All Our Technology

Beware!  Falling gasoline prices are hitting the residual values of used hybrids and  electrics -- hard. The influx of used small cars set to return to the market over  the next few years is going to make matters worse. Kelley Blue Book projects the collective residual value of 2016 hybrid and electric  vehicles sold in January and February to be 29.5 percent after 36 months.  That is 4.1 percentage points lower than the 36-month residual projection  it set for similar vehicles sold a year earlier. Low gasoline  prices played a big role in trimming those values, said Eric Ibara, director  of residual values at Kelley Blue Book. In 2012 -- when the average price of  gasoline nationwide was $3.60 a gallon, according to AAA's website -- KBB  projected that gasoline prices five years out would be in the range of $3.50-$4  a gallon, Ibara said. KBB's current  prediction puts gasoline in the $2-$3 a gallon range in five years...

It's  mid-afternoon and the Intramural (IM) Building's new fitness center on the University Park campus of Penn State is empty. The clang of dumbbells and whir of treadmills have subsided for the day and the student staff  have  left their posts. In well-worn sneakers and T-shirts, Mark Lozinski and Josh Davis, both coordinators of athletic programs for Penn State Strength and Fitness, make their rounds, checking a couple misbehaving ellipticals.   The space is quiet now, but with the influx of more than 4,000 mostly first-year students in East Halls next door the gym will be one of the busiest on campus again tomorrow. "We expect up to 3,000 students to come through every day during the semester,” Lozinski said. "We're very excited for the community to really start to use this facility, which is now the newest and most technologically advanced on campus." As former Penn State student trainers, Davis and Lozinski remember a time when gyms were design...

If genius is 99 per cent perspiration, then that’s a lot of valuable knowledge coming out of our pores. Capturing this is the idea behind a wearable sensor that measures the molecular make-up of your sweat to provide real-time information about your fitness and health. Sweat contains a wealth of information about your physiology. Wearable sensors have already been used to measure individual components of sweat  such as sodium, but this is just the tip of what’s possible, says Ali Javey at the University of California, Berkeley: “If you want to get any meaningful information about your health condition, it’s very important to be able to analyse multiple chemicals at once.” Javey’s team  combined tiny plastic sensors with flexible silicon-based circuits on a band that can be worn around the forehead or wrist. It measures glucose, lactate, potassium and sodium ions, and can transmit the data via Bluetooth wireless technology for more than an hour ...

The Next Big thing? The  memristor , a microscopic component that can "remember"  electrical states even when turned off. It's expected to be far cheaper and faster than flash storage.  A theoretical concept since 1971, it has now been built in labs and is already starting to revolutionize  everything we know about computing, possibly making flash memory, RAM, and even hard drives  obsolete within a decade. The memristor is just one of the incredible technological advances sending shock waves through the world of computing. Other innovations in the works are more down-to-earth, but they also carry watershed significance. From the technologies that finally make  paperless offices  a reality  to those that deliver  wireless power , these advances should make your humble PC a far different  beast come the turn of the decade. In the following sections, we outline the basics of 15 upcoming technologies, with  predictions on...

Scientists in China have developed a flexible, rollable, foldable battery inspired by traditional Chinese calligraphy involving ink on paper. Worldwide demand for  flexible electronics  is rapidly growing, because the technology could enable such things as video screens and solar panels to bend, roll and fold. These flexible electronics require batteries that are equally flexible to power them, but conventional batteries are too rigid and bulky to be used in flexible electronics. Chinese scientists, however, have developed a flexible lithium-based battery that is based on Chinese brush painting. [ 5 Crazy Technologies That Are Revolutionizing Biotech ]     Lithium-ion batteries power most portable devices, from smartphones to tablet computers to laptops. However, so-called lithium-air batteries could, in principle, hold five to 10 times as much energy as a lithium-ion battery of the same weight. This means that lithium-air batteries could theoretical...