文章资讯
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- 2015-05-04 'Silicon Beach' brings tech boom to Los Angeles
- So long Silicon Valley. These days entrepreneurs and engineers are flocking to a place better known for surfing waves than the Web. Amid the palm trees and purple sunsets of the Southern California coastline, techies have built "Silicon Beach."
In the past few years Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and YouTube have opened offices on the west side of Los Angeles from Santa Monica south to Venice and Playa del Rey. They are joined by hundreds of startups including Hulu, Demand Media and Snapchat, which nixed a $3 billion takeover offer from Facebook. Major Hollywood players like The Walt Disney Co. - See Details
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- 2015-05-04 California startup unveils gun technology for cops
- A Silicon Valley startup has developed technology to let dispatchers know when a police officer's weapon has been fired.
The product by Yardarm Technologies would notify dispatchers in real time when an officer's gun is taken out of its holster and when it's fired. It can also track where the gun is located and in what direction it was fired. - See Details
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- 2015-05-04 Startup tries to 'Poynt' stores in new direction
- A Silicon Valley startup is hoping an upcoming transition to smarter credit and debit cards will persuade millions of U.S. merchants to buy savvier payment terminals for their stores, too.
That's the point of Poynt, a versatile terminal built to take advantage of rules requiring stores to be equipped to handle payment cards with computer chips by October 2015 to avoid financial liability for fraudulent transactions. The chip-based cards are considered to be more secure than the ones with magnetic stripes that have been the U.S. standard for decades. - See Details
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- 2015-05-04 Can private space survive two explosions in four days? (Update)
- Fiery failures are no stranger to the space game. It's what happens when you push the boundaries of what technology can do, where people can go. And it happened again to Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo.
In the past decade, the space industry has tried to go from risky and government-run to routine private enterprise—so routine that if you have lots of money you can buy a ticket on a private spaceship and become a space tourist. - See Details
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- 2015-05-04 Combining 'Tinkertoy' materials with solar cells for increased photovoltaic efficiency
- Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have received a $1.2 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy's SunShot Initiative to develop a technique that they believe will significantly improve the efficiencies of photovoltaic materials and help make solar electricity cost-competitive with other sources of energy.
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- 2015-05-04 NSA director: US needs Silicon Valley's expertise
- U.S. intelligence depends on Silicon Valley innovation for technologies that strengthen the Internet and staff to provide national cybersecurity, National Security Agency director Mike Rogers told Stanford University professors and students on Monday.
While the federal government is never going to match Silicon Valley salaries, "we are going to give you the opportunity to do some neat stuff, things you probably aren't going to be able to do anywhere else," Rogers said. - See Details
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- 2015-04-30 13-year-old entrepreneur raises VC funding for Braille printer
- Last December, seventh-grader Shubham Banerjee asked his parents how blind people read. A Silicon Valley tech professional, dad Neil Banerjee told his son to "Google it."
So Shubham did, and with a few Internet searches he learned about Braille, the tactile writing system used by the blind, and Braille printers, which, to the 12-year-old's shock, cost thousands of dollars. One school science fair victory, a few national accolades, $35,000 of his parents' savings and a visit to the White House later, Shubham today is the founder of Palo Alto startup Braigo Labs, which aims to become the first purveyor of low-cost, compact Braille printers. - See Details
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- 2015-04-30 Tim Cook's announcement could spur Silicon Valley to push for social change
- Apple chief executive Tim Cook's announcement last week that he is gay caps years of efforts by an industry that has long championed gay rights at home. It also may help propel Silicon Valley to the forefront of global struggles for equality, underscoring the reach tech powerhouses have not only with their gadgets and software but with their positions on heated social issues.
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- 2015-04-30 SolaRoad: World's first solar cycle path to open in the Netherlands
- Imtech, in conjunction with the Province of Noord-Holland, Ooms Civiel, has developed the world's first solar road located in Krommwnie, Holland. The solar cycle path will be connected to the national grid to meet increasing energy demands and to advance of renewable energy use in Holland. It will be open to the public on Wednesday the 12th November.
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- 2015-04-30 Space: The final frontier in silicon chemistry
- Silicon, which is one of the most common elements in the Earth's crust, is also sprinkled abundantly throughout interstellar space. The only way to identify silicon-containing molecules in the far corners of the cosmos - and to understand the chemistry that created them - is to observe through telescopes the electromagnetic radiation the molecules emit.
