How To Talk To Aliens – “But what if we decided we wanted to send a message with intent, something that will say more about us than an episode of The Love Boat? What’s the best way to create a message that will be received, understood and useful?”

Running out of gas? – “in a two-mile-wide pit below, trucks head to refineries with loads of sand weighing more than Boeing 747s. Yellow flames shoot skyward as 900-degree heat liquefies any embedded petroleum. Floating scarecrows and propane-powered cannons do their best to chase migrating birds from lethal wastewater ponds. Eventually, nuclear reactors may surround the crater 270 miles northeast of Edmonton, Alberta, delivering the power required to wring oil from sand. “This is what the end of the age of oil means,” says Reinert, who plans the vehicles Toyota will make in a quarter century as national manager for advanced technology at the U.S. sales unit in Torrance, Calif. “The car-based culture, the business-as-usual of building cars and trucks, is going to change dramatically.”"

Atom Needs 2 Billion Times Less Force To Move Than A Penny, IBM Discovers – “In a scientific first that could pave the way for breakthroughs in nanoscale computing, researchers at IBM (NYSE: IBM) have successfully measured the precise amount of force needed to move a single atom, the company announced Friday…”

Putting terabytes of memory into servers, the cheap way – “The San Jose, Calif.-based company, which is just coming out of stealth mode and has received money from three of the four founders of Sun Microsystems, has devised a chipset that effectively lets computer makers or owners double or quadruple the amount of memory in their systems fairly cheaply. A standard two-processor server on the market right now might have a ceiling of 64GB (gigabytes) of memory. By inserting DIMMs (dual inline memory modules) equipped with MetaRam’s chips into the same server, the capacity can go to 128GB or 256GB…”

Security Researchers Claim To Hack GSM Calls – “If it works, the technology Hulton and Steve are developing should be able to crack GSM encryption in less than 30 minutes with about $1,000 worth of equipment, or in about 30 seconds with $100,000 worth of equipment. The technology could potentially be helpful to law enforcement investigators, but could also be taken advantage of by malicious hackers. Hulton says he plans to commercialize the more expensive version of the technology…”

5 Things I Didn’t Know about Poop

Digital downloads will be Blu-ray’s downfall – “Blu-ray won’t enjoy the same decade-long dominance DVD did after it succeeded VHS. But that’s not because there will be other challenger physical disc formats. Rather, instead of buying discs from Amazon, Best Buy or Wal-Mart, people will begin getting their entertainment in the form of digital downloads in larger volumes…”

Genetic Mutations Offer Insights on Human Diversity – “The findings — the latest dividend from the world’s investment in the Human Genome Project in the 1990s — confirm a broad narrative of human history known from previous biological, archaeological and linguistic studies. But the new research adds an astonishing level of detail and a few new insights that were not previously available…”

Leadfoot: Sometimes going green hurts more than it helps – “We’re talking about tin whiskers, single crystals that mysteriously grow from pure tin joints but not generally from tin-lead solder joints. Nobody knows how or why these whiskers grow and nobody knows how to stop them, except through the use of lead solder. Whiskers can start growing in a decade or a year or a day after manufacture. They can grow at up to nine millimeters per year. They grow in any atmosphere including a pure vacuum. They grow in any humidity condition. They just grow. And when they get long enough they either touch another joint, shorting out one or more connections, or they vaporize in a flash, creating a little plasma cloud that can carry for an instant hundreds of amps and literally blow your device to pieces…”

First massively micro game, ‘Bac Attack,’ wins design challenge – “Longtime and much-revered designer Steve Meretzsky’s Bac Attack, a game that pits man’s strategic ingenuity against the march of armies of bacteria, was the winner of Thursday’s Game Design Challenge at the Game Developers Conference here…” See also: Weird Videogames You Might Play

The Z-Train: Toy MagLev Set – “It uses linear propulsion to propel the magnet “cars” around a solid state track. Like a MagLev train, the cars float in an electromagnetic field, pulses in which will cause forward motion…” (with video)

Bravit candle – “It is specially designed for long romantic dinners, as the light can last up to 5 hours…”

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