| Blog - CES: Next Year's Touchscreens Will Go Right to the Edge and Taking the Risk out of Energy Efficiency Projects |
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For all their fashionable desirability, the sleek new tablets and countless other touchscreen devices unveiled at CES last week could still be easier on the eye. Cutting down the blocky black bezels that surround their strokable panels is one obvious strategy, but it's one that designers have not been totally free to pursue. That's about to change, though, says material's firm 3M, which predicts that next year's tablets will have screens that run much closer to their edges.A touchscreen has a transparent conducting mesh beneath its surface that detects changes in capacitance when your finger nears. At the screen's edges that mesh links to circuits that collect those signals for processing, and the space those circuits need is one of the limits on bezel size. 3M now says it has found a way to shrink them, by using silver rather than Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) to trace out both the honeycomb mesh behind the screen, and the electrodes at the panel's edge. [Read the full article] Smart phones are great at a lot of things, with one exception: Typing on a touch screen or a downsized keyboard is still frustrating compared to a full-size computer keyboard. That's probably why Google says that, even before the release of its new personalized Voice Search app for Android in mid-December, one in four mobile searches were already input by voice rather than from a keyboard.The improved Voice Search takes speech recognition to its next level: Google's servers will now log up to two years of your voice commands in order to more precisely parse exactly what you're saying.In tests on the new app, which appeared in Google's Android Market a week before Christmas, the app originally got about three out of five searches correct. After a few days, the ratio crept up to four out of five. [Read the full article] A biosignature common to both life on Earth and digital life could help to spot extra terrestrial organisms, say computer scientistsIn the early 1960s, the independent scientist James Lovelock worked as a consultant for NASA developing ways to analyse extraterrestrial atmospheres. This work led him to the dramatic conclusion that life would leave an indelible stamp on the chemical make up of any planet.Over billions of years, he said, the processes of life would create a fog of chemicals unlike anything that could form in an ordinary chemical equilibrium.He even went further to suggest that this atmosphere and the life it supported would form a kind of self-regulating system that could itself be thought of as a living organism--the Gaia hypothesis. Lovelock famously says that as soon as he saw the first analysis of the chemical make up of the Martian atmosphere, which is almost entirely carbon dioxide and nitrogen, he knew the planet could not support life. [Read the full article] 
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