While JAYS’ q-JAYS claimed to be the “smallest earphones on the market” just days ago, we doubt Klipsch would be willing to agree. Turns out, the firm’s IMAGE earbuds are also proclaiming that they are the “world’s smallest and lightest in-ear earphones,” and while we haven’t seen the ruler busted out just yet, we fear it may be needed to settle this obvious conflict. Regardless, these ‘buds utilize patent-pending Contour Ear Gels, KG926 balanced micro-armatures, aluminum bodies that are finished in anodized copper, and come with 50-inch long vinyl cables. Ready for a November release, the IMAGE earphones will ring up at $349 and will arrive with a carrying case and pouch, a 1/4-inch / airline adapter, five sets of ear gels, and a cleaning tool to boot. Click on for a literal hands-on shot.

Klipsch made tiny waves with their original Image headphones, saying they were the world’s smallest. We took their word for it and moved along. Now Klipsch has given up on the size game with its new X5 headphones, boasting that the 2mm-bigger X5 headphones are “light but heavy in sound.” Anyway, the Image X5 use a full-range armature driver, tuned bass-reflex system, and sport a long-enough 50-inch cable. The housing is electroplated aluminum and Klipsch says the black “tail” reduces cable stress and dampens cable noise. The X5 is iPhone compatible and comes in at a more wallet-friendly (but still slightly alarming) $249 later this month. For that price you’ll get the headphones, carrying pouch, airplane adapter, five multi-sized ear gels, and an ear gel cleaning tool.

It’s not always a question of why — sometimes why not will suffice. The rolling bot above relies upon the Mindstorms NXT light sensor’s ability to read the contrasting colors on the iPhone display. After some simple programming and DIY tomfoolery you can drive the robot from the comforts of your WiFi-enabled web browser. Overkill? Oh hells yeah, but at least now your iPhone will serve a purpose after Monday. See how the kids at Battlebricks did it in the video after the break.

The more cells you can pack onto a NAND chip, the cheaper the storage, so we’re excited about Hynix’s recent announcement of triple-level-cell NAND flash. You might have noticed that MLC-based SSDs are cheaper than SLC units, and TLC keeps the trend alive — Hynix says the cost of TLC production is some 30 percent lower than current chips. On top of that, the 32GB chips themselves are 30 percent smaller than current NAND chips, meaning device manufacturers will be able to cram more storage into our PMPs and phones. We’ll have to wait a little while though: production is going to ramp up in October, and Hynix hasn’t committed to using the new chips in SSDs quite yet.

Another day, another means of converting waste heat into something decidedly non-wasteful. This one comes to us from the folks at Cyclone, whose self-starting Waste Heat Engine can apparently be powered by virtually any source of waste heat, including exhaust emissions from an internal combustion engine, the “direct burning of biomass,” or even the waste heat from another Waste Heat Engine. The company is also touting the engine’s ability to provide a boost to solar-power generators, with it apparently able to capture heat using inexpensive panels attached to a roof, which Cyclone says could be installed at just 20% of the cost of other systems relying on pricey photovoltaic panels. Of course, there’s no word as to what the Waste Heat Engine itself will cost, or when it’ll be available, but you can check it out in action in the (auto-playing) video after the break.

Aw, snap. Our Chinese branch just happened upon Acer’s totally unmistakable new gaming rig at Computex, and while they couldn’t spend enough time with it to confirm or deny whether it really was faster, better, stronger or longer than anything else, they did manage to capture a few shots. Granted, that little “Don’t Touch” sign technically makes this a hands-off, but either way, we’re sure you’ll enjoy the close-ups found in the read link below.

New chip design uses only 0.3V of power

Back in February a group of researchers from MIT and Texas Instruments designed a new chip for portable devices that uses a mere fraction of the power required in similar chips today. The researchers were able to design a chip that may be up to ten times as energy efficient as current technology.

Current chips operate at about 1 volt and the new design from the MIT researchers operates on 0.3 volts of power. Anantha Chadrakasan, Professor of Electrical Engineering told MIT Energy Initiative, “Memory and logic circuits have to be redesigned to operate at very low power supply voltages. Chadrakasan directs the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories, where the work was conducted.

Simply reducing the voltage required for the chip to operate wasn’t the only trick the researchers used to get energy savings for the chip. The researchers also optimized the energy processing circuitry to account for several factors including environmental conditions and variations in circuit demands.

One key to the efficient nature of the new chip design according to Chadrakasan says was a high-efficiency DC-to-DC converter used to reduce voltage to lower levels built right onto the chip. At this point the chip design is only a proof of concept and significant obstacles remain to be overcome before the chip can enter production and ultimately end up in your cell phone. Researchers say that one of the biggest problems they had to overcome was the variability in chip manufacturing.

