Simply put, the technology opens the door to augmented reality systems that don’t require some kind of bulky, virtual-reality-headset-from-the-‘90s peripheral visor or helmet. Instead, Innovega’s tech relies on images protected on a normal-looking set of specs and a pair of nanotechnology-infused contact lenses that provide megapixel clarity of that up-close imagery while still allowing the eye to focus on the world beyond.

At least, so goes the company’s CES pitch, which you can judge for yourself below. We haven’t tested the product, so we can’t really speak to its awesomeness. But DARPA can. The Pentagon’s blue-sky research wing announced yesterday that Innovega has developed for the agency a new breed of contact lenses that allow “a wearer to view virtual and augmented reality images without the need for bulky apparatus” and that allow users to focus on both faraway objects and images placed very close to the eye.

For DARPA’s part, Innovega is working as part of the Soldier Centric Imaging via Computational Cameras (SCENICC) program, which aims to eliminate the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capability gap at the individual soldier level. Read: AR setups that plug individual soldiers right into drone feeds and other intel streams while still allowing them to maintain their peripheral vision and situational awareness. Meanwhile that could lead to more immersive 3-D television and gaming experiences for the rest of us. More tech detail via the video below.

Their dart-like rifle round is designed for small-caliber firearms like those carried by the average grunt or law enforcement officer. The duo is still sorting out some engineering issues and looking for a private sector partner to help develop the guided round into a marketable product, but for now the four-inch prototype bullet is proving that smart rounds are by no mean unfeasible, or even prohibitively expensive.

Their bullet works much like a precision guided aerial bomb might function. An optical sensor in the nose of the bullet detects a laser beam painted on a target and sends that information to a guidance and control system also packed on board. An eight-bit CPU commands electromagnetic actuators to adjust tiny fins that deploy from the round immediately after it exits the muzzle. From there, the on-board electronics aerodynamically guide the bullet home to its target, allowing the shooter to adjust a round’s trajectory in flight to correct on a long shot or to stay with a moving target.

In order for a finned design to work, of course, the engineers had to dispense with some fundamentals of modern firearm design, like the rifled barrel that puts spin on conventional bullets. That spin, like a spiraling football, stabilizes conventional rounds and helps them to fly straight. The smart rounds eschew rifling and spin for the active guidance provided by the fins, and in doing so computer simulations suggest they could narrow the average margin of error on a half-mile shot from nearly 10 yards down to just 8 inches.

Meaning a “miss” on a target of any decent size–let’s say for the sake of the argument, a target the size of a grown man’s torso–would still likely result in a “hit” of some degree. The video below doesn’t go very far by way of technical explanation, but you can see the round exit the muzzle and deploy its self-guiding fins in super slow-mo.

Asteroid Fly-By

On January 31, the 20-mile-long asteroid Eros makes its closest pass by Earth in 37 years. It will miss us by 16.5 million miles, but that’s still close enough for amateur astronomers to see it with a small telescope.

A New Human Emerges

Archaeologists will get a clearer picture of human evolution this fall when they begin analyzing the complete skeleton of Little Foot, a small hominid found deep inside a cave in Sterkfontein, South Africa (entrance pictured), that may be more than three million years old.

Ocean Secrets Revealed

Autonomous underwater vehicles, also known as gliders, will deliver data on water density and plankton counts near Oregon and New England this fall—the first concrete results from the ambitious Ocean Observatories Initiative, a wide-reaching network of undersea sensors and other monitoring devices.

Super Supercomputer

By May, IBM will finish building a computer that churns through 20 petaflops, or 20 quadrillion calculations a second, double the current record. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (aerial view pictured) will use the new machine, called Sequoia, to perform simulations of nuclear explosions and weather systems.

Tesla Offers a Luxury Sedan

Tesla, better known for its high-end Roadster, will begin delivery of its $77,400 (before tax credits) Model S sedan [see “Luxe Electric,” page 14], which will use lithium-ion cells similar to its sibling and travel up to 300 miles per charge.

Turing Turns 100

Alan Turing, a founding father of artificial intelligence, was born on June 23, 1912. Computer scientists around the world are celebrating his centenary with conferences, museum exhibits and competitions, called Turing Tests, to find a computer program that can convince a human that it is human too.

Largest Offshore Wind Farm

The first 175 turbines of the London Array wind farm, which sits 12 miles off the English coast, will generate up to 630 megawatts of power by year’s end—more than twice the current record and enough to power 470,000 homes.

