A Canadian researcher is taking a lead role in blazing a path to a Jetsons-like world of the future in which the power to build and fix things on computers would literally be right at our fingertips.

Robert Biddle is a professor of human computer interaction at Carleton University and one of the lead investigators on what is known as the Digital Surface Software Application Network (SurfNet), a project involving 12 elite researchers who believe the time is right to take touch-screen technology to a new level.

Biddle believes that by coupling new software with existing touch-screen devices, the world can better share ideas.

"Computers these days are really designed for one person. There is one keyboard, one mouse, one cursor on the screen and one focus of attention. You see people working 'together' and they are all just sitting there staring into their own computer," Biddle said.

"New multi-touch technology will allow big displays to be used by more than one person at a time. People working around the conference table, sketching things and showing them to one another in parallel. We think this has a lot of potential."

Technology that could see an end to the bane of many commuters - people talking loudly on their mobile phones - has been shown off by researchers.

The prototype device could allow people to conduct silent phone conversations.

The technology measures the tiny electrical signals produced by muscles used when someone speaks.

The device can record these pulses even when a person does not audibly utter any words and use them to generate synthesised speech in another handset.

"I was taking the train and the person sitting next to me was constantly chatting and I thought 'I need to change this'," Professor Tanja Shultz of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology told BBC News.

"We call it silent communication."

Purdue University researchers have developed a miniature device capable of converting ultrafast laser pulses into bursts of radio-frequency signals, a step toward making wires obsolete for communications in the homes and offices of the future.

Such an advance could enable all communications, from high-definition television broadcasts to secure computer connections, to be transmitted from a single base station, said Minghao Qi, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Researchers form the Fraunhofer Institute are working as part of the EU 3Plast research consortium to develop sensors that can be printed onto plastic film and attached to objects so that, for example, electronic devices can be controlled just by pointing a finger. Rather than responding to a directly applied force or acceleration, the sensors react to tiny fluctuations in temperature and differences in pressure, thereby recognising a finger as it approaches.

3Plast, which stands for Printable pyroelectrical and piezoelectrical large area sensor technology, is a consortium that comprises companies and institutes from industry and research with the goal of mass-producing pressure and temperature sensors that can be cheaply printed onto plastic film and flexibly affixed to a wide range of everyday objects. The 2.2million euro project is co-ordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research (ISC) in Würzburg, Germany. Gerhard Domann, who leads the project, says: "The sensor consists of pyroelectrical and piezoelectrical polymers which can now be processed in high volumes by screen printing, for example. The sensor is combined with an organic transistor, which strengthens the sensor signal. It is strongest where the finger is. The special thing about our sensor is that the transistor can also be printed."

The production of polymer sensors still poses a number of challenges. To produce printable transistors, the insulation materials have to be very thin. The experts at the ISC have, however, succeeded in producing an insulator that is only 100nm thick; the first sensors have already been printed onto film. Currently the researchers are working on optimised transistors that can amplify rapid changes in temperature and pressure.

(CNN) -- It's so tiny, you can't see it with the naked eye.

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered an energy source that you can see only through a microscope.

The researchers devised a process for generating electricity using nanotechnology. They plan to refine the process in hopes of creating a new environmentally friendly battery, among other products.

It works like this: Researchers used tiny wires, known as carbon nanotubes, to create a powerful wave of energy, according to Michael Strano, and MIT associate professor of chemical engineering. He is also the senior author of a paper on this new phenomenon, published in this week's Nature Materials journal.

After coating these tiny wires with a layer of fuel, Strano said his team generated a so-called thermopower wave and stumbled across a reaction that may eventually be used to power electronics, computers and cell phones.

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 9, 2010 – Cisco today announced a major advancement in Internet networking - the Cisco® CRS-3 Carrier Routing System (CRS) - designed to serve as the foundation of the next-generation Internet and set the pace for the astonishing growth of video transmission, mobile devices and new online services through this decade and beyond.

With more than 12 times the traffic capacity of the nearest competing system, the Cisco CRS-3 is designed to transform the broadband communication and entertainment industry by accelerating the delivery of compelling new experiences for consumers, new revenue opportunities for service providers, and new ways to collaborate in the workplace.

A team of scientists at the Tyndall National Institute have designed and fabricated the world’s first junctionless transistor that could revolutionise microchip manufacturing in the semiconductor industry.

Prof Jean-Pierre Colinge’s breakthrough on the microchip transistor was published today in Nature Nanotechnology, one of the most prestigious scientific research publications.

The news breathes fresh hope for the local economy and puts extra weight behind the nation’s aspirations to be a world-leading nanotechnology hub, effectively the future for computing and areas like healthcare, including battling cancer.

As researchers in all major science domains struggle to keep up with the exponentially growing amount of digitally based data, the HPC (high-performance computing) community will evolve to include HPD, or high-performance data, to benefit researchers who need to access, analyze, and store extremely large data sets in significantly shorter amounts of time.

“We are figuring out ways to fuse HPC together with what I now call HPD, and put the best of both worlds into one computer system,” said Michael Norman, interim director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego, during a presentation this week as part of the University’s activities complementing the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in San Diego.

Distinctions between HPC and HPD can be made on several measures, said Norman, but fusing them together has the potential to create both robust systems that will be at least one order of magnitude faster than anything in the HPC community today for certain applications. Last November, SDSC announced plans to build a new system called Gordon. Funded by the National Science Foundation and slated to be operational in mid-2011, Gordon will be the first data-intensive supercomputer of the modern era because of its novel technology.

A light-activated switch to turn nanomachines on and off has been developed by Japanese researchers. The team showed how tiny tweezers made with DNA could be triggered to open and close in response to UV and visible light. The clever mechanism is hoped to find useful roles in designing future nano-robots.

DNA is a versatile building block to construct nanomachinery that is small enough to interact with single molecules. But these nanomachines usually require a source of 'fuel' to trigger activity: typically small DNA fragments that are added each cycle. The problems associated with this process are delays in activating and deactivating systems, and the build up of waste products that can inhibit movement.