Gizmag News - EADS Airbike made of steel-strength nylon

Welcome to the newsletter for gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine. These are the headlines for March the 10th, 2011. EADS Airbike made of steel-strength nylon Engineers from the Bristol wing of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) have announced the development of the first bicycle using Additive Layer Manufacturing (ALM) technology. The manufacturing process involves "growing" the components from a fine nylon powder, similar in concept to 3D printing. Said to be as strong as steel, the end product is claimed to contain only a fraction of the source material used by traditional machining, and the process results in much less waste. It also has the potential to take manufacture to precisely where the component or product is needed, instead of being confined to factories often located a great distance away. Read More Warner Bros. becomes first studio to offer movie rentals through Facebook Warner Bros. is hoping to leverage the popularity of social networking juggernaut Facebook by becoming the first Hollywood studio to offer movies directly through the site. Facebook users will be able to purchase and rent titles from the Warner Bros. catalog using Facebook Credits and play, pause and resume the movies through their Facebook account for up to 48 hours from the time of purchase. An initial test offering of The Dark Night to fans who “Liked” said movie on Facebook can now rent the title through the movie’s official Facebook page, with additional titles to be made available in the coming months. Read More Intel 510 series SATA 6 Gbps SSDs with 500 MB/s read and 315 MB/s write As solid-state drives (SSDs) continue to drop in price they also continue to improve in performance. A perfect example is Intel's latest SSD 510 Series, which improves upon the company's previous X25-M SSD by adding SATA 6 Gbps performance to take advantage of the higher SATA bus interfaces found on recently introduced 2nd Generation Core processor-based platforms. This allows the 510 Series to boast sequential read speeds of up to 500 MB/s – double that of Intel's current 3 Gbps SSDs – and sequential write speeds of up to 315 MB/s – more than triple that of its current SSDs. Read More Behold the beast: the AMD Radeon HD 6990 graphics card Not too long ago, we were all salivating at the release of NVIDIA's GTX 580 graphics card and scrambling to make the most of the world's fastest Direct X GPU. Now AMD has bounced back with the announcement that its new Radeon HD 6990 card has beaten NVIDIA's 3DMark 11 performance score in industry standard benchmark testing for a single graphics card. AMD says that its new powerhouse GPU is able to automatically unlock higher clock speeds, features technology aimed at giving gamers the best possible visual experience, and supports a number of different display options, including expanding the field of view over five monitors with Eyefinity technology. Read More Stretchable electronics get the heart back on track When a patient has an arrhythmia (an irregular heartbeat), cardiologists will often treat the disorder by inserting two tube-like catheters into the patient’s heart. The first catheter is used for mapping out the heart tissue, identifying the location of cells that are causing the arrhythmia. The second catheter, which has an electrode on the end, is then directed to those locations, where it kills the aberrant cells in a process known as ablation. Scientists have recently developed a single catheter with added stretchable electronics, however, that does both jobs in one step. Read More Student-designed system could transmit data and power through submarine hulls Given the deepwater working conditions endured by submarines, one of the last things most people would want to do is drill holes through their hulls. That’s exactly what is necessary, however, to allow power and data to flow to and from audio and other sensors mounted on the exterior of the vessels. Not only do these holes present a leakage risk, but they also diminish the hull’s structural integrity, and the submarine must be hoisted into drydock in order for any new sensors to be added. Now, a doctoral student at New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) has come up with a method of using ultrasound to transmit power and data wirelessly through a sub’s thick metal hull – no holes required. Read More Olivetti announces Italy's first Android Tablet: the OliPad 100 My very first electronic typewriter was made by Olivetti. It was a sturdy beast and quite the reliable performer. So, it's good to see that the Telecom Italia-owned company is keeping up with the times as it announces the release of Italy's first tablet computer – the OliPad 100. The 10-inch Android tablet is powered by NVIDIA's Tegra 2 platform, has Bluetooth, 3G, Wi-Fi, and sports SD card expansion if its 16GB of onboard memory proves to be too restrictive. Read More Nanotech to boost solid state hydrogen storage Hydrogen has great potential as a clean fuel source for powering our cars and airplanes, but it also poses some big hurdles – in particular, how to store it. Making practical use of hydrogen in gas or liquid form raises difficulties in terms of volume and pressurization – a hydrogen gas tank for a car would need to be around four times larger than current petroleum tanks. Another possible solution is the use of solid state hydrogen and the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS), along with the University of Glasgow, hope to boost this approach by developing a new storage system using materials modified at the nanoscale that receive and release the hydrogen at a faster rate. Read More Charlie Sheen’s meteoric rise to Twitter God status - after one week he's 58th with a bullet Charlie Sheen it seems, does not do things by halves. Within a week of opening his Twitter account, he’s being followed by 2.2 million people and creating some serious personal "share of attention" in the entertainment world. He's poised to race past Time magazine, People, the New York Times and the NBA and Irish bookmakers are now taking bets on just how far Charlie's record-breaking following will grow. Amazingly, the oddson a range of special bets and achievements are quite short that Sheen will be close to the top 10 most powerful Twitter opinion makers in the world - perhaps even at number one. Read More If you would like to refer this newsletter to a friend or colleague, please point them at our free subscription page. Please don't try to forward this email, as the formatting is unlikely to remain intact. And don't worry, we don't share email addresses. Please read our privacy policy if you are concerned. Watch for more of the best new innovations, ideas and practical technologies in your inbox. You are receiving this email because you signed up for our daily newsletter at http://www.gizmag.com. If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter please click here to unsubscribe. COPYRIGHT GIZMAG (C) 2011