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Have you ever run into the issue of space on your desk? I’m sure that we all have at one time or another. While a USB hub might not take up a ton of room, every little bit helps right? That’s why this tiny little hub might be worth looking into.

What makes this gadget worthwhile isn’t actually its size, but rather the fact that it has built-in magnets. This way you can just stick it to the side of your PC case (provided that it is made up of some sort of metal). Since the rest of your USB ports are located on the back or front of your PC, why not have a few extra on the side or top? You can pick one up for just $12.

Source: GeekAlerts

Researchers at Toshiba in Japan have created a talking bot that can be used as a voice-activated universal remote in addition to formulating plots about terminating humans.

Our little robot will first observe your behavior and ask you questions in order to learn how to operate various remote controls.

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A first-generation commercial brain-computer interface (BCI) is being released by Emotiv Systems later this year. What does the future hold for BCI?

By 2050, and likely sooner, you will be able to buy a BCI device that records all your dreams in their entirety. This will be done in one of two ways. One method would be to use distributed nanobots less than a micrometer in diameter to spread throughout the brain and monitor the activation patterns of neurons. By this point, cognitive science will have advanced enough to know which neural activation patterns correspond to which sensory experiences. This has already been done with cats (using electrodes, not nanobots), where researchers led by scientist Garrett Stanley were able to extrapolate what a cat was seeing merely by monitoring the neurons of its visual cortex.
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It takes a lot of energy to keep the human body warm. So why not harness that power? The Berkeley Lab at UC Berkeley plans to lace silicon nanowires into a power-jacket. The excess heat from the human body would be used to recharge portable electronic devices, such as cell-phones, PSP’s and laptops.

The process being developed is called “electroless etching,” where rough silicon nanowires are synthesized with silver ions on a flat wafer surface. These wafers would be woven into coats and the excess warmth given off by the body would be transformed into energy.

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On March 19, Hitachi Maxell, Ltd. announced the development of new volume optical storage technology that can provide terabyte-level storage capacity in a compact device. Relying on unique nanoimprint technology, the company has succeeded in reducing the thickness of DVDs to 0.092 mm (92 micrometers) — which is 1/13th the thickness of current DVDs — while maintaining the standard capacity of 4.7 GB.

The system features what the company calls Stacked Volumetric Optical Disc (SVOD) technology, which consists of 100 ultra-thin optical discs (12-cm in diameter, the same as current DVDs) loaded into a 6.5-cm (2.5-inch) thick cartridge. The result is a compact optical disc library system (1/10th the conventional size) capable of combining random access memory and long-term storage.
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