After speculation from last week, the star-studded supporters of the company Planetary Resources announced their intention to begin mining asteroids for water and precious metals. While an audacious claim to begin with, the company doesn’t stop there: Planetary Resources says it will launch its own fleet of spacecraft, bring in billions in precious metals, and even sell water from space-based depots. This just got even more exciting.

When it comes to mobile devices, most of today’s games are stuck with relatively cartoony graphics. Many seem almost as if they’re hiding behind their art styles. Of course, these are just mobile devices; we can’t ever expect them to live up to, say, console expectations, can we? Yes we can, if you ask Nvidia, at least. According to the company, best known for its GPUs, by 2014 most mobile devices should be able to handle graphics on par with the consoles of today. Granted, the consoles of today will probably be the consoles of yesterday by 2014, but that’s still a vast improvement.

If you’ve ridden on an airplane some time in the last 15 odd years, you’ve probably noticed that the list of approved electronic devices is a bit limited. Most items need to be completely powered down and stowed during taxiing, take off, and landing. The reasons for this vary, but it can be pretty annoying for travelers whose personal electronics represent their only comfort in the nightmare that is coach-class travel. Now, it seems that the Federal Aviation Administration might be warming up to the idea of relaxing their rules about electronic devices.

Today, scientists at IBM have announced that they’ve achieved a breakthrough in quantum computing that may allow engineers to start working on actual quantum computer prototypes in the near future. To put it another way, up until now, quantum computing has largely been concerned with questions like “What kind of crazy stuff could we do if we had one of these?” and now thanks to this breakthrough, it’s barreling towards something more like “Okay, let’s figure out how to put one of these together.”

Instead of attempting to shrink down existing forms of data storage, IBM took a gamble and started experimenting with building storage from the bottom up; it paid off. IBM has now figured out a way to store one bit of data in a mere twelve atoms, creating a form of data storage 2 orders of magnitude denser than some forms of conventional storage.

Pretty much everything nowadays uses a lithium-ion battery, and they seem to work alright, right? Well, a team of engineers from Northwestern University have put some effort into seeing if they could improve upon the norm. Miraculously enough, they seem to have stumbled upon a discovery that could not only allow lithium-ion batteries to charge ten times as fast as they do now, but also last up to ten times as long. Even after hundreds of charges, this new battery prototype remains at least five times faster than any brand new battery you could get today.

The idea of mapping a HUD display onto the windshield of a car seems like a pretty neat idea, but in the past it’s run into some snags. Visuals popping up over what the driver is seeing could be distracting, and the fact that the windshield is constantly moving makes it rough for the images to have any sort of consistent context, not to mention if the physical tech is too big, it’d be a pain to install. Well, the True3D Heads Up Display & Navigation System from Making Virtual Solid seems to have overcome those obstacles. That’s why it picked up the 20,000 euro prize at the European Satellite Navigation Competition in Munich.

It’s only in the demonstration phase at the moment, but the tech looks promising. The idea is that the display slaps translucent images on the windshield that actually match up to real-life objects outside and updates those images in real-time (60 fps) so that they don’t so much look like they’re appearing on the windshield, but instead actually look like they are outside.

The size of computer chips has been shrinking at a rapid pace over that last decade or so. While that gives us awesomely compact and capable devices like tablet PCs and smartphones, the issue is that we’re coming up on the the logical end of this advancement; soon we won’t be able to shrink things any smaller.

Scientists at Northwestern University have not found a way around this problem exactly, but they have been developing a nanoscale material that could allow chips to become more powerful and more efficient without necessarily making them smaller. Instead, this material would allow chips to effectively rewire themselves on the go in order to increase the efficiency of whatever process happens to be executing at the moment.

A new device developed by Kei Nakatsuma at University of Tokyo Department of Information Physics and Computing lets you use the back of your hand as a touch pad. Encased in the form of a wrist-watch, the device uses infrared sensors to track the movement of your finger across the back of your hand and translate it into the same sort of signals a mouse or a laptop touch pad provides.

This may seem sort of trivial, but there are some interesting uses this functionality could provide. First of all, since you can feel the back of your hand and feel with the back of your hand, you’ve got built-in haptic feedback. Secondly, in this increasingly digital world, it could be very useful if everyone had their own interface by which to interact with all the digital things in their lives. No more losing the remote or touching a filthy public number pad, you just use the back of your hand.

Generally, getting the results of an HIV test takes a few days, however, a new chip, around the size of a credit card, only takes about 15 minutes to diagnose a blood sample. The chip, dubbed the mChip, developed by Columbia University researchers, reportedly has a 100 percent detection rate, and on top of that, only costs about one dollar.