Radio-controlled bullets leave no place to hide – “A RIFLE capable of firing explosive bullets that can detonate within a metre of a target could let soldiers fire on snipers hiding in trenches, behind walls or inside buildings…”

Twine…Digg on Ritalin! – “The digital doorway to Web 3.0 is beginning to ease open ever so slightly, as we learn more and more about semantic technology
. Now joining the excitement of Wolfram Alpha and Google Wave is a small start-up called Twine. In the grand scheme of things, Twine might be a fledgling to the social networking space, but its definitely pushing the Web 2.0 envelope inside out with its debut…”

Unix turns 40: The past, present and future of a revolutionary OS – “Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created…”

Floating wind turbine launched – “The world’s first floating wind turbine is to be towed out to sea this weekend…”

UN announces launch of world’s first tuition-free, online university

Electro-Optical Distributed Aperture System (EO DAS) for the F-35

How did 100,000,000 women disappear? – “Two researchers crunching population statistics have confirmed an unsettling reality. Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray noticed the ratio of women to men in developing regions and in some cultures is suspiciously below the norm…”

Irrigation system can grow crops with salt water – “The dRHS irrigation system consists of a network of sub-surface pipes, which can be filled with almost any water, whether pure, brackish, salted or polluted. The system can even take most industrial waste-water and use it without the need for a purification process. The pipes are made from a plastic that retains virtually all contaminants while letting clean water through to the plants’ roots…”

Leo Laporte calls out Mike Arrington of TechCrunch:

Welcome to BlindSearch – “The goal of this site is simple, we want to see what happens when you remove the branding from search engines. How differently will you perceive the results?”

A Billion Year Ultra-Dense Memory Chip – “When it comes to data storage, density and durability have always moved in opposite directions – the greater the density the shorter the durability. For example, information carved in stone is not dense but can last thousands of years, whereas today’s silicon memory chips can hold their information for only a few decades. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have smashed this tradition with a new memory storage medium that can pack thousands of times more data into one square inch of space than conventional chips and preserve this data for more than a billion years!”

A new way to prevent flaws in composite materials – “BECAUSE they are both strong and lightweight, composite materials made from carbon fibres are the darlings of engineers in the aerospace industry. Unfortunately, such materials deteriorate over time. Wind and rain attack the glue that sticks the layers of carbon fibres together. As a consequence, the layers peel away from one another. Many people have tried to solve this problem, without success. A new method aims to do so by stitching the carbon-fibre layers together…”

The Myth of the Black Box – “While searchers scour the Atlantic Ocean for Flight 447’s black box, Clive Irving explains how aviation came to depend on this idiosyncratic recording method—and why the Air France debacle proves we need to give it up…”

Rising Above I.Q. – “In the mosaic of America, three groups that have been unusually successful are Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks — and in that there may be some lessons for the rest of us…”

Microsoft’s Bing feeds you, tries to keep you captive – “Microsoft calls Bing a decision engine. Why? “That’s our goal of not just providing links but helping you solve the key task that you’re trying to do,” says Program Manager Nathan Buggia. “That’s the whole point behind the categorised search, the instant answers, and a lot of other features.”" See also: Microsoft Outperforms Google In Porn and Beware Google: Microsoft’s new search engine isn’t half-bad

Search is too important to leave to one company – even Google – “It may seem as unlikely as a publicly edited encyclopedia, but the internet needs publicly controlled search…”

The Hole Punch That Infiltrated A Steve Jobs Keynote and Macworld San Francisco – “The Stevenote was set to begin at 9am, and as I stated it was only 7:25am when we found out we were not getting in. It was then that I realized the only difference between us, and the members of the press that were getting into the Stevenote was due to our lack of little circular yellow stickers on our press passes. This is when it occurred to me that we were in San Francisco, one of the greatest cities in the world, and that there was a Rite Aid about 2-3 blocks from the Moscone center…”

Microsoft won’t offer Windows for smartbooks – “The OS maker doesn’t plan to offer Windows versions for the machines leaving the market to Linux and Android…”

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live – “The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your “followers,” and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It’s not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, “If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal.” “

The other kind of solar power – “Energy: Think of solar power, and you probably think of photovoltaic panels. But there is another way to make electricity from sunlight, which arguably has even brighter prospects…”

US shells out $10M for unmanned aircraft that can perch like a bird – “Unmanned aircraft maker AeroVironment got an additional $5.4 million to further develop the diminutive aircraft that can fly into tight spaces undetected, perch and send live surveillance information to its handlers…”

Project Natal’s Milo Is the Future of Video Games

Drinking water from air humidity – ” Cracks permeate the dried-out desert ground, the landscape bears testimony to the lack of water. But even here, where there are no lakes, rivers or groundwater, considerable quantities of water are stored in the air. In the Negev desert in Israel, for example, annual average relative air humidity is 64 percent – in every cubic meter of air there are 11.5 milliliters of water…”

A Brain in a Band-Aid Box – “We live in the age of multi-core. So why build a bunch of low power single core nodes? First, to be clear, VIA is not immune from the multi-core trend as it will be sampling a dual core Nano version later this year. In any case, this product seems to try and fit into a price-performance-power envelope that is not multi-core friendly. Let’s consider power. Each unit is said to use less than 30 Watts peak. Each 2U chassis then requires about 360 Watts. This power requirement is about half as much as you would need for an 8 core Nehalem solution…”

Improving Plug-In Electric Cars – “Two of the more interesting efforts include roads that can recharge batteries and batteries designed to charge up faster…”

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