Micro-Mover

A tiny motorized table that is able to slide sideways in increments measured in atom-widths could offer a way to vastly increase computers' memory capacity. The "micro-mover," as it's called by its inventors at Agilent Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA, is carved into a silicon chip three millimeters wide. The mover sits on two sets of flexible legs that bend slightly under electrostatic forces; one set flexes in the north-south direction, the other east-west. In this way, the device can skate to any of a billion positions in increments of five nanometers-about the width of a dozen atoms, says Farid Matta, manager of the group that built the device. Researchers have long envisioned memory devices that would pack bits as closely as individual molecules in a solid material, but any such storage device requires "something that moves under the read-write tool to allow you to write a one or a zero in a new spot," Matta explains. The micro-mover is sprightly and precise enough to do that with individual molecules, he says-potentially writing up to 125 megabytes of data in an area only 50 micrometers on a side.

Picture Perfect

Even Ansel Adams struggled with light, employing tricky developing techniques to preserve detail and avoid large areas of a print appearing washed out or too dark. Now, amateur photographers can produce artfully balanced images with a new digital-processing algorithm.

Developed by MIT computer scientist Frdo Durand, the process reduces excessive contrast in the picture without losing detail and takes only a couple of seconds. It starts with a digitized image, either from a digital camera or a scan of a negative, and partitions the image data in unique ways. The first partition is into color (which the algorithm does not touch) and light-intensity components. The computer next subdivides the intensity component into one comprising the picture's details and one containing a map of large-scale variations in luminosity. The algorithm then reduces the variations in this final component. Durand hopes the technology will first be employed in software that digital photographers use to download their pictures from camera to computer, which could transform those vacation snapshots from awful to art.

Flat-Screen 3-D

Father and son inventors Paul and Ilan Kleinberger have developed a flat-screen 3-D display that eliminates the flicker, low resolution, and bulky glasses that detract from other 3-D methods. 3-D effects are created by showing slightly different images to each eye. At startup 3ality in Jerusalem, Israel, the Kleinbergers use their own software to combine left- and right-eye image data so that each pixel on a liquid-crystal display contains the information for both eyes. 3ality adds an extra liquid-crystal layer that "twists" the resulting light, giving a different polarization to each eye's image. That way, a viewer wearing lightweight polarizing glasses gets an uninterrupted, full-resolution image for each eye. 3ality has built prototypes in cooperation with the U.S. Army; company president Yosh Mantinband says the displays should be ready to market by 2005.