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US Air Force to Test Scramjet Aircraft – “The US Air Force has been developing an aircraft that employs an air-breathing scramjet engine, and hopes to run test flights in the fall of 2009. Officials hope the X-51 “Waverider” aircraft will provide high speed aircraft [Mach 4.5] for reconnaissance or strike missions, and eventually the engines will be used for rockets to deploy satellites in space…”
Color E-Paper That Rivals the Real Thing – “Turning pixels on their side may finally mean high-quality color electronic paper…”
Color-Shifting Cuttlefish Inspire TV Screens – “Cuttlefish are masters of disguise, able to change their skin color in less than a second to hide from predators or draw in prey for the kill. Now, scientists from MIT and elsewhere are developing cuttlefish-inspired electronic ink and screens that use less than one-hundredth the power of traditional television screens…”
Something in the air kills flu virus – “A British company continues to offer a portable decontamination device that should come as breath of fresh air to a flu-weary public…”
Stadium in Taiwan Almost Completely Covered in Solar Panels – “We love solar power, we really do, but sometimes wonder if these things are not used for architectural effect rather than real power generation. The new World Games stadium in Kaohsiung, Taiwan is just about completely covered in photovoltaics, to very dramatic effect. The 55,000 seat stadium is designed by Japanese great Toyo Ito, and the panels can supply “one million kilowatts of electricity per year.” (I know, that makes little sense, it is a quote.)”
New tech for ball machines – simple lift technology:
Warning Letter to General Mills – “Based on claims made on your product’s label, we have determined that your Cheerios® Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal is promoted for conditions that cause it to be a drug because the product is intended for use in the prevention, mitigation, and treatment of disease. Specifically, your Cheerios® product bears the following claims on its label…”
Coil Gun with laser sight – “Capable of delivering over 18J kinetic energy, and speeds up to 110km/h! (42 gram projectiles)…”
New Asus P6T7 CUDA Motherboard gives you 4 Teraflops – “It is certified for NVIDIA Tesla GPU computing, based on the NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture that supports up to three NVIDIA Tesla cards and one NVIDIA Quadro card. Each GPU delivers 240 CUDA parallel processing cores, producing 1 teraflop of processing power simultaneously. This adds up to a total of 960 parallel processing cores, delivering 4 teraflops of processing power…”
Red Laser – The First Accurate iPhone Barcode Scanner – Hits The App Store – “There already are a few barcode related applications in the app store, but they all have one thing in common – they don’t really work. Red Laser, which has just hit the iTunes App Store, is the ultimate iPhone barcode scanner, which works just like one of those red-laser scanners at the checkout (hence the name)…”
Tape Designed to Bomb-, Storm-Proof Homes – “When a hurricane looms, a new tape could soon help homeowners keep their walls from blowing apart. X Flex tape, a clear, Kevlar-reinforced tape tested and developed in conjunction with the U.S. military, is set to become available to civilians within the next year…”
A stitch whose time has come – “A protein extracted from cows’ blood could provide the best answer yet to the age-old question of how to sew up wounds…”
Navy adapts laser cannons to chat with stealth subs – “Talking to submarines is a very a tricky business – most communication systems are based on radio or acoustic signals, but neither travel very far in water. This means that to pick up radio signals, submarines must surface or raise communication buoys very close to the surface, neither of which are appropriate for nuclear-powered stealth submarines that remain deep underwater for months at a time…”
AT&T’s move to block iPhone SlingPlayer from 3G is poppycock – “Slingbox owners can now access their content from the convenience of their iPhone. The only problem is that AT&T has killed the app’s access to its 3G network, hobbling an otherwise useful app and making its $30 asking price a little hard to swallow….”
China’s ‘secure’ OS Kylin – a threat to U.S offensive cyber capabilities? – “Picture a cyber warfare arms race where the participating countries have spent years of building offensive cyber warfare capabilities by exploiting the monoculture on one another’s IT infrastructure. Suddenly, one of the countries starts migrating to a hardened operating system of its own, and by integrating it on systems managing the critical infrastructure it successfully undermines the offensive cyber warfare capabilities developed by adversaries designed to be used primarily against Linux, UNIX and Windows…” See also: China deploys secure computer operating system
Better Place Unveils an Electric Car Battery Swap Station – “Better Place unveiled its battery swap system today and said the $500,000 gadget can replace a dead battery and get you back on the road in less time than it takes to fill your gas tank…”
IBM “Watson” System to Challenge Humans at Jeopardy:
Experimental Touchscreen Has Physical Buttons That Can Pop Up, Disappear – “BlackBerry and iPhone users might argue endlessly about which keyboard is better, but a new prototype display could bridge their divide: It combines touchscreen technology with physical buttons that appear or disappear, depending on the application…”
Credit card code to combat fraud – “A credit card with a built-in display is being tested by Visa with the aim of reducing online fraud…”
Teenagers Are Becoming Increasingly Logical, Swedish Study Finds – “A research project at the University of Gothenburg has been testing large groups of 13-year-olds in Sweden since the early 1960s using the same intelligence test. The tests have taken place at approximately five year intervals and consist of an inductive-logic test, a verbal test and a spatial test…”
Intel Fined Record €1.06 billion For Anti-Competitive Practices – “The California based company are alleged to have given leading computer manufacturers – such as Acer, Dell, HP and NEC – hidden rebates if they agreed only to use microprocessors provided by Intel in their computer products…”
Secrets of the Deep – “What lies beneath the surface of New York Harbor? For starters, a 350-foot steamship, 1,600 bars of silver, a freight train, and four-foot-long cement-eating worms…”
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