GPS Causing Truckers to Crash Into Bridges – “New York state wants to crack down on truckers who rely on satellite devices to direct them onto faster but prohibited routes and end up crashing into overpasses that are too low for their rigs…”

Exploring the Sinister Catacombs of the City of Light – “The passages can be as low as three feet overhead – even less – the air heavy with dust, and the ground underfoot flooded with grimy water splashing way over your gumboots. In tunnels up to 100 feet below the surface bustle of one of the world’s great cities, another clandestine world exists. Exploring the Mines of Paris carries risk. For one, it is strictly illegal, with special police and their dogs patrolling the vast subterranean network. There is also a very real danger of getting lost as well as the chance of cave-ins in some places…”

New Trend: Flammable Tap Water – “The whole natural gas question in this country is a complicated one. On one hand, we have oodles of the stuff, it’s relatively low carbon, and it would seem to be a sensible pillar of our country’s energy future. On the other hand, extracting it from Mother Earth does nasty stuff to the water supply. How nasty? Check out this video shot in Fort Lupton, Colorado, a little town just north of Denver’s northernmost suburban sprawl…”

First black hole for light created on Earth – “An electromagnetic “black hole” that sucks in surrounding light has been built for the first time. The device, which works at microwave frequencies, may soon be extended to trap visible light, leading to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity…”

Lottery hoax causes riot at Ohio coat store – “A woman being driven around in a rented limousine pulled up at a coat store and announced she’d won the lottery and would pay for everyone’s purchases, police said, but she ended up causing a riot when customers realized it was a hoax…”

We ARE the Jetsons! – “Growing up watching cartoons, watching the Jetsons made me want to live in the future. All the flying cars, talking robots, and new fangled contractions were in our future. Now as I look around at all the technologies, it seems that Hanna/Barbara might have gotten a few things right with their farcical cartoons! Here are a few examples…”

Berners-Lee ‘sorry’ for slashes – “The forward slashes at the beginning of internet addresses have long annoyed net users and now the man behind them has apologised for using them…”

Immaterials: the ghost in the field – “This video is about exploring the spatial qualities of RFID, visualised through an RFID probe, long exposure photography and animation….”

It’s Just Fancy Talk – “Here’s a little story to show just how thoroughly Google’s long-awaited chatting tool, called Google Wave, can kill your mood to chat: The other day, I was “waving” with Zach Frechette, the editor of GOOD magazine. Naturally, we were talking about the new site’s merits and flaws. As we went back and forth, I had a tiny epiphany. I wanted to tell Zach that I thought Wave would have a much tougher time catching on than Twitter, because it was asking so much more of its users…”

Wi-fi ‘to get a whole lot easier’ – “The world of wi-fi is to become a whole lot easier thanks to a major technology upgrade, says an industry group…”

Microsoft recovers Sidekick data – “Microsoft says it has now recovered the personal data lost when its Sidekick servers suffered an outage on 13 October…”

2009: The year your data died – “Data disasters at Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook all in the same week mean one thing: Your data — and the Net itself — are a lot more fragile than you may think…”

It’s official: Your bullying boss really is an idiot – “Got a bullying boss? Take solace in new research showing that leaders who feel incompetent really do lash out at others to temper their own inferiority….”

‘Magnetricity’ observed for first time – “The magnetic equivalent of electricity, dubbed “magnetricity”, has been demonstrated experimentally for the first time. Just as the flow of electrons produces electrical current, individual north and south magnetic poles have been observed to roam freely, generating magnetic “current”…”

The spider that invented the wheel:

How the Moon produces its own water – “The Moon is a big sponge that absorbs electrically charged particles given out by the Sun. These particles interact with the oxygen present in some dust grains on the lunar surface, producing water. This discovery, made by the ESA-ISRO instrument SARA onboard the Indian Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, confirms how water is likely being created on the lunar surface. It also gives scientists an ingenious new way to take images of the Moon and any other airless body in the Solar System…”

Video: 9 year old scores greatest goal in Boston this season – “Not too shabby for a 9 year old, eh? Your heart has to go out to the goalie, though, who’s probably still frozen in his crease as we speak…”

An Engineer’s Guide to Bandwidth – “Web app developers spend most of our time not thinking about how data is actually transmitted through the bowels of the network stack. Abstractions at the application layer let us pretend that networks read and write whole messages as smooth streams of bytes. Generally this is a good thing. But knowing what’s going underneath is crucial to performance tuning and application design. The character of our users’ internet connections is changing and some of the rules of thumb we rely on may need to be revised….”

The secret sauces in ATI’s new Radeon HD 5000 GPUs – “ati_logoAfter months of speculation, AMD has pressed the big red “go” button on the Radeon HD 5000 series. The reviews are pouring in–and we’ll get to those–but we want to focus on what improvements have been made to make for a superior end-user experience…”

WHO launches worldwide war on booze – “HUMANITY’s relationship with alcohol has never been easy. Now it is about to undergo as great a change as our attitude to tobacco, which has seen smoking plummet from the height of cool to the lowest of unpleasant habits….”

Testosterone drives men to buy fast cars – “Testosterone is what drives men’s desire to own fast cars, according to a study published in the journal Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes…”

Did you know your iPhone has an FM radio in it? – “Your iPhone has an FM radio in it, and Apple is thought to be on the verge of activating it and giving your a radio app…”

Seamlessly Melding Man and Machine – “Tiny implants that connect to nerve cells could make it easier to control prosthetic limbs…”

Robots that “show emotion”

Henry Markram builds a brain in a supercomputer – “Henry Markram says the mysteries of the mind can be solved — soon. Mental illness, memory, perception: they’re made of neurons and electric signals, and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain’s 100,000,000,000,000 synapses…”

A spoonful of sugar helps wounds heal faster – “Spilt sugarCan sprinkling sugar into a wound speed up the healing process? The papers are today reporting on some new research we touched on back in August…”

“Look Ma, No Parachute!” – “How do you fly on a world with no atmosphere? Wings won’t work and neither do propellers. And don’t even try that parachute!”

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