Intel WiDi Wireless Display Technology – “Intel’s new WiDi (Wireless Display Interface) technology will start to be bundled with various Core i5 and Core i3 notebooks later this month and it promises to address the Home Theater and Multimedia PC markets with a solution that will enable wireless connectivity of your notebook over HDMI to an HDTV. Using standard 802.11n wireless technologies for transmission of data,..”

Google Earth helps find El Dorado – “For nearly 500 years, explorers have hunted in vain for a lost city— now with Google Earth, it may have been found…”

How to stop a killer asteroid – Different techniques for saving earth from a killer asteroid

Cancer Risks Debated for Type of X-Ray Scan – “The plan for broad use of X-ray body scanners to detect bombs or weapons under airline passengers’ clothes has rekindled a debate about the safety of delivering small doses of radiation to millions of people — a process some experts say is certain to result in a few additional cancer deaths…”

Lego Universe Trailer:

A Comparison of the Effects of Three GM Corn Varieties on Mammalian Health – “Our analysis clearly reveals for the 3 GMOs new side effects linked with GM maize consumption, which were sex- and often dose-dependent. Effects were mostly associated with the kidney and liver, the dietary detoxifying organs, although different between the 3 GMOs. Other effects were also noticed in the heart, adrenal glands, spleen and haematopoietic system. We conclude that these data highlight signs of hepatorenal toxicity, possibly due to the new pesticides specific to each GM corn. In addition, unintended direct or indirect metabolic consequences of the genetic modification cannot be excluded…”

Reporter breaks an ‘unbreakable’ mobile phone at CES – “Reporter Dan Simmons from the BBC’s technology show Click managed to break a mobile phone marketed as “unbreakable”, during a demonstration at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas…”

Transmission of thought from one person to another is becoming a reality, albeit one which will take time to realize – “We are about to make history. As long as these electrodes don’t electrocute me first, I am seconds away from becoming the first journalist in the universe to try the professor’s telepathy machine…”

Future air security could involve mind-reading technology – “A would-be terrorist tries to board a plane, bent on mass murder. As he walks through a security checkpoint, fidgeting and glancing around, a network of high-tech machines analyzes his body language and reads his mind…”

Intelligence and the Idle Mind – “I’ve written before about the importance of daydreaming and the so-called default, or resting state network, which seems to underlie some important features of human cognition. Instead of being shackled to our immediate surroundings and sensations, the daydreaming mind is free to engage in abstract thought and imaginative ramblings and interesting counterfactuals. As a result, we’re able to envision things that don’t actually exist…”

Who will pay for Amazon’s ‘Chernobyl’? – “A film released this week in Britain recounts the 16-year battle by Ecuadorians for damages against Chevron for oil pollution…”

America’s Incredible Shrinking Car Population – “Has it been a while since you last bought a car, even a used one? Are financial realities causing you to consider giving up owning one at all? Welcome to the club. America’s auto population is shrinking along with annual sales (which lost a whopping four million in 2009). The 16 million annual sales year is likely to be ancient history in the U.S. Did you notice that they’re now selling more cars in China than in the auto capital of the world…”

Light Touch interactive projector turns any flat surface into a touchscreen – ” the “Light Touch” from the house of Light Blue Optics is an interactive projector that featuring multi-touch technology turns any flat surface into a touchscreen…”

How Earth Survived Its Birth – “Just how Earth survived the process of its birth without suffering an early demise by falling into the sun has been something of a mystery to astronomers, but a new model has figured out what protected our planet when it was still a vulnerable, baby world. In short, temperature differences in the space around the sun, 4.6 billion years ago, caused Earth to migrate outward as much as gravity was trying to pull it inward, and so the fledgling world found equilibrium in what we now know to be a very habitable orbit…” See also: A New Theory on Why the Sun Never Swallowed the Earth

Hands-On With the Boxee Set-Top Box and Remote – “A host of video services on the web enable you to watch your favorite TV programs and movies anytime you wish, and Boxee is an open platform striving to weave them all into one neat interface. To get the Boxee experience onto a TV, D-Link has launched a set-top box dedicated to the open video platform, along with a special remote…”

Call Me! – “But Skype requires me to look at you while you’re talking, which is totally ridiculous. The only sci-fi show that understood this was Star Trek. Bones and Jim would use their flip phones to talk quickly about beaming or health issues. The only time they’d fire up the videophone was when a Klingon was sitting in a spaceship 20 yards away with guns pointed at them…”

25 worst jobs to have in 2010 – “At this point in the recession it’s probably safe to say any job is a good job, but according to a study conducted by job search portal CareerCast, in order to identify the best, you have to also determine which are the worst. The bottom 25 are quite surprising and their methodology makes me wonder if they took into account things like pensions, vacations and benefits. How else could cops and temporary circus workers rank so closely together?”