California Cap-and-Trade

This summer, California will kick off the country’s largest carbon-swap agreement by selling the right to emit greenhouse gases. Polluters can redeem these allowances in 2013, when a limit on emissions kicks in. Estimated price: $15 per metric ton. A typical power plant’s discharge: 150,000 tons.

Curiosity Explores Mars

On August 6, the largest rover yet—the size of a car rather than a golf cart—will land on the Red Planet. Curiosity is carrying new equipment that will drill into rocks, analyze their chemistry, and look for compounds that support life.

Fracking Under Scrutiny

The Environmental Protection Agency will release the first results of a study designed to answer a controversial question: Does hydraulic fracturing to release natural gas pollute drinking water? The researchers will study data from sites in four states and monitor drill locations before, during and after fracking.

Fusion Delivers Extra Energy

Researchers at the National Ignition Facility in California will attempt to produce a net energy gain from a nuclear fusion reaction by using 192 lasers to crush a hydrogen-filled target. Past fusion experiments have always consumed more energy than they created.

Salmon Stage a Comeback

State and federal agencies will return salmon to California’s newly flowing San Joaquin River, parts of which had been dry for 50 years. Researchers will study up to 2,000 tagged fish to see if a full salmon run can thrive.

That’s the idea behind one designer’s concept for a Fujitsu Lifebook, which would come with slots for a smartphone, digital camera, and tablet, for them all to all work together as one super device. The unique concept, dubbed "Lifebook 2013," comes from designer Prashant Chandra, who submitted the design to a competition held by Fujitsu. The laptop would feature fitted slots for various smart devices, but those aren’t for your standard connectivity. Attaching a gadget to the Lifebook would bring all it’s functions to the computer, including using its own processor to run some of the laptop’s functions.

Fitting the digital camera to the front would mean pictures could be downloaded to the computer or other devices. Sliding in the smartphone/mp3 player would allow music to be played and other data to be shared across devices. The Lifebook 2013 concept doesn’t have a keyboard itself, since an tablet becomes the keyboard once slotted into place. The tablet can also be used as a second display (like a larger Nintendo DS) or as a digital sketchpad with a stylus. Aside from potentially reducing the overall cost, another advantage to this setup would be that all the devices can be synced and updated simultaneously from the same hub.

"The proposed Lifebook is a laptop computer concept based on the principle of ‘shared hardware,’" explains Chandra. "Currently a lot of hardware is wasted when we use separate devices, as there is often a lot of ‘repeat’ of data stored and features. For example if I have my songs on my music player, why do I have to block the same amount of storage on my laptop? Similarly, if I have a processor sitting in my tablet, why can it not also run/assist my laptop? If I have a fully functional camera with its own memory and image processing power, why do I need to have it repeated in my laptop?"

Put this way it sounds like a logical step forward for the next generation of laptops, though there is the obvious question of being limited to the concept’s constituent devices, which would clearly be a bit limiting for the consumer.

Imagine you’re a developer and you have some code you’d like to run on a quantum computer. And imagine there’s a quantum computer maker who says you can run your code. But you can’t trust each other — you, the developer, don’t want the computer maker to rip off your great code, and the computer builder doesn’t want you to peep its breakthrough machine. This new system can satisfy both of you.

Stefanie Barz and colleagues at the University of Vienna’s Center for Quantum Science and Technology prepared an experimental demonstration of a blind computing technique, and tested it with two well-known quantum computing algorithms.

Here’s how it would work: You, the developer, prepare some quantum bits, in this case photons that have a polarity (vertical or horizontal) known only to you. Then you would send these to the remote quantum server. The computer would entangle the qubits with even more qubits, using a quantum entangling gate — but the computer wouldn’t know the nature of the entangled states, just that they are in fact entangled. The server is “blind” to the entanglement state, and anyone tapping into the server would be blind, too.

Imagine the computer tries to snoop on the qubits and see their entanglement, which could then be used to extract the information they carry. You’d be able to tell, because of the laws of quantum mechanics. The cat is both dead and alive until you check whether it’s dead or alive, and then it’s one or the other. If your photon has a specific state, you’d be able to tell that it was spied upon.

Back to the entangled bits. The actual information processing takes place via a sequence of measurements on your qubits. These measurements would be directed by you, based on the particular states of each qubit (which, again, only you know). The quantum server would run the measurements and report the results to you. This is called measurement-based quantum computation. Then you’d be able to interpret the results, based on your knowledge of the qubits’ initial states. To the computer — or any interceptor — the whole thing would look utterly random.

