technologyreview.com: By Robert F. Service

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 ]

entrepreneur.com: By now, it’s clear that Google’s Android isn’t a cell phone. Instead, the Android Open Handset Alliance is an ambitious attempt to expand on Apple’s breakthrough into “commputers”–communication devices with real computing functionality.

The iPhone proved we’re more than ready for commputers–and we’re even willing to pay Apple prices. Android will provide a mass-market alternative: It will standardize commputers the way Windows and the x86 processor did PCs. That won’t be easy. [ read more ]

pcworld.com: GPS, electronic compasses, and new software will soon let our phones show us around town.

The United States leads the world in operating systems, Web 2.0 startups, and drunken teenage starlets. When it comes to cell phones, however, we might as well be Albania. With the exception of the iPhone, a truly game-changing (yet flawed) piece of technology, all the cool handsets appear first in Europe and Asia.

The main reason why we lag: Because people in Europe and Asia are more dependent on their cell phones than on their PCs, high-speed mobile broadband service has developed much faster. Buying a handset overseas is a lot like buying a computer–you can mix and match models and service providers. Here we’re still mostly locked in to one carrier per device. [ read more ]

mkaku.org: How advanced could they possibly be?

The late Carl Sagan once asked this question, “What does it mean for a civilization to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilization is a few hundred years old… an advanced civilization millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bush baby or a macaque.” [ read more ]

Seed Magazine: After decades of searching, scientists have found no trace of extraterrestrial intelligence. Now, some of them hope to make contact by broadcasting messages to the stars. Are we prepared for an answer? [ read more ]