Two comparisons of recent smart phones in chart form:
1) The new generation of smart phones
2) Smartphones compared

Guide to Lightning

IBM Invests in Battery Research – “IBM Research is beginning an ambitious project that it hopes will lead to the commercialization of batteries that store 10 times as much energy as today’s within the next five years. The company will partner with U.S. national labs to develop a promising but controversial technology that uses energy-dense but highly flammable lithium metal to react with oxygen in the air. The payoff, says the company, will be a lightweight, powerful, and rechargeable battery for the electrical grid and the electrification of transportation…”

Custom bike wheels:

Pay-as-you-go 3G broadband comes courtesy of Virgin Mobile – “Virgin Mobile is offering a few prepaid mobile broadband plans that use Sprint’s 3G wireless network. It’s a bit pricey when the amount of bandwidth is factored in, but the cost and lack of a contract may make it appealing to some…”

Periodic table gets a new element – “The ubiquitous periodic table will soon have a new addition – the “super-heavy” element 112…”

Basic anatomy ‘baffles Britons’ – “Many people in the UK are unable to identify the location of their major organs, a study suggests…”

Getting a theory of everything by ditching tenet of physics – “A few recently published papers indicate that the long-running attempt to unite quantum mechanics and relativity might be finally seeing some compelling progress. A long-cherished tenet of physics, the Lorentz Invariance, is the first casualty…”

Radioactive wasps bug out nuclear cleanup workers – “If workers cleaning up the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site didn’t have enough to worry about, now they’ve got to deal with radioactive wasp nests. Mud dauber wasps built the nests, which have been largely abandoned by their flighty owners, in holes at south-central Washington’s Hanford nuclear reservation in 2003…”

Record-Breaking Superlens Smashes Diffraction Limit – “The world’s highest-resolution lens opens the door to real-time movies of molecules in action…”

Gravity Probe – “On April 20, 2004, a small spacecraft set out on a giant quest … to answer one of the fundamental unanswered questions of our universe. At stake is the reputation of the 20th century’s great genius … Albert Einstein … and also of this man. His entire career rides on this rocket…”

Evolution Can Occur in Less Than Ten Years
– ” How fast can evolution take place? In just a few years, according to a new study on guppies led by UC Riverside’s Swanne Gordon, a graduate student in biology…”

Teen diagnoses her own disease in science class – “For eight years, Jessica Terry suffered from stomach pain so horrible, it brought her to her knees. The pain, along with diarrhea, vomiting and fever, made her so sick, she lost weight and often had to miss school…”

Ford Mustang ‘X-1′ and Dodge Challenger ‘Vapor’ Revealed – “American tuners Galpin Auto sports have created two customs for the U.S. Air Force to wheel out on their 2009 Super Car Tour. Both cars will be used as recruitment tools for the military outfit…” See also:

Feds Swoop In on Nationwide Pickpocket, I.D. Theft Ring – “Federal prosecutors in Virginia have leveled conspiracy and bank-fraud charges against the alleged leader and nine members of a national organization of high-tech pickpockets that’s been the scourge of police around the country since at least early 2007…”

Notoriety’s Missing Links – “Shortly after authorities identified their suspect in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting Wednesday, the world began searching for traces of James W. von Brunn online. Those who Googled immediately were able to find him: a personal Web site claiming Jewish “conspiracies,” diatribes posted on message boards. But those who started their hunt just a few hours later would have found only empty holes — information that was scrubbed away as Web sites figured out how to address the fact that they had once hosted the words of an accused murderer…”

Vancouver becomes role model for open source in government – “The CIO of a Vancouver school board quietly moved to open source last March, Reimer pointed out. By deciding not to renew its Microsoft Office licence, he saved enough money to purchase a computer lab for every school in the city and schools are now allowed to install Firefox, she said…”

Google Finally Launches Creative Commons Image Search – “To date, whenever I’ve needed free-to-use Creative Commons 2.0 or 2.5 images for blog posts or other projects I’ve been relegated to either Wikipedia or Flickr for my image searches. No longer will that be the case…”

This Flight Sim Needs 120 Graphics Cards Just To Get Off The Ground – “Back when they were popular, flight sims needed some pretty hefty hardware to get them running. But I can’t remember any of them ever having “120 dedicated graphics cards” under the “required” section on the side of the box…”

Who wins, loses with browser-less Windows 7 – “Microsoft’s move to offer Windows 7 in Europe without a browser may help rivals, but it could make life more difficult for European consumers, particularly those who want to upgrade their existing machines…”

What really prompts the dog’s ‘guilty look’ – “What dog owner has not come home to a broken vase or other valuable items and a guilty-looking dog slouching around the house? By ingeniously setting up conditions where the owner was misinformed as to whether their dog had really committed an offense, Alexandra Horowitz, Assistant Professor from Barnard College in New York, uncovered the origins of the “guilty look” in dogs…”

[[[Jump to IR #300]]]