Since you know the entangled state on which the measurements were made, you can be certain whether the server really was a quantum computer. And you wouldn’t have to disclose your algorithm, the input or even the output — it’s perfectly secure, the researchers write in their paper, published online today in Science.

Blind quantum computation is more secure than classical blind computation, which relies on tactics like the backward factoring of prime numbers, said Vlatko Vedral, a researcher at the University of Oxford who wrote a Perspective piece explaining this finding.

“The double blindness is guaranteed by the laws of quantum physics, instead of the assumed difficulty of of computational tasks as in classical physics,” Vedral writes.

The Vienna team argues their simulation is a potentially useful technique for future cloud-based quantum computing networks.

“Our experiment is a step toward unconditionally secure quantum computing in a client-server environment where the client’s entire computation remains hidden, a functionality not known to be achievable in the classical world,” they write.

Smallest storage unit Spin-polarized imaging with a scanning tunneling microscope reveals the structure of the world’s smallest magnetic data storage unit. It consists of just 12 iron atoms ordered in an antiferromagnetic structure.

Until now, it was unclear how many (or how few) atoms would be needed to build a reliable, lasting memory bit, the basic piece of information that a computer understands. Researchers at IBM and the German Center for Free-Electron Laser Science decided to start from the ground up, building a magnetic memory bit atom-by-atom. They used a scanning tunneling microscope to create regular patterns of iron atoms aligned in rows of six each. They found two rows was enough to securely store one bit, and eight pairs of rows was enough to store a byte.

Data was written into and read out of the bits using the STM — so it’s not like this type of bit will be integrated into hard disks anytime soon. But it answers some fundamental questions about the nature of classical mechanical systems, said Andreas Heinrich, the lead investigator into atomic storage at IBM Research Almaden and an author on a new paper describing the teeny bit. The team was interested in the transition from quantum to classical behavior, he said.

“If you take a single atom, you have to look at quantum mechanics when you describe its behavior,” he said in an interview. “As you make the (system) bigger and bigger, several iron atoms start talking to each other, and at some point you can ignore all of this quantum behavior and just think of them as a classical magnetic structure.” It turns out that point is around 12 atoms big.

“Many people would anticipate you would have to use quantum mechanical systems to describe these structures,” Heinrich said. “That was the most surprising thing to me.”

At the smallest scales, quantum effects blur stored information. A bit using six atoms would switch magnetic states — switching from “0” to “1” — about 1,000 times per second, for instance, which is much too frequently to be useful for data storage, Heinrich said. Eight atoms switch states once per second. But 12 atoms switched their states infrequently enough to be usable for storage — instead, an outside magnetic influence (in this case, the STM) changes their states. The nano magnets are only stable at a chilly 5 degrees Kelvin, or -450 degrees F.

The other breakthrough in this paper is the bits’ antiferromagnetism — this marks the first time antiferromagnetism has been used to store data. Ferromagnets, used in most modern data storage and other applications, use magnetic interactions between iron atoms to align all the atoms in a single direction. This creates a magnetic field that can be read out. This becomes a problem at the teeniest scales, however, because tightly packed magnetic bits can interfere with each other — this limits the downsizing of data storage systems. But this new 12-atom bit uses antiferromagnetism — the atoms are aligned in opposite directions, meaning they spin in alternating directions. The iron atoms were separated by nitrogen atoms and induced with the STM to spin differently, Heinrich said. This allowed them to be packed closer together, greatly increasing storage density.

The researchers switched the bit’s magnetic state five times to store the ASCII code for each letter of the word “think,” one of Big Blue’s slogans.

Sebastian Loth, who left IBM for CFEL four months ago and is lead author of the paper, said the 12-atom bit raises plenty of new questions for classical computing at quantum scales.

“We can now use this ability to investigate how quantum mechanics kicks in. What separates quantum magnets from classical magnets? How does a magnet behave at the frontier between both worlds? These are exciting questions that soon could be answered,” he said.

Tiny think: A white signal on the right edge corresponds to logic 0 and a blue signal to logic 1. Between two successive images, the magnetic states of the bits were switched to encode the binary representation of the ASCII characters "THINK."

It looks like the Star Trek item that we’re the closest to seeing become a reality, however, is the medical tricorder. This May, the X-PRIZE Foundation proposed a US$10 million Tricorder X-PRIZE, with the intention of encouraging the production of consumer devices that can assess a person’s state of health. The first potential contestant, which already has a tricorder in the works, is a tech start-up by the name of Scanadu.

