IBM and Samsung announce patent cross-license agreement, we pray for a z196-based Galaxy Tab

The dirty details are few and far betwixt, but IBM and Samsung have just joined up to announce a patent cross-license agreement that could have significant impact in the world we obsess with. According the (admittedly brief) release embedded after the break, the two will license their respective patent portfolios to each other, but considering that specific terms and conditions are being kept under wraps for now, it's on us to imagine what kind of magic will result from the agreement. Of course, the patent portfolios for each of these companies is staggeringly vast -- covering everything from mobile technologies to semiconductors, and just about everything in between. We're told that the deal will allow each company to "innovate and operate freely," and to use each other's patents to keep pace with the rapid expansion of technology. Is a 5.2GHz z196-based Galaxy S just months away? A boy can dream, can't he?

Researchers from Harvard and MITRE announce world's first programmable nanoprocessor

We've seen plenty of breakthroughs involving nanowires over the years, but none of those have involved an actual programmable processor -- until now, that is. That particular "world's first" was just announced by a team of researchers from Harvard University and the MITRE Corporation this week, and it's being described as nothing short of a "quantum jump forward in the complexity and function of circuits built from the bottom up." As for the processor itself, it consists of an array of nearly 500 germanium nanowires that have been criss-crossed with metal wires on a chip that's just 960 micrometers (or less than 1 millimeter) square. That becomes an actual processor when the researchers run a high voltage through the metal wires and switch the individual intersections off and on at will -- we're simplyfing things a bit, but you get the idea. What's more, the researchers note that the architecture is fully scalable, and promises to allow for the assembly of "much larger and ever more functional nanoprocessors." Head on past the break for the official press release.