Hewlett-Packard is betting that it can build computers whose functionality rests on the workings of individual molecules. It’s blue-sky research, but if it works, it will push computing far beyond the limits of silicon.

MIT researchers are developing new routing strategies for a wireless network that hops data in the roofs of the city.

Researchers from the University of California at Santa Barbara have constructed a device that can measure movements as small as one-thousandth of a nanometer, which is one-hundredth the size of a hydrogen atom.

MIT researchers have used a computer simulation to show that sending shock waves through photonic crystals could lead to faster and cheaper telecommunications devices, and more efficient solar cells.

A grass-roots group of leading computer scientists, backed by Intel and other heavyweight industrial sponsors, is working on replacing today’s Internet with a faster, more secure, and vastly smarter network: PlanetLab.

It often takes years to guide a building from conceptual sketch to completion. Along the way are myriad reviews, revisions, and modifications. Scale up to a city block, and the complexity mushrooms.

Speech recognition is a long-promised technology that’s finally beginning to deliver. But today’s best systems tend to fail when the speaker is in a noisy spot. To fix this problem, researchers are adding lip-reading to the mix.

Researchers are working to make entire chemistry labs on computer chip-size pieces of glass or plastic, which promises to automate, speed, and shrink the samples needed for testing and sensing.

Researchers from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have identified a microorganism that is particularly good at converting sugars to electricity under natural conditions.

The move is on to develop flexible, cheap, plastic electronics, but so far organic circuits have fallen far short of silicon chip performance.

More than a quarter of car crashes can be blamed on drivers who simply aren’t paying attention.
So while some experimental car-safety systems look out for approaching obstacles, tailgaters, and other hazards, a team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego, is developing a tool that keeps an eye on the driver to make sure his or her eyes are on the road.

To catch the future of payment schemes, go underground. Beneath the streets of the nation’s capital, more than 60 percent of peak-time riders on the Metro (Washington, DC’s subway network) have switched from magnetic-stripe tickets to “smart cards” embedded with memory chips and radio transponders.

One solution to humans seemingly insatiable appetite for energy is to let bacteria do most of the work.
Researchers from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have identified a microorganism that is particularly good at converting sugars to electricity under natural conditions.

Energy systems are all about converting relatively abundant forms of stored energy to forms of energy that can easily produce useful work, and doing so efficiently and without creating toxic waste.
Researchers from the University of Alberta in Canada have made a device that taps the same principles of charge separation used by fuel cells in order to directly convert water pressure to electricity.

The ultimate in transistors, which turn on and off in response to a flow of electricity, is a device that can be tripped by a single electron.
Researchers from Hokkaido University have put together an AND logic circuit made from four single-electron tunneling transistors.
The devices draw little power and are very small, which opens the way for making computers that are more powerful than is possible with ordinary transistors.