A collaborative effort between scientists at Northwestern University and the United States Department of Energy discovered that common bacteria can power simple machines like the one seen above. Stimulated by oxygen, the swimming bacteria are able to push gears that are millions of times their size.

Igor Aronson, a lead scientist on the project, envisions a future in which these types of bacteria-powered micromachines make up a material that could "dynamically alter its microstructures, repair damage, or power microdevices." Presumably they won't quit their day jobs of decomposing stuff and making us sneeze. [PRWeb]

The system is powered by 45,000 quad-core AMD Opteron processors that take advantage of 362 terabytes of memory. This and other underlaying architecture allows processors to chew on 284 gigabytes of data per second with its impressive I/O bandwidth, which has apparently been a major bottleneck in supercomputers of yesteryear. Information is stored on 750 terabytes of hard drives.

The Cray XT Jaguar can be found at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory where it will create scientific breakthroughs during the day, and succumb to Crysis at night. [ORNL and EurkeAlert]

Using "rough" silicon wires, produced by a process known as "electroless etching," where silicon nano-wires are synthesized in an aqueous solution, over a thin, semiconductor crystallized base, the scientists have been able to exploit the process of galvanic displacement of silicon. This displacement technique, which uses silver ions, causes the thermoelectric efficiency to be increased on the rough surfaces of the nano-wires.

The breakthrough comes from the boffins at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, who believe they have found a way to increase the conversion efficiency by a factor of 100. Though they are unable to pin the exact physics of why this works, what they can be certain of is that it definitely does work.

The potential uses for such a technology are mind blowing; from power-jackets that recharge gadgets kept in their pockets to vehicles that utilizes your farts for headlight juice, and pretty much everything else in between. It will be a long while before anything like this makes it to the consumer market, but the development is an exciting one. Expect my son to blog about future developments concerning these nano-wires in 2016. [Tom's Hardware]