Lower voltage levels mean that differences in variations and imperfections in the chip building process are magnified and become a problem. Chadrakasan says that commercial applications for the new chip could be seen in five years or sooner. The researchers are also looking at applications for the low voltage chip other than in electronics.

Since the chip can operate on such low power requirements, the researchers also believe it could be used in implantable devices like pacemakers. In this application the chip would be able to get all the power it needs from body heat or the movement of the person with the implant. This would allow implantable devices to be powered indefinitely. Battery life is currently a very big concern for implantable medical devices.

One of the main reasons cited for the lack of encryption on telemetry data sent from pacemakers and internal defibrillators is the added strain encryption would put on the battery inside the devices. A low power chip that gets all the power it needs from the body may be just what is needed to allow stronger security in implanted medical devices.

These researchers aren’t alone in their quest for lower voltage, less power hungry chips and processors. Intel recently introduced its Atom processor which is a full x86 processor and requires only 0.6W of power. The Atom processor still consumes more power than the 0.3V design from MIT.

Researchers simulate childhood thought process, further blurring the line between artificial intelligence and biological intelligence

While some skeptics, such as Apple-cofounder Steve Wozniak, dismiss artificial intelligence insisting that robots will never be able to reach a human level of thinking process and behavior, the reality is that artificial intelligence is fast approaching human level thought process. Battlefield robots are making life and death decisions, and an international panel recently met to discuss whether robots could be tried for war crimes.

In vehicles, DailyTech witnessed firsthand the GM-sponsored DARPA robotic driver navigate a complicated course with efficiency matching or surpassing that of a human. Meanwhile, SRI National works to create DARPA funded robotic assistants which learn and organize thoughts in a human-like fashion.

As robots become more and more human-like, we face the duality of the result. On the one hand, in creating something that is human-like we learn more about what makes us human; on the other hand, by creating a replica of man, the line between human and machine becomes more blurry. As we enter the future, reality in the virtual world and real world is merging into one. Scientists already demonstrated the first “mixed reality” systems — systems in which a virtual and a real world device were indistinguishable.

Continuing along the path of convergence between biology and the digital world, researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) are developing complex artificial intelligence to control characters in the popular online game Second Life. These characters will be able to have beliefs, distinguish human and AI characters’ beliefs, and manipulate the behaviors of human and AI characters based on these beliefs.

The team unveiled their first creation, a 4-year old child avatar dubbed “Eddie”, at an AI conference. The avatar not only follows the aforementioned intelligence goals, developing beliefs, but also behaves psychologically like a human child. Researcher Selmer Bringsjord explains the creation process, stating, “Current avatars in massively multiplayer online worlds — such as Second Life — are directly tethered to a user’s keystrokes and only give the illusion of mentality. Truly convincing autonomous synthetic characters must possess memories; believe things, want things, remember things.”

You won’t be seeing a character like Eddie walking around on the street for a little while explains Bringsjord — Eddie’s complex behavior requires the processing power of a supercomputer. The processing power is leverage to combine traditional logic-based artificial intelligence with computational cognitive modeling techniques.

Understanding, predicting, and being capable of manipulating the behavior of humans is one benchmark of intelligence, and the principles behind how this works in the human mind is known appropriately as the “theory of mind”. The RPI team’s research marks one of the largest efforts to date to engineer based on the principles of the theory of mind. The researchers, implementing the part logic and part math theory, impart on the AI-controlled avatars an understanding of such “human” concepts as betrayal, revenge, and evil.

Similarly, they employ human-like stages of cognitive development. For example, Eddie behaves correctly in a false-belief test. In a typical false belief test a person observers an object, in this case a virtual teddy bear. When the person leaves the room, another person moves the object to a different location. Upon the return of the first person to the room, the adult observer expects them to look in the old location of the object, knowing that they don’t have knowledge of the move. However, a child four years old or younger will think that they will look in the new location, not understanding that they couldn’t see the move. In an example of a case where it’s right to be wrong, Eddie correctly believed in the “false” location, the proper “human” behavior for a child.

Eddie can also be digitally switched to have adult-like reasoning and make the correct decision. The reasoning is accomplished by an automated theorem prover. An interface takes conversational English in Second Life and turns it into formal logic, which is processed by the prover. A video clip of Eddie in action can be viewed here.

The RPI research is sponsored by IBM. The RPI team’s final goal is to place humans in a Star Trek-like holodeck filled with projected virtual characters with human-like behavior. The researchers say that they could accomplish such a simulation in theory by leveraging the processing power of RPI’s Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI) and the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC).

