Washington, Oct 10 : A Northwestern University-led research team has identified a promising new material that could efficiently convert waste heat into electricity to help power cars and improve gas mileage.

The researchers discovered that adding two metals, antimony and lead, to the well-known semiconductor lead-telluride, produces a thermoelectric material that is more efficient at high temperatures than existing materials.

"We cannot explain this 100 percent, but it gives us a new mechanism - and probably new science - to focus on as we try to raise the efficiency of thermoelectrics," said Mercouri G. Kanatzidis, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

London, Oct 10 : Data security worries could soon be an anxiety of the past, courtesy the world''s first computer network protected by unbreakable quantum encryption.

The EU-sponsored project (called SECO-QC) has been successfully demonstrated at a scientific conference in Vienna.

The network connects six locations across Vienna and in the nearby town of St Poelten, using 200 km of standard commercial fibre optic cables.

The kinds of security schemes used on computer networks today are typically based on complex mathematical procedures, which are extremely hard for outsiders to crack, but not impossible given sufficient computing resources or time.

Washington, October 10 : A pair of Penn State researchers has come up with a statistical approach that may one day make Internet searches for photographs quite easier.

The tool they use for this purpose is called Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures in Real-Time (ALIPR), which works by teaching computers to recognize the contents of photographs, such as buildings, people, or landscapes.

The procedure is very different from searching for keywords in the surrounding text, as is done with most current image-retrieval systems.

The team recently received a patent for an earlier version of the approach called ALIP, and is in the process of obtaining another patent for the more sophisticated ALIPR.

New York - In a rare piece of positive economic news, IBM shares jumped as much as 4.9 per cent Thursday morning after the company reported that its third-quarter earnings rose 22 per cent to 3.9 billion dollars.

Shares in the technology powerhouse gave back some of the gains as analysts focused on-less-than expected growth in revenue, which inched up 2 per cent to 25.3 billion dollars, falling short of the 26.53 billion dollars expected by analysts.

London, October 9 : Ultrafast, power-saving electronic devices may have come a step closer to reality with American researchers producing superconducting thin films.

Scientists at the U. S. Department of Energy''s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory say that they have successfully created two-layer thin films where neither layer is superconducting on its own, but which exhibit a nanometre-thick region of superconductivity at their interface.

London, Oct 9 : A new phase change material with the potential to change the design of future memory storage devices has been invented by scientists at Singapore ASTAR''s Data Storage Institute (DSI).

Phase change materials can modify their structure between amorphous and crystalline at high speed.

The materials, these days, are used to make Phase change memory (PCM), considered to be the most promising alternative to replace FLASH memory.

Usually, PCM is worked by changing phase change materials'' structure through applying an electric current. But now, phase change can be initiated by means of switching the new phase change materials by using magnetic fields, reports Nature.