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- 2015-04-30 Microtubes create cozy space for neurons to grow, and grow fast
- Tiny, thin microtubes could provide a scaffold for neuron cultures to grow so that researchers can study neural networks, their growth and repair, yielding insights into treatment for degenerative neurological conditions or restoring nerve connections after injury.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Wisconsin-Madison created the microtube platform to study neuron growth. They posit that the microtubes could one day be implanted like stents to promote neuron regrowth at injury sites or to treat disease. - See Details
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- 2015-04-30 Scientists convert agricultural waste to high-value silicon carbide
- Around the globe, billions of pounds of agricultural waste are generated every year. Scientists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) are exploring ways to convert this waste into high-value silicon carbide that can be used for a variety of electronic and structural applications.
Agricultural waste products, such as rice husks, corn stalks, corncobs, sorghum leaves, wheat chaff, peanut shells, and other shells and residues are considered to have no value and are often plowed into the fields. They are sometimes disposed of by burning, which creates environmental hazards by the release of ash, CO2, and nano-particles into the air. - See Details
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- 2015-04-30 Self-driving cars: safer, but what of their morals (Update)
- Drivers make split-second decisions based on instinct and a limited view of the dangers around them. The cars of the future—those that can drive themselves thanks to an array of sensors and computing power—will have near-perfect perception and react based on preprogrammed logic.
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- 2015-04-30 Tomorrow's degradable electronics
- When the FM frequencies are removed in Norway in 2017, all old-fashioned radios will become obsolete, leaving the biggest collection of redundant electronics ever seen – a mountain of waste weighing something between 25,000 and 30,000 tonnes.
The same thing is happening with today's mobile telephones, PCs and tablets, all of which are constantly being updated and replaced faster than the blink of an eye. The old devices end up on waste tips, and even though we in the west recover some materials for recycling, this is only a small proportion of the whole. - See Details
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- 2015-04-30 Tech, medical sectors mixed on Obama's immigration changes
- Nestled in President Barack Obama's plan to overhaul aspects of the US immigration system are tweaks to rules for high-skilled workers long frustrated with hurdles to getting work or residency approval.
The tech and medical sectors especially have for years complained of difficulties in recruiting talent from overseas, with many potential candidates subject to protracted bureaucratic delays. - See Details
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- 2015-04-30 Knightscope K5 on security patrol roams campus
- A Mountain View, California-based company called Knightscope designs and builds 5-feet, 300-pound security guards called K5, but anyone scanning last week's headlines has already heard about them, with the news that Microsoft was deploying a number of autonomous robot security guards to patrol its Silicon Valley campus. The company making the K5, Knightscope, refers to the guard as an "autonomous data machine."
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- 2015-04-29 Lengthening the life of high capacity silicon electrodes in rechargeable lithium batteries
- A new study will help researchers create longer-lasting, higher-capacity lithium rechargeable batteries, which are commonly used in consumer electronics. In a study published in the journal ACS Nano, researchers showed how a coating that makes high capacity silicon electrodes more durable could lead to a replacement for lower-capacity graphite electrodes.
"Understanding how the coating works gives us an indication of the direction we need to move in to overcome the problems with silicon electrodes," said materials scientist Chongmin Wang of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. - See Details
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- 2015-04-29 Hollywood is giving tech startups the star treatment
- Japanese technology entrepreneur Ken Fukazawa was in San Francisco in March when his geeky friends told him about something awesome coming up in Los Angeles.
Walt Disney Co. was opening its doors to selected startups for a summer of intensive mentoring. Fukazawa couldn't think of anything better to help his company grow than the brand that he had fallen in love with as a child. His three-person company, Tyffon, moved into Disney offices in June, ready to improve a suite of apps that add spooky animations to photos. - See Details
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- 2015-04-29 New woes may put brakes on Uber, ride-share growth
- Uber, the ride-sharing service and Silicon Valley superstar startup, has hit problems around the world which threaten to put the brakes on its spectacular growth.
Uber has long drawn scorn from established taxi operators in many cities, and regulators from New Delhi to Portland, Oregon, have been clamping down on its operations. At the same time, the company has seen its image tarnished by executives' gaffes and concerns on privacy. - See Details
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- 2015-04-29 Researchers capture microimages of micropillar P/N junctions on a semiconductor
- By equipping a semiconductor, with which you can convert sunlight into electricity, with micropillars, you can increase the surface and efficiency. Creating a so-called P/N junction in these micropillars, which follows the 3D structure of the surface, is essential in this to be able to properly separate the positive and negative charge in the structure. Scientists of the UT research institute MESA+ have for the very first time succeeded in accurately visualizing these P/N junctions in semiconductors in 3D.
