CNET: Remember those X-ray glasses advertised in the back of comic books? Imagine a handheld camera that can reveal the unseen, inner structures of everything from concrete bridges to body parts.

Researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology under engineering professor Reza Zoughi have developed a patented device that can show the inner structures of objects in real time by using millimeter and microwave signals.

Potential applications include the detection of cancerous skin cells, termite damage to buildings, or concealed weapons at secure zones like airports.

Inhabitat: While it may seem like tattoos are the norm now, no one has ink like this. A team from the University of Illinois led by John Rogers has devised a method to actually install LED lights under the skin. The research, published today in Nature Materials, saw the team develop flexible arrays 2.5 ?m thick and 100 x 100 ?m square which are currently smaller than any commercially available array.

In their research, the team printed circuits "directly onto a rigid glass substrate and then transferred them to an inexpensive biocompatible polymer called poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) to create a mesh-like array of LEDs and photodetectors.”

In short, the univer... Read more »

One of the more successful bike sharing services was launched in Paris in 2007 by the company Vélib’. Now a similar service is coming to New York City with a mobile technology twist.

SoBi allows users to interact with the service through their mobile phones. One can find nearby bicycles tracked by GPS, then unlock those available bikes using a mobile app.

Instead of the pre-built and deployed docking stations employed by other services, SoBi bikes will have a "lock box” attached to the rear wheel of the bike which can be used to lock the bike to typical bike racks. The lock box also has a fair amount of technology built in: it connects the bike to a c... Read more »

Softpedia:  A team of particle physicists announces the creation of a refrigerator, in a quantum system made up of three individual qubits, or quantum bits.

These are the basic components of such a system, and they all respect the entanglement principle. This basically states that any change affecting one of the qubits will affect the other two immediately.

The researchers who designed and created this particular innovation say that they used nothing more than the basic principles of thermodynamics for the job, adding only a little twist at the end.

The basic operating principle in the quantum refrigerator is fairly ... Read more »