Stories by Lucas Mearian

Smart gun company aims to begin production soon

Smart gun company SGTi is ready to begin production of a new prototype technology that would use a fingerprint scanner to enable a weapon to fire. But like similar ventures, the company is struggling for financial backing.

How big data will save your life

Dr. Robert Walker, director of health innovation for the U.S. Army Surgeon General, has been more a frustrated data entry clerk in recent years than a physician, a frustration shared by thousands of his colleagues.

Cisco's new director-class storage switch boosts throughput 6X

Cisco's new director-class switch for storage, unveiled today, increases throughput six-fold and offers N+1 resilience.

WD shrinks laptop drives to just 5mm thick

Western Digital is now shipping what it said is the world's first 2.5-inch, 5mm hard drives and solid-state hybrid drives (SSHDs) for use in ultra-slim notebooks.

Next-gen USB SuperSpeed to eliminate power cords

USB SuperSpeed will move from 5Gbps bandwidth to 10Gbps in the coming year, but it's also leaping from 10 watts to 100 watts for charging, which could power monitors and even HDTVs.

National Digital Public Library launches

The new National Digital Public Library will initially contain 2.4 million digital records, including historical images, video and audio that had previously been siloed in public and private institutions.

Harvard global grid computing project will help create printable solar cells

Harvards Clean Energy Project is conducting a study on millions of potential chemical structures and has identified next-generation organic solar cell material.

IBM to invest $1B in flash memory development

After its buyout of Texas Memory Systems, IBM is now the latest on the vendor bandwagon to push flash into the data centers, saying it will invest a whopping $1 billion into flash research.

Samsung hits high gear, rolls out densest flash chip

Samsung today announced it is now mass-producing a 3-bit per cell, sub-20 nanometer class NAND flash chip that is the densest memory to date.

STORserver enters cloud business

STORserver, a maker of backup appliances, announced private and public cloud backup services.

BYOD: More than 6 out of 10 US companies approve of personal device use for work

CompTIA's second annual Trends in Mobility study found that 64 per cent of companies allow, or mandate, the use of employee-owned devices, with most stating that improving productivity is the main driver.

WD releases first 12Gbps SAS SSDs

WD subsidiary HGST today released the world's first 12Gbps SAS and Fibre Channel SSD line, which sport top speeds of 1,200MB/s.

Fusion-io releases 1.6TB flash card, HP preps workstations for them

Fusion-io announced a flash card for workstations that more than triples the capacity over its previous model, and for the first time Hewlett-Packard is preparing to ship workstations with the drives.

Nanowires could boost energy in solar cells by 15x

Building solar voltaic cells from nanowires instead of standard metal conductors can increase the amount of energy that can be captured by a factor of 15, according to a new study by scientists from the Nano-Science Center in Denmark.

Non-volatile DIMM cards coming soon to a server and array near you

Viking and Micron plan to begin shipping forms of non-volatile DRAM on standard DDR4 DIMMs this summer. The cards combine DRAM with a NAND flash backup that speeds recovery and can be used as a tier of storage in a server.