Questions swirl about new aircraft catapult systems for next carrier – “Despite widespread concerns about a planned aircraft launching system for the Gerald R. Ford class of aircraft carriers, the Navy has given Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding a $43 million contract to begin purchasing equipment to support the new technology…”

The new TV remote: Your bare hand? – “The TV remote control of the future isn’t an expensive device with an LCD screen and blinking lights. It’s your hand…”

New Way To Split Water Into Hydrogen And Oxygen Developed – “The design of efficient systems for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, driven by sunlight is among the most important challenges facing science today, underpinning the long term potential of hydrogen as a clean, sustainable fuel. But man-made systems that exist today are very inefficient and often require additional use of sacrificial chemical agents. In this context, it is important to establish new mechanisms by which water splitting can take place…”

Conficker wakes up, updates via P2P, drops payload – “The Conficker worm is finally doing something–updating via peer-to-peer between infected computers and dropping a mystery payload on infected computers, Trend Micro said on Wednesday…”

World’s Most Expensive Engineering Projects – “Here is a list of the world’s most expensive engineering projects with estimated costs and short descriptions of each project (sources: iCivilEngineer, China Daily, Wikipedia). Some of the projects are already completed, some are under construction, so the cost estimates are not definitive…”

Recycled plastics giving criminals a break – “The recycled products may look similar, but the physical and chemical properties differ so widely from the plastics they replace that the techniques honed over recent decades to lift fingerprints off plastics are no longer effective, he says…”

Filling the Skies with Robot Assassins: The Drone Wars Have Begun – “They came to life as surveillance tools during the wars over the former Yugoslavia, were armed by February 2001, were hastily pressed into operation in Afghanistan after 9/11, and like many weapons systems, began to evolve generationally. As they did, they developed from surveillance eyes in the sky into something far more sinister and previously restricted to terra firma: assassins…”

Ancient diatoms lead to new technology for solar energy – “Engineers at Oregon State University have discovered a way to use an ancient life form to create one of the newest technologies for solar energy, in systems that may be surprisingly simple to build compared to existing silicon-based solar cells…”

How Big is Facebook? – “Facebook announced this morning that it will welcome its 200 millionth user today. That’s a whole lot of people…”

Did a nickel famine trigger the ‘Great Oxidation Event’? – “The Earth’s original atmosphere held very little oxygen. This began to change around 2.4 billion years ago when oxygen levels increased dramatically during what scientists call the “Great Oxidation Event.” The cause of this event has puzzled scientists, but researchers writing in Nature have found indications in ancient sedimentary rocks that it may have been linked to a drop in the level of dissolved nickel in seawater…”

1 MW and 20 Megawatt Kitegen Wind Power Systems Funding of 15 million Euro Announced – “The radical italian Kitegen wind power system appears to have funding of 15 million euro (announced not distributed). An interesting synergy is possible with large Kitegen systems and nuclear power plants…”

Top Tips for New Twitter Users – “Twitter is expanding rapidly and if you aren’t already tweeting, then I suggest you do and we have put together a list of tips to help you get a good start on twitter…”

Visual Attention: How The Brain Makes The Most Of The Visible World – “The visual system has limited capacity and cannot process everything that falls onto the retina. Instead, the brain relies on attention to bring salient details into focus and filter out background clutter. Two recent studies by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, one study employing computational modeling techniques and the other experimental techniques, have helped to unravel the mechanisms underlying attention…”

10 things I bet you didn’t know about domain names – “A pulling back of the domain business curtain to reveal a few shady practices undertaken by unnamed sources…”

Bug eats electricity, farts biogas – “Single-celled organisms that can convert electricity into methane could help solve one of the biggest problems with renewable energy – its unreliability compared to the steady output of polluting fossil-fuel power stations…”

Sentience Driving Software Can Reduce Fuel Usage 5-24% Starting in 2012 – “Sentience driving software can control a car or trucks acceleration and braking and enable 5-24% fuel savings and could be installed in vehicles starting in 2012. It is also a transition path to completely robotic driving. For about $30 to install ion each car or truck the system would save an average of 14% of fuel usage…”

Guest Column: Computers vs. Brains – “Because the brain arose through natural selection, it contains layers of systems that arose for one function and then were adopted for another, even though they don’t work perfectly. An engineer with time to get it right would have started over, but it’s easier for evolution to adapt an old system to a new purpose than to come up with an entirely new structure. Our colleague David Linden has compared the evolutionary history of the brain to the task of building a modern car by adding parts to a 1925 Model T that never stops running. As a result, brains differ from computers in many ways, from their highly efficient use of energy to their tremendous adaptability…”

Has power grid been hacked? U.S. won’t say – “U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters the power grid is vulnerable to potentially disabling computer attacks, while declining to comment on reports that an intrusion had taken place…”

Quantum lasers: Half light, half matter – “So here’s a heads-up for you: we could be about to witness the next stage in the laser’s evolution, a sea change in how laser light is produced. A new wave of devices looks likely to exploit particle-like packets of energy to produce their light – packets that are neither light, nor matter, but both. It’s early days, but advances in taming these exotic beasts are proceeding apace….”

A Bonding Experience: NASA Strengthens Welds – “Traditional or fusion welding involves blowtorches, solder and all the tools of the trade. Now imagine a different welding process that joins materials with no blowtorch, no solder, no sparks, no smoke, no ozone and no radiation. Instead, it uses friction to heat materials and then “stir” them together at a molecular level…”

111 Teams Vie for a $10 Million Prize to Design a Super-Efficient 100+ MPG Car – “One hundred eleven teams fielding 136 vehicles have gotten the green flag to compete for a $10 million purse in the Progressive Automotive X Prize contest to build a production-ready, super-efficient vehicle that can travel more than 100 miles on a gallon of fuel…”

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