PICNIC is considered to be Europe’s leading event focused on creativity and innovation, especially in media, entertainment and technology. Within this area, the Green Challenge focuses especially on sustainable, environment-friendly ideas.

The PICNIC Green Challenge is a challenge for entrepreneurs and other creative and innovative people, who are to design a product or service that will contribute to an eco-friendly lifestyle or that will directly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Three to five finalists will be chosen, who get professional training sessions before presenting their idea at Picnic ‘08. The winner of the challenge will win €500,000, expert coaching, and a contact list with possible business partners in order to execute his plan. For more information about the challenge, please visit www.greenchallenge.info.

I accidentaly found this information on Wikipedia today and I must admit that I never heard of ZISC before.

ZISC stands for Zero Instruction Set Computer (just as RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer and CISC for Complex Instruction Set Computer). A ZISC processor doesn’t use any instructions at all, it purely relies on pattern matching.

The concept was invented by Guy Paillet and is based on ideas from artificial neural networks and massively hardwired parallel processing. The first ZISC processor was the IBM ZISC36 containing 36 independent cells that can be thought of as neurons or parallel processors. Each of these can compare an input vector of up to 64 bytes with a similar vector stored in the cell’s memory. If the pattern matches the number of the matched cell will be returned.

A newly developed nano-sized electronic device is an important step toward helping astronomers see invisible light dating from the creation of the universe. This invisible light makes up 98% of the light emitted since the “big bang,” and may provide insights into the earliest stages of star and galaxy formation almost 14 billion years ago.

The tiny, new circuit, developed by physicsts at Rutgers University, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the State University of New York at Buffalo, is 100 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. It is sensitive to faint traces of light in the far-infrared spectrum (longest of the infrared wavelengths), well beyond the colors humans see.

“In the Read the rest of this entry »