Much of the research and development had been done by the Office of Naval Research in their own laboratories, but soon they will be testing the first industry railgun prototype launcher built by BAE systems. This device uses 32 megajoules of energy, while Navy’s device was only firing at 1.5 Mj. (A one ton car travelling at 100 mph is roughly one megajoule.) At first the testers are aiming for a range of just 50-100 nautical miles (57-115 miles) but intend on expanding this to 220 nautical miles (253 miles) in the future.

More work will have to be done before these weapons will be found on ships though, as automated reloading and cooling systems have to be developed. The Office of Naval Research though has recently award $10 million contracts to Raytheon Corp, BAE Systems and General Atomics to create pulsed power systems that should allow a for a firing rate of 6-10 shots per minute.

Researchers have been looking to plasmons for a variety of reasons. These quasi-particles, which are a photon and electron coupled together, have some interesting properties and can be directed along the metals they are formed. Researchers at the Stanford School of Engineering have realized that shining light onto nanowires will cause hotspots where two wires cross because of plasmonic effects.

The top wire collects plasmons, like an antenna, and focuses them at the junction between the two wires. This creates a hotspot as the energy transfers from one wire to the other, and the heat is enough to fuse them together. Once the weld is made though, the effect stops, because it is the transfer from one wire to the other that generates the heat.

To test the potential and quality of this welding technique, the researchers sprayed silver nanowires onto a piece of Saran wrap, which has a considerably lower melting point than the metal. An advantage to testing with Saran wrap is the nanowire mesh should be transparent, like the plastic. The plastic was completely unharmed by the welding process, unlike if this were done on a hot plate. The researchers then balled up the plastic and nanowire mesh, to check if the welds would withstand such treatment, and they did. This means nanowire meshes, which could be used in solar panels, LEDs, touch and non-touch screen displays, could be sprayed onto most any surface, and welded on the spot. In the future this could allow a ‘solar panel’ to be sprayed onto you window.

Clevo's venerable X7200 notebook has gotten more than a little long in the tooth. The desktop hardware-based behemoth has been sporting the X58 chipset and support for LGA1366 processors pretty much since launch, despite the availability of Sandy Bridge processors and 6 series chipsets. Since mainstream hardware just isn't punchy enough for Clevo, they've now released a refresh to the X7200 in the form of the P270WM.

While we don't have any good photos of the new kit yet, we do know AVADirect will be among the first if not the first to have the new notebook available. They'll be shipping the P270WM with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580M standard; not a bad choice, as our testing showed the 580M inching out AMD's Radeon HD 6990M as the fastest single mobile GPU on the market. Users craving as much power as humanly possible will be able to spec the P270WM with a pair of 580Ms in SLI along with up to a Sandy Bridge-E Intel Core i7-3960X.

Where things get really interesting is that, judging from the photos AVADirect sent us, Clevo has finally given the X7200 a much-needed sprucing up. The P270WM includes not just a backlit keyboard, but in a bid to finally satisfy our Jarred Walton, the keyboard itself has been completely redesigned and now includes a layout that's actually functional.

Gallery: Clevo P270WM

Everything else about the P270WM should seem pretty familiar for users who already know the X7200: 17.3" screen at 1080p, punishing 12.13 pound body weight, three 2.5" drive bays, and four SO-DIMM slots to populate Sandy Bridge-E's quad channel memory controller.

Just like every other aspect of the P270WM, though, the pricetag isn't for the faint of heart: pre-orders start at a whopping $3,122 and are expected to ship around early March. Hopefully we'll have one in hand for review in time for launch.

The previous graphene transistors were built in a plane, which makes some sense since graphene is as close as one can get to an actual two dimensional object. The new design from Manchester has vertical graphene sheets and uses the material’s quantum mechanical properties. By placing the graphene on one side of a dielectric (resistant material) and a metal on the other, electrons can be made to tunnel through the dielectric. This will greatly reduce the energy and current needed for operation. Not only will the graphene encourage the electrons to tunnel, but it has the peculiar effect of allowing an external voltage to change the energy of the tunneling electrons.

Putting this all together makes the design the first vertical field-effect tunneling transistor. With further work, the researchers believe the transistor can be improved and scaled down in size to just nanometers. Ironically though, the transistor design itself may not be the most important aspect of this research. Instead it is how the researchers built the transistor one atomic layer at a time. Such control will allow for even more amazing structures to be made.

Lenovo will be rolling out its official Ice Cream Sandwich build for the ThinkPad Tablet in May of this year, the company announced via the tablet's product page.

The tablet, which starts at $479.00 and integrates NVIDIA's Tegra 2 SoC, 1GB of RAM, a 10.1" 1280x800 display, optional 3G, and 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB capacities, is currently Lenovo's flagship Android tablet. The company also sells two other Android tablets: the IdeaPad Tablet K1, another 10.1" tablet running Android 3.1, and the IdeaPad A1, a 7" tablet running Android 2.3. Lenovo hasn't said when (or if) either of these tablets would receive an official Android 4.0 upgrade.

We'll continue to do our best to keep you updated as Ice Cream Sandwich (reviewed here in its smartphone iteration) trickles out to phones and tablets across the Android ecosystem.

Source: Lenovo

Back when the Verizon CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus released, there was much talk of a signal related issue, which we investigated. The findings back then were that there was nothing wrong with the device itself, the problem was merely a discrepancy with how 4.0.2 was painting signal bars. Since then, I've been watching for an update which would change the way the device reports signal, and it appears that these changes are included in the 4.0.4 ROM which has emerged for the mysid (CDMA/LTE) model. I spent some time playing around with our CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus with this ROM installed and have a few impressions.

 
Three bars on 4.0.2 (left) versus four bars on 4.0.4 (right) at -93 dBm

First, the update does indeed appear to change the signal strength to signal bars mapping. In the same reported signal strength (-93 dBm in this example), the device has gone from 3 bars on 4.0.2 to 4 bars on 4.0.4. The rest of the change points seem to be accordingly lower as well, meaning you'll see more bars for the same field strength. This change makes the Galaxy Nexus more in line with the reporting I've seen on other Verizon LTE devices.

I believe that there's a good chance that the Galaxy Nexus as of 4.0.4 is reporting signal strength based on LTE RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) which is the summation of power from adjacent cells, interference, and thermal noise, as opposed to LTE RSRP (Reference Signal Received Power) which is the power of a reference signal from a specific cell. Lately, Verizon has been making a concerted effort to standardize reporting on LTE handsets to a 5 bar scale reflecting LTE RSSI instead of LTE RSRP, starting with the recent HTC Rezound update.

  
Dock options, power menu

A few other observations address some other cellular performance characteristics - specifically hard handover speed from 4G LTE down to 3G EVDO and back up. Going both directions on the Galaxy Nexus now seems much, much faster compared to the device's original shipping state - doing the handover and getting data flowing now is basically instantaneous. This is a big improvement if you're frequently in an area with marginal 4G LTE signal. Other changes are subtle and include some UI tweaks: the camera launch from lock screen now feels faster, there's a subtle tweak to the power off menu, and inside settings is a "Dock" category and options tab (shown above) which was present in 4.0.3 but new for the CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus. Performance through our benchmark suite remains the same, however.