University of Illinois

From Salon:

Cars with video displays on their sides that show up only when the video plays. Pocket-sized video screen roll-ups. Wall-hanging TVs -- across an entire wall -- that are as thin as cardboard. These are only some of the possible uses for a new form of LED display, reported today by a scientific team in Science magazine.

The University of Illinois, Urbana has not only met its goal of reducing energy consumption by 10 percent, but has saved a whopping $5 million as a result.  The college started the project to cut its energy use only 10 months ago, but they had given themselves a year to accomplish their goal.

The world's smallest fuel cell, measuring just 3mm x 3mm x 1mm (roughly 0.1 inches square by 0.04 inches tall), has been built by scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The tiny cell is able to produce about 1 milliamp at 0.7 volts for 30 hours.
The cell is so small that it simply eliminates some of the components typically found in larger fuel cells.

An Israeli entrepreneur with decades of experience in international education plans to start the first global, tuition-free Internet university, a nonprofit venture he has named the University of the People.

An Israeli entrepreneur with decades of experience in international education plans to start the first global, tuition-free Internet university, a nonprofit venture he has named the University of the People.

Nvidia on Tuesday announced a personal supercomputer that delivers the computing power of a cluster at 1/100th of the price and in the form of a standard desktop workstation. It is working with partners to release the GPU-based Tesla Personal Supercomputer.

Supercomputers, shared resources that consume hundreds of kilowatts of power and cost millions of dollars to build and maintain, are typically used to carry out scientific research. Nvidia is bringing this power to the desktop.

Data centers in the U.S. have created a carbon footprint that is larger than that of countries such as The Netherlands and Argentina. Internet companies such as Google are investing billions of dollars in setting up massive data centers and struggling to control soaring power usage. While Google may want its users to trawl thousands of terabytes of data and get their search results almost immediately, this activity gobbles up plenty of energy.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University have announced the development of a camera based on the biological design of the human eye. While it won't make a 10-megapixel digital camera obsolete, it may be a huge breakthrough in bioengineering.

U of I Prof. John Rogers, the team's head researcher, said, "This approach allows us to put electronics in places where we couldn't before." Researchers at Northwestern University and other academic institutions helped in the design and fabrication processes.

subhead>Artificial Sight