Stanford Engineering Library Blog

Applications to test products before production are constantly improving. Here's the latest:
"From cars and mobile phones to computers and furniture, most of today's products are created virtually on a computer before they are actually produced. In the context of the Functional DMU (Digital Mock-Up) project, researchers from four Fraunhofer Institutes are adding new functionalities to digital product development." Read the ScienceNews article

From the Editor's Summary in the 1 May 2008 issue of Nature:

Basic electronics textbooks list three fundamental passive circuit elements: resistors, capacitors and inductors. But nearly forty years ago, Leon Chua predicted the existence of a fourth, the memristor — in effect a nonlinear resistor with memory. A paper from the Hewlett-Packard research lab now reports that memristance arises naturally in nanoscale systems where solid-state electronic and ionic transport are coupled under an external bias voltage.

See related article at SFGate.com, 5/1/08
HP Labs' find could revolutionize computing by Deborah Gage

Read the full article from Nature, 5/1/08 (Stanford- or by subscription-only)
The missing memristor found by Dmitri B. Strukov, Gregory S. Snider, Duncan R. Stewart & R. Stanley Williams

Researchers at MIT are using RFIDs to track post-it notes. Using a special pen and pad, the information you write on the post-it is stored into a system that then allows you to set reminders, alerts, etc.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/01/mit-reinvents-the-post-it-note-with-post-it-notes/

A University of Portsmouth (UK) Electronic and Computer Engineering student is developing an online electronics workbench that teaches students the fundamentals of electronics and evaluates their work using artificial intelligence. More