The University of Michigan has received a $10 million, five-year grant from the Army to develop a miniature spy bat complete with cameras, radar, recharging capability, a self-guidance system, and a radio to send surveillance data.

Scientists will try to shrink current electronics down to allow the bat to be six inches in length, weigh four ounces, and use only one watt of power. They will attempt to create a navigation system 1,000 times smaller and 1,000 times more energy efficient than today’s systems, and a communications system that’s one-tenth of today’s size. Read more »

Let’s face it, today’s computer memory and storage is far from perfect. Scientists at the Technical University of Berlin are trying to get us a bit closer.

There are three main types of storage and memory today. DRAM (dynamic random access memory), the memory inside your computer, is fast but can’t keep data for long - it must be refreshed 100 times per second to maintain its data.

Flash memory, the memory used in memory sticks and some devices like the iPod nano, can store data for long periods of time without refreshing. However, it writes information about 1000 times slower than DRAM. Read more »