in a handy pocket at the back of the tie. [ read more ]

Practicality is the last thing anyone considers when designing concept cars. A car made of glass? Windows like gun slits? An automakers’ lawyers would kill those ideas faster than General Motors is killing Hummer.

But practicality isn’t the point. Concept cars are flights of fantasy carrying auto design into the future. Since our future will be a place where a gallon of gas costs more than a gallon of Scotch, the students at Royal College of Art designed their cars that run on things like electricity and algal fuel. [ read more ]

From the plains of southern New Mexico, we bring you a story of headset-wearing cows. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are teaming up to remotely corral cattle using a wireless device that sends sound straight into the bovines’ ears. HDTV-watching pigs can’t be far behind.

The solar-powered “Ear-A-Round” is a naugahyde “helmet” held in place by the cow’s ears. Atop the holster sits an electronics device hooked to sound-transmitting stereo earphones and containing a GPS unit that could let farmers monitor the animals’ whereabouts from afar. [ read more ]

Big TVs always have been expensive. If you are looking beyond mainstream you are quickly in the five figures, which can be hit with 63”-65” plasma and LCD TVs. High-end premium TVs such as Sony’s 70” Bravia XBR currently sell for about $30,000, while Panasonic’s 103” plasma TV has held the top spot with about $70,000 for more than a year. Adding inches on top of that will cost you quite some cash, at the tune of $23,000 per inch. [ read more ]

Physicist Marin Soljacic is working toward a world of wireless electricity.

In the late 19th century, the realization that electricity could be coaxed to light up a bulb prompted a mad dash to determine the best way to distribute it. At the head of the pack was inventor Nikola Tesla, who had a grand scheme to beam elec­tricity around the world. Having difficulty imagining a vast infrastructure of wires extending into every city, building, and room, Tesla figured that wireless was the way to go. He drew up plans for a tower, about 57 meters tall, that he claimed would transmit power to points kilometers away, and even started to build one on Long Island. Though his team did some tests, funding ran out before the tower was completed. The promise of airborne power faded rapidly as the industrial world proved willing to wire up. [ read more ]

Another international motor show, another ludicrous Land Rover. This week it is Geneva and the LRX, a supposed “diesel hybrid” which cranks the company’s now- familiar Judge Dredd concept-car aesthetic to a new pitch of childish aggression. Ooh, isn’t she butch and frowny! A cross between an Audi A3 and an Orc, the LRX is the work of someone who spends far too much of his (well, it’s not a “her”, is it?) time hunched in front of a games console watching his avatar torture unfeasibly buxom she-goblins. : [ read more ]

Zopa: Where do you want to go today? The future’s bright. I’m lovin’ it. These are the mantras with which our brands have mesmerised us. Microsoft and McDonald’s aren’t just consumer products – they’re lifestyle choices. But all that is about to change. Or so says Robert Jones, director of brand consultancy Wolff Olins. He and his colleagues recently identified some of the next generation of brands. “The creation of myths around 20th-century brands is under threat,” Jones explains. “We’re too well-informed and too sceptical to believe in image. What brands have to do in the future is not create a big idea that people buy into, but be useful for people. The days of pure consumerism in the classic economic sense are over. [ read more ]

They range from Yves Saint Laurent’s Downtown tote bag to the Nintendo Wii, and from the Parisian self-service bicycle-hire scheme to a kitchen bin whose lid hovers on its rim when opened, and a felt chair that stacks noiselessly and cannot be used as a weapon, designed for a Swedish prison. These are just some of the 100 creations nominated by a panel of experts including the designer Wayne Hemingway, fashion photographer Nick Knight, and director of the Design Museum Deyan Sudjic, for the first Brit Insurance Designs Awards. [ read more ]