Techno gadget

McKinney, vice president and chief technology officer for HP’s Personal Systems Group, kicked off the MobileBeat 2010 conference with a brief presentation followed by a question-and-answer session in which he reaffirmed the current goal of the personal computing industry: To figure out what the hell people want in a device bigger than a smartphone but smaller than a notebook PC. Now armed with Palm’s webOS operating system following its completion of that acquisition two weeks ago, McKinney promised that HP would build slates and phones that are both “open” in terms of application development and consistent in terms of the user experience across multiple devices.

He didn’t have anything new to discuss, such as whether or not HP is still planning to build slate devices based on Microsoft’s Windows 7. But one technology that could make a difference in how consumers adopt these middle-of-the-road devices is a flexible display, which McKinney unrolled from a cardboard tube to show off to attendees. Flexible display is one of those tech-industry ideas that has been about five years away from becoming reality for around 10 years. We’re still pretty far away from the ultimate goal of a computing device you can roll up and stick in your pocket, McKinney said, but HP Labs has been doing a lot of work on this technology over the past few years and has gotten to the point where it can marry its investment in transistors and printing technology to literally print these kinds of displays.

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Globetrotters passing through Japan’s Kansai airport should check out its giant plasma screen setup showcasing the air transport hub and traditional Japanese culture. Hailed as the largest of its kind measuring 4m high by 3m wide, this 200-inch plasma is also unique for its curved surface. If you look close enough at the above photo, it seems like the mammoth display is pieced together from six small panels, though it’s still difficult to explain how the screen is wrapped.

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Particle acceleration has been the focus of research at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center since the early 1960s, but a relatively new project at the US Department of Energy facility at Stanford University called the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) is giving scientists a unique opportunity to capture images of single molecules. With the use of microwaves, electrons are accelerated along a two-mile path where they are oscillated back and forth, generating radiation and ultrafast X-ray flashes that capture images of molecular events with a “shutter speed” of less than 100 femtoseconds.

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