With a new initiative dubbed Build with Chrome Google is bringing plastic brick construction to its Chrome browser. Showcasing WebGL and 3D graphics, and a bit of Google Maps, the idea is to liberate plastic brick construction (and promote the forthcoming LEGO movie, of course). See the Official Google Blog post – Chrome + LEGO: You can build whatever you ...

A bit late, but I had to cover this one in the Android blog – Google selling Motorola, only a year and a half since buying it. While the move may be explained by purely business reasons – i.e. losing money in a difficultly competitive market with ever-diminishing margins (partly brought about by Android itself, of course) – these points would have ...

I am a fan of high efficiency, and therefore I am a fan of wired charging: two wires and a USB connector between power supply and phone is a very efficient solution in my book. I was not a fan of some early propaganda for wireless charging, which tried to make it sound more efficient than wires. Losses in the ...

The Electronics Weekly team share their picks of the week, in terms of announcements, developments, product releases, quotes or anything else in the wider world that caught their eye in the last seven days… Richard Wilson, editor …What is more elusive than the Higgs boson particle? This story by Steve Bush gave us the answer – Magnetic monopole found David ...

Microchip Technology has reported net sales for the third quarter of fiscal 2014 of $482.4m. This was a 15.9% increase on the same quarter a year ago, but down 2.1% sequentially from Q2. “Looking at the December 2013 quarter compared to the year ago quarter, net sales were up 15.9% and reflected our continued market share gains in our strategic product lines,” said Steve ...

“I had defined all the functional specifications for the 4004 by December 1969,” recalls Masatoshi Shima of Busicom, “I next visited Intel in April 1970. In those four months, nothing was done. There should have been some progress, but there had been no progress in the development. Intel did not have any logic designer at all who would be able ...

Micron’s attempt to sack 40% of its Italian workforce without compensation has escalated into an international scandal with the US Embassy in Italy asking Micron to send senior executives to Italy to sort out the situation.

Micron’s attempt to sack 40% of its Italian workforce without compensation has escalated into an international scandal with the US Embassy in Italy asking Micron to send senior executives to Italy to sort out the situation.

IBM says its researchers have created what it calls “a fully functional integrated circuit made of wafer-scale graphene”. Graphene is a semicodnmcutor material which is being heavily touted as the key development for future very high speed ICs, and is particularly suited for wireless communications devices. Graphene is one of the thinnest electronic nanomaterials and consists of a single layer of carbon ...

Forget the Higgs boson, the elusive magnetic monopole has been observed. Researchers at Aalto University (Finland) and Amherst College (US) have created, photographed, and modelled synthetic magnetic monopoles. “These observations lay the foundation for the underlying structure of the natural magnetic monopole, the detection of which would be a revolutionary event comparable to the discovery of the electron,” said Aalto ...