Founded in January 2011, Scanadu is based out of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and is headed by CEO and futurist Walter De Brouwer.

Although its inner workings are being kept secret, the Scanadu Tricorder is a small, handheld device, that would be used in conjunction with the processing power and screen of a smartphone. In a non-contact, non-invasive fashion, it would be able to measure vital statistics such as blood pressure, pulmonary function, and body temperature. An onboard hyper-spectral camera and microfluidic lab-on-a-chip would also be able to analyze rashes and infections, and process blood and saliva samples, respectively.

Based on these and other measurements, it could then offer a diagnosis, and advise its user on what course of action should be taken. If a doctor needed to be involved, the patient data on the tricorder could be instantly transferred to them. If it turned out to be something that could be treated at home, then an unnecessary trip to the emergency room or doctor’s office would be avoided.

The first generation of the tricorder will be aimed at parents, for use on their young children. Although it’s hard to know just how far along the device is in its development, Scanadu did recently announce that it had received US$2 million in funding from a group of private investors – that’s certainly going to help.

Other products have already made steps in the direction of smartphone-based tricorders. Melapp and the Handyscope utilize a phone’s camera to assess suspicious skin markings, the iHealth system helps users manage their weight and blood pressure, while iBGStar allows diabetics to measure their blood glucose levels.

Titanium dioxide is found in products like solar panels and sunscreen — it absorbs ultraviolet light — and in several cleaning products, because it can be used to oxidize organic material. Cement, paint, windows and even odor-free socks contain TiO2, which is prized for its ability to kill microbes and break down dirt.

Other researchers have incorporated titanium dioxide into clothes before, but they don’t get clean unless exposed to ultraviolet light, which isn’t exactly practical. Mingce Long of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Deyong Wu of the Hubei University for Nationalities in Hubei, China, set out to create clothing with titanium dioxide coating that can self-clean using only sunlight.

To do this, they doped some TiO₂ with nitrogen, which had been previously shown to work as a light-activated catalyst in visible light. They developed a new method to put this nanoparticle solution in liquid form, dunked cotton in it for one minute, then pressed the cotton, dried it and re-rinsed it. Then they added some silver iodide nanoparticles, which were intended to improve the fabric’s overall light sensitivity. The researchers stained the fabric with orange dye, and then exposed it to sunlight. The cotton broke down the orange, and also sterilized bacteria.

The best part: The coating remains intact after washing and drying. So even if you decide to break down and do actual laundry — or if someone does it for you — you can still revert back to the self-cleaning sunlight method later.

The teaser video (below) doesn’t offer a ton of information about the computer, but does show off a widget hub in the corner of the desk you can use to launch applications on the screen, and the ability to pull down a timeline populated with news information, tweets, or other alerts from the top corner of the table. Both the widgets and the timeline can be casually swiped away when you’re done with them, and the screen and location of the widgets can be customized to meet your own personal needs. The ExoPC also supports full-screen applications, showing off in the video an app that instantly turns the computer into an electronic piano.

Multi-touch desk computers aren’t really anything new. Samsung for instance recently announced the Samsung SUR40, a 40-inch, 1080p multitouch table running Microsoft’s Surface software. Where the ExoPC stands out, however, is in its price tag. While the SUR40 and other table computers are designed for businesses (and priced that way, the SUR40 is US$8,400!), the ExoPC is instead priced at a modest $1,299 making it affordable for average consumers.

The Samsung SUR40 is expected to be a computer replacement, however, the ExoPC also appears to be something you would use as a replacement for a traditional desk, and a supplement for your actual computer.

The lens harvests energy from an external source using an antenna and has an integrated circuit to store the harvested power and transfer it to a transparent sapphire chip with a single blue LED. Unfortunately, while the range of the display was about one meter in free space, that range was reduced to about two centimeters when it was placed on the eye.

Another of the challenges facing the creation of a Terminator-style eye display is that the minimum focal distance of a human eye is only a few centimeters. This means that information displayed on a contact lens would appear blurry. To address this, the researchers used thin Fresnel lenses to magnify the display.

More research is needed before we’ll be able to read text on our eyeballs though. "We need to improve the antenna design and the associated matching network and optimize the transmission frequency to achieve an overall improvement in the range of wireless transmission," said Parviz, co-author of the study. "Our next goal, however, is to incorporate some predetermined text in the contact lens."