R&D spends Worldwide

2013 R&D magazine global funding forecast

Shorter is better

Half as long is twice as good

Point of Light

Nano focused light

Reach for the skies

How tall can a Lego tower get?

Top tech blunders of 2012

Top tech blunders of 2012

Space Travel is Harmful to the Brain

Cosmic radiation, a problem for Houston?

Metallic sandwiches boost efficiency

Gold mesh efficiency boost for organic solar cells

Get real?

Can we tell if we are living in a computer simulation?

Faster smaller

Last month's International Electronics Device Meeting attracted a large number of papers related to silicon replacement materials. Interestingly InGaAs seems to be increasingly in the frame as offering some solutions for the ITRS roadmap.

IBM predicts

Readers may like to note the five innovations that IBM believe will change our lives in the next five years. These relate to touch, sight, hearing, taste and smell. The later includes tiny sensors being embedded in computers or cell phones to analyze the molecules in your breath in order to detect the onset of illnesses. Are last year's predictions any nearer realisation?

Glow worms

Nature can be truly wonderful. A recent paper in Nature Nanotechnology might have the potential to replace epitaxy with worm excrement. The team at King’s College London put cadmium chloride and sodium tellurite in the soil eaten by standard, wild earthworms. Amazingly through processes in their guts the worms created nanometre diameter-sized luminescence dots of cadmium telluride. Worms excreting quantum dots could be both a whole new approach to making semiconductors. Probably not a good idea to try to up-scale this technique with research students.

Data flood

Despite the ending of the Mayan Calendar last month, we have survived into 2013. Back in ancient times Noah built a boat to survive a huge flood. A recent report on the Digital Universe in 2020 has left me wondering if we need a Noah for this digital age. Can mankind's end be to drown in data? Apparently the digital data supply reached 2.8 trillion gigabytes in 2012 meaning that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years. The digital universe is set to double every two years, by 2020 there will be  5200 gigabytes of data for everyone living on the planet. The report notes that less that 1% of data is currently used for any analysis and that only half the data that needs protection has adequate protection in place. We are clearly entering the age of 'Big Data' but as IBM have noted, 1 in 3 business leaders do not trust the information they use to make big decisions. 

As we start 2013 let us remember that data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding and understanding is not wisdom.