Paper-thin battery can be bent

• It's a battery that looks like a piece of paper and can be bent or twisted, trimmed with scissors or molded into any shape needed. While the battery is only a prototype a few inches square right now, the researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who developed it have high hopes for it in electronics and other fields that need smaller, lighter power sources.
• "We would like to scale this up to the point where you can imagine printing batteries like a newspaper. That would be the ultimate," Robert Linhardt a professor at the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at RPI said. The development is reported in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
• Unlike other batteries, Linhardt explained, it is an integrated device, not a combination of pieces. The battery uses paper infused with an electrolyte and carbon nanotubes that are embedded in the paper. The carbon nanotubes form the electrodes, the paper is the separator and the electrolyte allows the current to flow.
• Students at the school in Troy, NY, were the inspiration for the work, said Linhardt, whose students were working on methods to dissolve paper and cast it into membranes for use in dialysis machines. Meanwhile, students of Pulickel Ajayan in RPI's materials science department were trying to make carbon nanotube composites using polymers.
• The two groups got together and realized they could use paper instead of polymers and combine the two projects. Then came Omkaram Nalamasu's students, also at RPI, who said the project - a thin sheet black on one side and white on the other - looked like an electrical device.
• And over about 18 months, the groups developed the projects, into a battery, a capacitor, which stores electricity and a combination of the two.
• Ajayan sees potential uses in combination with solar cells, perhaps layers of the paper batteries that could store the electricity generated until it is needed, he said. Perhaps it could be scaled up and shaped into something like a car door, offering moving electrical storage and power when needed.
  
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SOCIAL COMPUTING

• It refers to things like wikipedia, newsgroups, messageboards, email lists , blogs, the web itself etc. In such fora, a lot of value is "collectively constructed" by many users.

• A major job in social computing is to identify "ecosystems" in online communities. What kind of people tend to pipe up with useful answers, in a newsgroup, how information spreads through blogs and wikis, are just two examples of questions which social computing tries to answer.

VIRTUAL WORLDS

Virtual worlds ( VW) represent the next generation of internet applications. they have enormous potential for changing business and lifestyles. VW will enable new kinds of interactive comerce, collaboration and entertainment. Just as it is impossible to exist today without an email id in real life, in the coming years it might become impossible to exist without a virtual identity in VW environment.

"Second life" is the most widely known virtual world. To read more on this topic click on the link below :

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Editorial/Todays_Features/Networked/Virtual_Worlds_The_Future_Life/articleshow/2087908.cms