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The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA–E) works on a three-year cycle: Funded projects have three years to prove worthy--or not. Program directors who help fund projects such as Plants Engineered to Replace Petroleum ( PETRO ) or Batteries for Electrical Energy Storage in Transportation ( BEEST ) have three years to steer the research. And, after three years at the helm as the founding director of ARPA–E, mechanical engineer Arun Majumdar has announced that he will be stepping down in June.

Cloud start-ups have thrived because no major Big Tech company beat down their doors. That just changed. It's official: Google announced its new Google Drive service Tuesday—just one day after I wrote about how the Mountain View tech giant was moving into a territory wholly dominated by Box and Dropbox

Silicon is a unique material that has revolutionized electronics; it enables engineers to put millions of electrical devices onto a single chip. Replacing the electrical currents in this technology with beams of light could enable even faster information processing. Qian Wang at the A*STAR Data Storage Institute and co-workers1 have now designed a crucial component for such optical chips — a connector that links the silicon chip to an optical fiber.

Technology disasters happen.

Solid-state memory is seeing an increase in demand due to the emergence of portable devices such as tablet computers and smart phones. Spin-transfer torque magnetoresistive random-access memory (STT-MRAM) is a new type of solid-state memory that uses electrical currents to read and write data that are stored on magnetic moment of electrons

Solid-state memory is seeing an increase in demand due to the emergence of portable devices such as tablet computers and smart phones. Spin-transfer torque magnetoresistive random-access memory (STT-MRAM) is a new type of solid-state memory that uses electrical currents to read and write data that are stored on magnetic moment of electrons. Rachid Sbiaa and co-workers at the A*STAR Data Storage Institute have now enhanced the storage density of STT-MRAM by packing multiple bits of information into each of its memory cells.

Spin valves are essential building blocks in the magnetic sensors of read heads in hard disk drives. They consist of two magnetic layers separated by a non-magnetic layer and act as valves for electrons depending on the relative alignment of the magnetization (spin) in the magnetic layers. With the continuous push to boost the storage density of disk drives, it has become increasingly important to shield each individual sensor from the magnetic flux of adjacent bits

It just might be the best product Amazon has ever released. The burning questions is, should you get one? Inc.com columnist John Brandon weighs in.

(PhysOrg.com) -- If hydrogen is to ever to serve as an onboard energy carrier for the transportation industry, a material will be needed that can store large amounts of hydrogen at ambient temperature and pressure.

With the market for cloud-based enterprise services expected to grow to $35.6 billion by 2015, the battle for control of the clouds is heating up, with tech giants such as EMC, Apple, Cisco, IBM, and Microsoft elbowing for market share. But don't forget about scrappy underdog Box.net

The perfect data storage solution should offer fast access to data, maintain data in the absence of external power, and be able to withstand large numbers of read–write cycles. Phase-change random access memory (PCRAM), a type of non-volatile memory that uses the amorphous and crystalline states of phase-change materials for encoding data, can satisfy all of these criteria

These amazing bro-bots work in pairs and in three dimensions to vastly improve efficiency and organization--without incessant high-fiving! Watch a time-lapse video of them moving Diapers.com's entire stock to a new location in 36 hours flat! With new upgrades, Kiva Systems robots, the productivity-boosting, pick-and-pull helpers at the warehouses of Diapers.com, Walgreens, Gilt Groupe , and many others, are working in pairs--and in all three dimensions. And they're answering a huge new e-commerce demand

Ford is using organically derived materials all over their cars. Why?

Decades of optimization have made the electronic switch both tiny and efficient.

There are multiple nuclear reactors teetering on fault lines around the country, and most of them are surrounded by pools of water filled with still-very-radioactive spent fuel. The radioactivity from the now-exposed spent fuel at Fukushima is part of the reason why the situation there is so dire.