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Tag Archive for computing

Ambient Energy

 

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/538031/first-demonstration-of-a-surveillance-camera-powered-by-ordinary-wi-fi-broadcasts/

Electronics bleed.  I mean, if energy serves as the lifeblood of any bit of tech, then I think we can make that metaphor work, right?  There is energy all around us, there is the solar energy that gets dumped on our planet by the tanker-load every minute of every day, there is the lost energy in the form of heat that bleeds from our car engines as they sit, cooling with no more than an occasional crackle or ping, in our garages at night.  There is the extra kinetic energy lost when your fingers mis-type letters on a keyboard, or when you idly spin your office chair around in circles.

As we move forward, we are going to need to think differently about recapturing energy, there are going to be a host of inventions, big and small, that will help us to achieve even greater levels of efficiency.

DNA computing and live-drives

One of the really cool things about living systems is the way they *want* to work.  There are thousands of strange little redundancies and stopgaps that kick in when something doesn’t work right, or when it works *way* too right.  DNA, given the right set of conditions, WANTS to zip itself up, it’s almost like it’s happiest in a double-helix, like that is it’s true base state, the place it always tries to return to.

Which makes alternate uses for DNA so incredibly cool.  Yes, these are the instruction sets of life, but they don’t have to be just that.  People have been searching for the next thing in computing, the next really big jump forward for quite a while now.  We’ve seen quantum computing and crystal computing, now it looks like we might be in a position to see biologic computing as well.

http://www.hephaestusproject.com/blog/2013/02/03/infinitely-expandable-computing-using-three-dimensional-configurable-nand-gates/#.UQ32xqV1GuI