Phone scanner

Camera cell phones can double as a scanner. A new software, developed by NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in Japan, morphs an existing cellphone camera technology into a scanner. It allows a document to be scanned simply by sweeping the phone across the page. Normal cell phone cameras with rudimentary optical character recognition (OCR) software can only capture small amounts of text. The new OCR software helps entire documents to be scanned. While scanning, it helps take dozens of still images of the page and effectively merges them together.

Smallest robot

Bruce Donald of Dartmouth University has designed the tiniest robot on earth. It measures about the width of a human hair ? approximately 0.000006 meter wide and 0.000025 meters long. Its size makes it the smallest untethered, controllable microrobot ever. It works like a remote-controlled car and one can steer it anywhere on a flat surface. The robot doesn’t drive on wheels, but crawls like a silicon inchworm, making tens of thousands of 10-nanometer steps every second. It turns by putting a silicon ‘foot’ out and pivoting like a motorcyclist skidding around a tight turn.