Egypt tombs suggest pyramids not built by slaves
– “New tombs found in Giza support the view that the Great Pyramids were built by free workers and not slaves, as widely believed, Egypt’s chief archaeologist said on Sunday…”

Why don’t TV weathermen believe in climate change? – “The responses stunned him. Twenty-nine percent of the 121 meteorologists who replied agreed with Coleman—not that global warming was unproven, or unlikely, but that it was a scam.* Just 24 percent of them believed that humans were responsible for most of the change in climate over the past half century—half were sure this wasn’t true, and another quarter were “neutral” on the issue. “I think it scares and disturbs a lot of people in the science community,” Wilson told me recently. This was the most important scientific question of the twenty-first century thus far, and a matter on which more than eight out of ten climate researchers were thoroughly convinced. And three quarters of the TV meteorologists Wilson surveyed believe the climatologists were wrong…”

Science denial on the rise – “From evolution to global warming to vaccines, science is under assault from denialists–those who dismiss well-tested scientific knowledge as merely one of many competing ideologies. Science denial goes beyond skeptical questioning to attack the legitimacy of science itself…”

Google Nexus One carries $174 materials cost – “The Nexus One, sold with the Google brand name but manufactured by HTC Corp., carries a Bill Of Materials (BOM) of $174.15, based on a preliminary estimate from iSuppli’s Teardown Analysis Team. This total comprises only hardware and component costs for the Nexus One itself and does not take into consideration other expenses such as manufacturing, software, box contents, accessories and royalties…”

Mirror testing breaks superstitious myths – “The James Webb Space Telescope is the next-generation premier space observatory, exploring deep space phenomena from distant galaxies to nearby planets and stars. Webb will give scientists clues about the formation of the universe and the evolution of our own solar system, from the first light after the Big Bang to the formation of star systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth. Expected to launch in 2014, the telescope is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency…”

25 Microchips That Shook the World – “A list of some of the most innovative, intriguing, and inspiring integrated circuits…”

Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over – “Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December…”

are insects the first step in creating a.i.? – “We don’t like insects. Besides their annoying and sometimes dangerous bites, annoying habits of carrying all sorts of diseases and bizarre body plans that seem to be completely alien compared to our familiar tetrapod arrangement, they also seem to be everywhere, trying to sink their mouthparts into just about everything, from our food to our flesh. And when we try to control their populations, they quickly evolve resistance to most of our chemical weapons and carry on an usual. Not even mass extinctions seem to bother them all that much. But hey, at least they’re just little eating machines which function solely by instinct, right? Well, actually, it just so happens that scientists working with a number of insects found that bugs have some basic intelligence and their discoveries are making us question whether bigger is necessarily better when it comes to brainpower…”

The Other Plot to Wreck America – “THERE may not be a person in America without a strong opinion about what coulda, shoulda been done to prevent the underwear bomber from boarding that Christmas flight to Detroit. In the years since 9/11, we’ve all become counterterrorists. But in the 16 months since that other calamity in downtown New York — the crash precipitated by the 9/15 failure of Lehman Brothers — most of us are still ignorant about what Warren Buffett called the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that wrecked our economy. Fluent as we are in Al Qaeda and body scanners, when it comes to synthetic C.D.O.’s and credit-default swaps, not so much…”

How to Make America More Innovative – “Is America no longer the land of innovation? Everyone from tech billionaires to Times columnists is sounding the alarm, and everyone has his own diagnosis of the problem: innovators kept out of the country by H1-B visa quotas and bureaucracy. Poor science education in public schools. Even U.S.-style health care has been implicated. Would-be entrepreneurs, the thinking goes, can’t act on their breakthrough ideas because they feel tethered to middle-management jobs and the health benefits that come with them…”

Quantum computer calculates exact energy of molecular hydrogen – “In an important first for a promising new technology, scientists have used a quantum computer to calculate the precise energy of molecular hydrogen. This groundbreaking approach to molecular simulations could have profound implications not just for quantum chemistry, but also for a range of fields from cryptography to materials science…”

It From Bit: The Case Of Gravity – “Subsequently, Verlinde takes a deep dive: if an acceleration is proportional to a temperature, it has all the characteristics of an entropic effect. Entropic acceleration results from the tendency of a system to evolve such that there is an increase in the minimum number of bits required to describe the system in all its details. Could it be that gravitational attraction results from nothing more than a growth in number of bits required? Verlinde argues that such is indeed the case. Key is that one needs to follow a holographic approach with all bits describing reality residing at holographic screens….”

Coal from Mass Extinction Era Linked to Lung Cancer Mystery – “The volcanic eruptions thought responsible for Earth’s largest mass extinction — which killed more than 70 percent of plants and animals 250 million years ago — is still taking lives today. That’s the conclusion of a new study showing, for the first time, that the high silica content of coal in one region of China may be interacting with volatile substances in the coal to cause unusually high rates of lung cancer. The study, which helps solve this cancer mystery, appears in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology…”

[[[Interesting Reading #393 – News from CES, sexting vs. bullying, wireless TV, robot girlfriends, terahertz waves, the tech of the dead Ady Gil and much more…]]]