CyberCarpet opens way to Pompeii – “A stroll around the ancient city of Pompeii will be made possible this week thanks to an omni-directional treadmill developed by European researchers. The treadmill is a “motion platform” which gives the impression of “natural walking” in any direction…”

Big oil to big wind: Texas veteran sets up $10bn clean energy project – “T Boone Pickens is famous for thinking big. He founded his Texan oil company, Mesa Petroleum, in 1956 with just $2,500 (£1,200) in the bank. After a string of audacious takeovers he turned it into an independent empire that challenged the big oil companies, and today he is worth $3bn. Now this straight-talking Southerner is launching the biggest and most audacious project of his career. This month he will make the first down payment on 500 wind turbines at a cost of $2m each. The order is the first material step towards his goal of building the world’s largest wind farm. Over the next four years he intends to erect 2,700 turbines across 200,000 acres of the Texan panhandle. The scheme is five times bigger than the world’s current record-holding wind farm and when finished will supply 4,000 megawatts of electricity – enough to power about one million homes….”

The Future Is Now – “Science and technology form a two-headed, unstoppable change agent. Problem is, most of us are mystified and intimidated by such things as biotechnology, or nanotechnology, or the various other -ologies that seem to be threatening to merge into a single unspeakable and incomprehensible thing called biotechnonanogenomicology. We vaguely understand that this stuff is changing our lives, but we feel as though it’s all out of our control. We’re just hanging on tight, like Kirk and Spock when the Enterprise starts vibrating at Warp 8…”

Shuttle’s New $99 KPC Review – “The KPC should do well as a business PC, Internet Café PC, PVR, loaner or hot spare, software test bed, appliance PC, and low cost PC. It is small, power efficient, has a low price, and performs well enough that users will be happy with its level of performance. It is upgradeable for those that need more memory or a faster CPU, so it could easily replace workstations at many businesses that need more power…”

Rocket Racing League announces August takeoff – “It’ll be like Formula One or Nascar in the sky, or at least that’s what the leadership of Rocket Racing said at a press conference at the Yale Club here on Monday morning. The aeronautics entertainment start-up announced the debut of its long-awaited Rocket Racing League, which will have its first exhibition race on August 1-2 at the EAA AirVenture air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin…” See also: The Rocket Racing League X-Rockets

5 Incredible Eco-Powered Ships

Dark matter particle discovered? – “Solving the dark matter mystery would of course be enormous news. Researchers have known since the 1930s that galaxies are spinning too fast at their outer edges to be made entirely of the kind of matter that we can see with our eyes. They believe that the visible stars and gas making up galaxies must be embedded in some kind of invisible or “dark” matter that provides added traction…”

IBM finds more performance and less power in 32 nm chips – “A chip alliance led by IBM expects semiconductors to bring a substantial boost in performance and a reduction in power consumption with the arrival of the 32 nm chip generation. The secret? High-K Metal Gate, a transistor technology that replaces polysilicon gate with a metal gate and the silicon-dioxide gate dielectric with a high-k dielectric…”

The #1 song on this date in history – “To look up and listen to Billboard’s #1 song on a specific date in history, select a month to the left…”

Retinal Imaging Display Glasses Make Terminator Vision Possible – “Japan-based Brother Industries has created a wearable, portable version of its retinal imaging display (RID) technology, which gives people the chance to see things Terminator-style. How is this different than other HUD glasses we’ve seen? The new RID prototype attaches to a basic set of spectacles and works by focusing light onto the retina, moving it at high speeds to generate images that look like they exist right in front of the user….”

Russia to Send Monkeys to Mars – “ussia has a long history of scientific discovery and space exploration through the use of animals. Beginning with space dog Laika in 1957, the space program expanded to run tests on other dogs (many returned safely to Earth) and eventually monkeys. Although the monkey testing program was stopped through lack of funding in the mid-1990′s, the nation has announced plans to send the closest relation to humans to a place where no man has gone before: Mars. And here’s us thinking it will be a human first stepping onto the Martian surface…”

Why: Heathrow Airport Terminal 5′s High Tech Failings – “ondon Heathrow airport’s latest building, Terminal 5, launched last month after almost two decades of planning, $8.5 billion dollars in cost, and 100 million hours in manpower. It is a glass and concrete and steel marvel, the largest free standing building in the UK, with over 10 miles in suitcase moving belts, and was supposed to be a cure for the Airport’s famous congestion by way of massive automation. But on its opening day it just did not work right…”

On Leaving Google – “As some of you may know, I have decided to leave Google and go back into the startup world. Friday was my last day at Google, and even though I normally don’t blog much about my job, I figured I was due for an update…”

Squeezed by Rising Food Costs – “The cost of food has become a headline story the world over, from food-related riots in Haiti and Egypt to some Asian governments mulling whether to restrict rice exports. In the U.S., grocery bills are surging: Nearly every food staple has seen a double-digit percentage increase over the past year, including a 38% hike for a dozen eggs, to $2.16, and a 19% jump, to $1.78, for a loaf of white bread, according to American Farm Bureau data. With Americans spending 15% of their household income on food and drinks, rising prices in the grocery aisles have spurred consumers to hunt savings. Of that spending, only half goes to grocery stores, with restaurants collecting the rest…”

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