China Unveils Bendable Graphene Smartphone and Other Science

It’s Friday, and we’ve got some high-tech news in the science & technology world. Read and be amazed!

China Unveils Bendable Graphene Smartphone

At the Nanping International Conventional Center Trade Show in Chongqing, a Chinese company unveiled a flexible smartphone like never before. The smartphone features a bendable graphene display and weighs around 200g. It utilizes an electric field to produce images by rearranging the particles in a solution.

Graphene is a wonder material for scientists – it’s the thinnest, lightest, most conductive and transparent material known till date. Research on flexible graphene displays had started as early as 2012, with researchers in Canada having developed the ‘ReFlex’ phone based on flexible OLED display technology.

Microsoft to Store 1,000,000,000 TB in 1 Gram of DNA

Data storage is a huge problem. From CDs to USBs, the technology industry is constantly looking for ways to safely and efficiently store data for future generations. Making progress towards to achieve this goal, Microsoft has purchased 10,000,000 strands (oligonucleotides) of DNA from Twist Bioscience (a biology startup) in an initiative to store 1,000,000,000 TB in 1 Gram of DNA.

“Today, the vast majority of digital data is stored on media that has a finite shelf life and periodically needs to be re-encoded. DNA is a promising storage media, as it has a known shelf life of several thousand years, offers a permanent storage format and can be read for continuously decreasing costs,” says Emily Leproust, CEO of Twist Bioscience.

When asked about how it’s like to work with one of biggest tech giants in the world, Leproust is very eager to start. “Our silicon-based DNA synthesis platform offers unmatched scale and product quality that vastly accelerates the ability to write DNA at a cost enabling data storage. We are thrilled to work with Microsoft, and University of Washington researchers, to address the growing challenge of digital data storage.”

Humanoid Diver Robot Recovers Treasure from Wrecked Ship

You might be a little surprised if a diver recovered a lost ancient artifact. But what about a humanoid robot diver? A Stanford professor has made a 5 feet long AI-powered haptic-feedback humanoid robot to perform ocean dives while the human counterpart remains at the surface.

“OceanOne is aimed at bringing a new capability for underwater exploration. The intent here is to have a diver, diving virtually, creating a robot that can be the physical representation of the human. It has two hands. It has stereo vision. And the most amazing thing about it, is that you can feel what the robot is doing, while [you are] sitting up on the boat,” says Oussama Khatib, Professor of Computer Science at Stanford.

Read more at www.bit.ly/q3newsblog. Q3 Technologies is a large diversified technology company which develops custom products for the IT industry including cloud applications, enterprise applications across all platforms and Rich Internet Applications (RIA).