Technology is advancing and every day we see new and better products coming in market. In world of electronics, it’s so fast that item you buy today become obsolete tomorrow. However without our notice some technology has stagnated. Be surprised to read about some of them.

1. Optical Drives: Remember how rapidly optical drives reached to 52x speed? From those days of 16x and 32x it took just few years to reach 52x and price was always going down. But now we don’t see any news of 104x optical driver in market. Although we might not be much concern about optical drive speed, it’s still the slowest reading media in our computer (earlier was floppy drive but it’s no more a standard now) and increase in its speed will make a difference. Other factors which might stop us at 52x is risk of breaking CD if we spin it faster inside drive or other damages, but technology is all about taking challenges right? Also we are yet to see more DVD writing speed which is struck at 24x. Though I write my important data DVD’s at 8x because slower you write higher is the reliability but that doesn’t mean drive should not be capable of high speed.

2. LCD displays: LCD displays have become a common item with little or no improvement I see in newer models. Earlier when it was launched, its response time was 8ms which was reduced to 5ms and then 2ms in costlier models. But now since few years we see only 5ms and 2ms, when will 1ms and 0ms response time come? I know it may be useless to work on this technology because our eyes can’t make difference in video played at 1ms and 2ms but still don’t we listen to very high quality songs when our ears can’t listen to all the fine notes?

3. Jet Engines: Since 1944 aircrafts are using these engines. These engines are very powerful but a small bird can cause this engine to fail. We all hear bird entering the jet engine causing it burst into flames and results in mass killing of passengers inside the aircraft. This technology definitely needs improvement.

In the race to implement new energy sources, farms have an advantage: lots of manure. A large chicken farm north of Beijing is taking advantage of this fact by using its chicken manure to generate power and heat. And this isn’t just a small-time farm—the 3 million chickens on the farm produce 220 tons of manure and 170 tons of wastewater each day.

The project is expected to provide 14,600 megawatt hours of electricity a year and help reduce electricity shortages in the region. The biogas is taking the place of coal-fired power, and the project is also helping to control dust levels and reduce odors.

The plant will feature an anaerobic digester to treat waste material, which will produce biogas that will then power 2 GE Jenbacher gas engines. Heat generated from the process will be used in the waste fermentation process and to warm the farm in the winter.

While any facility containing 3 million chickens probably doesn’t treat its animal residents very well, at least this one sets an example for other farms looking to become more self-sufficient—and energy self-sufficiency should always be welcome in a growing country like China, cleantechnica.com reports.

GE Energy China estimates the project will save the farm more than $1.2 million a year in electricity costs. GE’s Jenbacher gas engines can be powered a number of ways, with natural gas, coal mine gas or alternative fuels like biogas from waste and landfills.

Pioneer has developed a 16-layer read-only optical disc (you cannot burn data on it) which claims to store 400GB of data. The per-layer capacity is 25GB, the same as that of a Blu-ray Disc. If this was announced few months back then people will think its totally un-practical to have so much space and data on a single disk but today I see such disk will be of great use for providing high definition content. More people are buying high definition LCD TV’s and these people will experience a great video quality as there will be no need to compress videos and even longer videos will fit on single disk. Still this disk will not be for a mass market as not everyone is equipped well to play such high definition movie at home.

Adobe systems made an announcement that it has provided technology and information to Google and Yahoo, the two search engine giants (and rivals) to index Shockwave Flash (SWF) file formats. According to the Adobe, this will provide more relevant search rankings of the millions of flash content which was till now of no relevance to search engines. But now since the Flash content is exposed, it is not yet cleared by Adobe how their technology will show content of flash to the search engines. Any how people have got more reasons now to go for full flash websites and flash developer delight as well.

AMD has aimed this time to put all the benefits of console gaming in PC. Although PC gaming has a very committed to fan-base but it is impossible to not see the many benefits that console gaming offers: faster loads, better compatibility and more games that fully utilize the hardware to name a few. AMD just launched a new initiative called AMD GAME! that attempts to bring some of these benefits to PC games as well. AMD will be certifying hardware for two different levels of PC gaming standards, testing compatibility with a host of current and future PC titles as well as offering up AMD GAME! ready components or pre-built systems from partners. AMD GAME! will come in two flavors, AMD GAME! and AMG GAME! Ultra. Let’s see if this can bring up the lost image of AMD after launch of Phenom.

A new superconducting material fabricated by a Canadian-German team has been fabricated out of a silicon-hydrogen compound and does not require cooling. Instead of super-cooling the material, as is necessary for conventional superconductors, the new material is instead super-compressed. The researchers claim that the new material could sidestep the cooling requirement, thereby enabling superconducting wires that work at room temperature.

The new family of superconductors are based on a hydrogen compound called “silane,” which is the silicon analog of methane combining a single silicon atom with four hydrogen atoms to form a molecular hydride.

Tse’s team is currently using the Canadian Light Source synchrotron to characterize the high pressure structures of silane and other hydrides as potential superconducting materials for industrial applications as well as a storage mechanism for hydrogen fuel cells.