Just to clear things up -- Cyclone Power Technologies says its robotic technology "is strictly vegetarian."

Representatives CEA-Leti, STMicroelectronics, IBM, and officials from across France have gathered to officially launch the Nano2012 R&D program, a public/private program led by ST to create advanced R&D clusters to develop new semiconductor technologies.

A sensitive mobile radar system will pinpoint illegal traffic

MOVING people and contraband unseen from one place to another is what smugglers do best. Governments, for their part, try to stop such traffic. The task is made more difficult when smugglers use deep underground tunnels linking, for example, Mexico and the United States. These are tricky to locate from the surface, but a new radar system should help.

The race is on for a successor to the popular ‘flash’ memory used in portable devices. European researchers think they have found a candidate in novel materials combined with a simple, easily fabricated ‘crossbar’ architecture.

When you turn off your mobile phone you don’t lose the address book. That’s because data is stored in ‘non-volatile’ memory chips that remember your precious contacts even when the power is off.

Two new ways to detect the elusive stuff of the universe

MOST of reality appears to be missing. Physicists reckon that the missing matter must be there, but that it is dark. Finding the stuff is damned tricky because dark matter, by definition, cannot be seen. So some of those physicists have been busy trying to devise ways of glimpsing it indirectly—and two groups of them now think their methods are ready to test.

Treatment of diseases like diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis or neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's still poses a tremendous challenge to modern medicine. Nanomedicine, meaning the use of nanotechnology in therapy and diagnostics, may offer promising solutions. At the EuroNanoMedicine 2009 conference, leading experts from various disciplines such as medicine, nanotechnology, chemistry, cell biology and toxicology will present and discuss recent progress and results. The conference will take place on September 28-30, 2009 in Bled, Slovenia.

Alberta will be home to a new research and product development centre and state-of-the-art Hitachi microscopes thanks to support provided through the Western Economic Partnership Agreement between the governments of Canada and Alberta along with contributions from Hitachi High-Technologies.