TechToaster.com – Technology Buzz

Kevin Parrish writes on tom’s guide:

Elastic Water could eventually replace plastic, or be used in an environmentally-safe plastic.

Bernama, a part of the Malaysian National News Agency, reports that Japanese scientists have created “elastic water.” Developed at the Tokyo University, the new material consists mostly of water — 95-percent — with an added two grams of clay and organic material. The resulting substance resembles jelly, but is extremely elastic and transparent.

The invention was originally revealed last week in the latest issue of the Nature scientific magazine. According to the article, the new material is quite safe for the environment and humans, and may be a “long-term” tool in medical technology, possibly to help wounded or surgically cut tissue to remain closed.

Read More: tom’s guide

Popularity: 29% [?]

Intel gave up it’s hopes of breaking into the high end GPU market yesterday, when it announced that it would be halting production on it’s long-delayed consumer GPU, codenamed “Larrabee“.  Intel,  the worlds biggest chip manufacturer, has been working on the Larrabee platform for a number of years.  “Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we had hoped to be at this point in the project,” said Nick Knuppfler, a spokesman for Intel in Santa Clara, Calif. “Larrabee will not be a consumer product.”

Although they have pulled the plug on the consumer version of Larrabee, Knuppfler said that Intel will continue to work on graphics chip designs.  He says that Intel will release more information on this in 2010.

Intel drew much praise and interest at the game developer conference last year when it released more info on the platforms architecture and performance.  The platform was touted as having dozens of processors on a single graphics card.

Popularity: 41% [?]

In this article I am going to show you a handful of Windows 7 tools, some of which can be useful to even the most novice users.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 42% [?]

It’s been a long time coming, but finally, a new version of USB has appeared and it is begging for us to plug it into something.  Duly nicknamed “Superspeed USB”, it is 10 times faster than it’s current incarnation, USB 2.0. Pictured here is a standard USB 3.0 connection, sporting it’s new sexy blue innards.

Next to it is the mini connection, which will be used to connect MP3 players and other small devices. USB 3.0 is proudly touting a maximum physical-layer throughput of 5Gbps and application layer data rates of up to 350 Mbytes/second.  These increased speeds are aimed to eliminate current problems with streaming HD video and other applications where today’s 480 Mbit/second USB 2.0 can be sluggish.  Preliminary tests showed that USB 3.0 was possible of transferring a 25GB file in just under 70 seconds -  a huge improvement over USB 2.0, which would take a face palming 14 minutes, while with USB 1.0 it would take a ‘go to sleep and hope it’s done in the morning’ 9.3 hours to transfer the same amount of data.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 52% [?]