With over 100 teraflops of computing power, the CCNI is the most powerful university supercomputer in the world. It is composed of massively parallel Blue Gene supercomputers, POWER-based Linux clusters, and AMD Opteron processor-based clusters. And soon, it may be thinking, just like humans, if the RPI team continues in its success.

Want power? Just print it!

Solar power admittedly has obstacles to overcome. Photovoltaics require glass and are relatively expensive. Trough and solar tower setups typically need to adopt advanced design features, such as those of the new proposed Arizona 280 MW desert plant. These design features add to the moving parts total, make maintenance more complex, and most importantly raise the cost. Other solar setups such as photosynthetic hydrogen production and solar nanowires hold great promise, but are currently too far away from being a realizable commercial solution.

So what is the answer to providing cheap solar power, power that can rival even the efficiency and cost of nuclear energy? One idea floated around in the past has been to print solar cells using inkjet printers. However such a process remained in the realm of pure research — until now.

Massachusetts-based Konarka Technologies, Inc, a company with a healthy history of commercial experience, developed and demonstrated a commercial-grade process for printing cells on inkjet printers. All quips about inkjet cartridge costs aside, the new process holds tremendous potential to revolutionize the solar photovoltaic industry.

Konarka demonstrated the technology publicly and published its research that backs the process in Advanced Materials, entitled, “High Photovoltaic Performance of Inkjet Printed Polymer:Fullerene Blends” by Konarka researchers Dr. Stelios A. Choulis, Claudia N. Hoth, Dr. Pavel Schilinsky and Dr. Christoph J. Brabec.

Typical photovoltaics require a clean room to maintain the delicate manufacturing conditions necessary in order to carry out silicon spin coating and other steps in the manufacturing process. These clean rooms are extremely expensive to build and maintain. While traditional photovoltaics can be profitable, Konarka’s inkjet phtovoltaics promise to dramatically lower their cost, making solar power suddenly very competitive in terms of energy production per installation cost. Better yet, it will likely reduce the time it takes to produce the cells and allow for easier expansion of capacity.

Rick Hess, president and CEO, states, “Demonstrating the use of inkjet printing technology as a fabrication tool for highly efficient solar cells and sensors with small area requirements is a major milestone. This essential breakthrough in the field of printed solar cells positions Konarka as an emerging leader in printed photovoltaics.”

The new solar cells use an organic bulk heterojunction, as opposed to the non-organic designs of traditional solar cells. The new organic-ink has the advantage of being deposited easily on a number of different substrates, unlike traditional inorganic semiconductor doping which can only be applied easily to a limited number of inorganic semiconductors. Konarka looks to deploy this technology in what it calls Power Plastic® — flexible plastic power producing sheets. One intriguing feature of the plastics is that Konarka can offer flexible plastic solar panels with printed patterns — such as bricks or camouflage, which although taking a slight hit on efficiency, could be an intriguing prospect for non-intrusive installation. The military already has contracted the company to build a series of camouflaged power-generating buildings.

Konarka plans on marketing the new tech to power laptops, cell phones, and more. The solar cells work with the full spectrum of visible light, so they can be charged indoors, not just in sunlight. Konarka advertises that a sheet not much bigger than a couple pieces of notebook paper could charge a laptop, when you’re on the go.

While Konarka still has to prove itself before maintaining a place among the greats of alternative energy, its process sure seems innovative. If the company is a success, perhaps in a couple years the solution to the energy crisis will be as simple a print job away.

USAF wants 300 PlayStation 3s for “research”

Sony, Toshiba and IBM have long touted the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) to be supercomputer material. The designers of the Cell/B.E. said many times that the processor may be used in a variety of applications, ranging from entertainment to industrial.

Now, the U.S. Air Force is planning to put the Cell/B.E. to the test, and oddly enough, it plans to procure its processor samples by purchasing 300 PlayStation 3 consoles.

As written in its presolicitation notice posted late February, “The Air Force Research Laboratory is conducting a technology assessment of certain cell processors.”

While there are many other ways to obtain a Cell/B.E., some of which more capable than the one offered for videogames, but even the U.S. Air Force has a budget.

“The processors in the Sony PlayStation 3 are the only brand on the market that utilizes the specific cell processor characteristics needed for this program at an acceptable cost,” detailed the notice.

Strangely, the 40GB PlayStation 3 model requested by the U.S. Air Force specifies the inclusion of four USB ports – twice as many on the retail 40GB PS3 – and slots for Memory Stick/SD/Compact Flash, which are only available on the 60GB and 80GB machines.