technologyreview.com: By Emily Singer

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 ]

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 ]

wired.com: By Charlie Sorrel

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 ]

wired.com: By Chuck Squatriglia

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 ]

cnet.com: by Leslie Katz

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 ]

tgdaily.com: By Wolfgang Gruener

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 ]

cnn.com: By Michael V. Copeland

Building the world’s first electric supercar was never going to be easy - even without the hubris, infighting, and mismanagement that nearly sent Tesla spinning off the road.

For Martin Eberhard, there were many obstacles on the path to building the ultimate electric sports car. There was the scientific challenge of creating a lithium ion battery pack stable enough to power a 2,650-pound vehicle. There was the belief that Americans would stick with their gas-guzzlers, no matter what the price of oil. And there was, of course, the considerable resistance in the venture capital community to funding heavy industry.

But for Eberhard, the ultimate indignity came in early June of this year. Just days before he was finally supposed to take possession of his Tesla Roadster, a gray beauty with orange racing stripes that he had devoted the past five years of his life to building, a technician who had been driving it on the 101 freeway relayed some bad news.

[ read more ]

mises.org: by Matthew Beller

In previous articles (here and here), I explored the economy and monetary scheme of Second Life, an online three-dimensional virtual world where users can create virtual goods and services and exchange them with one another. I also discussed issues surrounding the increasingly interventionist stance that Linden Lab, Inc., the creator of Second Life, has taken toward its economy.

In the field of macroeconomic theory, the Austrian view is distinct from other schools of economic thought due to its emphasis on the role of capital. In attempting to extend the application of Austrian economics to virtual economies, it will be a worthwhile exercise to explore the nature of capital that exists within Second Life and observe how it is evolving. [ read more ]

belfasttelegraph.co.uk Futuristic concept cars are everywhere at the Geneva Motor Show. Shame you can’t drive one. Shame you’ll never be able to buy one.

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 ]

independent.co.uk: From a book club taking on Amazon to the loans firm shaking up banking – Tim Walker meets the creators of the next digital superbrands

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 ]