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- 2015-04-29 Tech summit addresses industry's lack of diversity
- Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson spent most of this year pressuring the technology industry into facing up to the glaring scarcity of women, blacks and Latinos at companies renowned as great places to work.
Now comes Diversity 2.0—finding ways to reverse a deep-rooted problem that isn't going to be as easy to fix as writing new lines of code for a computer bug. - See Details
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- 2015-04-29 Gangnam becomes hot spot for Korean startups
- The uber-trendy Seoul neighborhood made famous by the "Gangnam Style" K-pop hit is known for status-conscious people, plastic surgery clinics and Ivy League prep schools. Now it's making a name as a bustling center for tech startups.
Many young South Koreans, some educated overseas, are going to Gangnam to start mobile or Internet businesses. Venture capitalists from Silicon Valley and Japan are opening offices in the area to find promising Korean services or apps to bet their money on. Hardly a day passes in Gangnam without a meeting or event related to startup businesses. - See Details
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- 2015-04-29 Attosecond laser provides first 'movie' of fast electrons jumping band-gap of semiconductor
- The entire semiconductor industry, not to mention Silicon Valley, is built on the propensity of electrons in silicon to get kicked out of their atomic shells and become free. These mobile electrons are routed and switched though transistors, carrying the digital information that characterizes our age.
An international team of physicists and chemists based at the University of California, Berkeley, has for the first time taken snapshots of this ephemeral event using attosecond pulses of soft x-ray light lasting only a few billionths of a billionth of a second. - See Details
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- 2015-04-29 In Curiosity Hacked, children learn to make, not buy
- With her right hand, my 8-year-old daughter, Kalian, presses the red-hot soldering iron against the circuit board. With her left hand, she guides a thin, tin wire until it's pressing against both the circuit board and the tip of the iron.
The tin begins to melt. There is a wisp of smoke, and a metallic smell drifts back to where I am standing behind her, a bit nervously, sweat running down my forehead onto my safety goggles (which I have always detested). I am ready to pounce if that soldering iron slips and touches her skin. - See Details
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- 2015-04-29 Ag-tech could change how the world eats
- Investors and entrepreneurs behind some of the world's newest industries have started to put their money and tech talents into farming - the world's oldest industry - with an audacious agenda: to make sure there is enough food for the 10 billion people expected to inhabit the planet by 2100, do it without destroying the world and make a pretty penny along the way.
Silicon Valley is pushing its way into every stage of the food-growing process, from tech tycoons buying up farmland to startups selling robots that work the fields to hackathons dedicated to building the next farming app. - See Details
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- 2015-04-29 Engineers use liquid drops to make solids stiffer
- Engineers at Yale University have discovered that the stiffness of liquid drops embedded in solids has something in common with Goldilocks: While large drops of liquids are softer than the solid that surrounds them, extremely tiny drops of liquid can actually be stiffer than certain solids. But when they're "just right," the liquid drops have the exact same stiffness as the surrounding solid.
The key is a liquid's tendency to have as small a surface as possible—a contractile force known as "surface tension" that, for example, allows a cup of water to be filled slightly above the brim without spilling. - See Details
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- 2015-04-28 Industrial clusters fuel economies, according to study
- Experts have long theorized that having a cluster of firms within a given industry helps a region's economy grow. Now a study co-authored by an MIT professor shows empirically that clusters of almost all kinds help drive overall economic growth in multiple ways, from job creation and development of intellectual property to the formation of new industries.
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- 2015-04-28 Chattanooga touts transformation into Gig City
- A city once infamous for the smoke-belching foundries that blanketed its buildings and streets with a heavy layer of soot is turning to lightning-fast Internet speeds to try to transform itself into a vibrant tech hub.
Through a combination of political will and federal stimulus money, 175-year-old Chattanooga became the first U.S. city to broadly offer a gigabit per second internet speeds—nearly 50 times the national broadband average. - See Details
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- 2015-04-28 Researcher identifies defects in solar cells made of silicon
- Since he was a teenager, engineer Sergio Castellanos had the desire to study abroad to prepare and do research in the best laboratories, particularly on solar energy. With six years of study in the United States, first at the University of Arizona and now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, his dream has come true: "I am working on defects found on silicon and their impact on the efficiency of solar cells made with this material," he says. This research is toward his doctorate from MIT.
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- 2015-04-28 China smartphone maker Xiaomi wants a bite of Apple
- When the charismatic founder of upstart Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi took the stage at an Internet conference, he was open about his ambition: world domination.
"In the next five to 10 years, Xiaomi has the opportunity to become the world's number one smartphone company," Lei Jun told the Chinese-organised World Internet Conference. - See Details