Zhenqiang Ma, a University of Wisconsin-Madison electrical engineer, has developed a key electronic component that could allow mobile phone users to get 25 percent more talk time out of each battery charge.

Since the power amplifier (the component that boosts the strength of an electrical signal before sending it to a device’s antenna) does the heavy work when it comes to communicating via a mobile phone, it also devours the most battery power. And as more electrical current converges in the center of the power amplifier, it heats up and excessive heat lowers power amplification.

Ma's device allows for more uniform heat dissipation, which means stronger signal and less wasted battery power.

Ma says his technology could be on the market as early as the end of this year.

From Technology Review.

Puzzled by plants ability to turn over 20 per cent of sun energy into electricity, Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists are working on a way to combine the solar genius of plants and the computational genius of computers

Researchers have extracted proteins from spinach cells that convert light to energy and squeeze them between two layers of conducting material to generate energy.

The trick was to "convince" the delicate spinach proteins to believe that they are still inside the mother plant and so shouldn't immediately begin to decompose.

So far, the biobattery can generate current for only three weeks -- and it is only 12-per-cent efficient.

From Globe & Mail and Science News for Kids.

Last month, on the flight from Munich to San Francisco, two Apple managers killed time with iChat AV, iSight, 17-inch PowerBook G4, an Airbus and an orbiting satellite.

In was probably the first in-air commercial videoconference, Kurt Knight, on the ground in Cupertino, hooked up over iChat AV with Eric Zelenka, returning to San Francisco from Munich, by leveraging Lufthansa’s new wireless high-speed broadband connection service.

Found on Hotspot.

Fujitsu Laboratories are working on a new technology to "invisibly" embed numeric characters (such as a telephone number or a URL conversion code) in a printed colour image.

The picture can be taken into a phone camera and decoded by specific software for the user to make a phone call or access a Web site.

This technology would enable users to make a phone call by reading a phone number from a picture on a business card; download ring melody data for their mobile phone by scanning a picture on a CD jacket; collect information on a shop while reading about it in a magazine.

Fujitsu still has to consider when and how to commercialize the technology.

From NE Asia.

Net-2Com and Fujitsu have developped a prototype of the world's first wireless IP phone switching seamlessly between wireless LAN and public wireless networks.

More in Press Release, via Hotspot.

NEC research unit has developed a vegetable-based plastic that has the ability to "remember" its past shapes and change them according to users' wishes.

Besides, the highly biodegradable material dissolves easily underground and could thus help solving the problem of the disposal of massively produced waste caused by plastics used in computers and other products.

From The Japan Times.
Related entry: Eco-friendly 3G antenna.