Most people have no idea what rare earth elements are, but a wide array of the technologies that we use every single day are dependent on them. Without rare earth elements, we would have no hybrid car batteries, flat screen televisions, cell phones or iPods. Without rare earth elements, the entire “green economy” [...]
The US senators pushing a controversial new bill that some fear would give President Barack Obama the powers to seize control of and even shut down the internet have rejected claims it would give Obama a net “kill switch”.
The bill, titled Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, has been unanimously approved by the US [...]
(PhysOrg.com) — The Shimizu Corporation, a Japanese construction firm, has recently proposed a plan to harness solar energy on a larger scale than almost any previously proposed concept. Their ambitious plan involves building a belt of solar cells around the Moon’s 6,800-mile (11,000-kilometer) equator, converting the electricity to powerful microwaves and lasers to be beamed [...]
PhysOrg.com — The majority of today’s hard disks use perpendicular recording, which means their storage densities are limited to a few hundred gigabytes per square inch. Scientists have for some time been trying to find ways of increasing the limit, and a new method has been proposed that could stretch the limit as high as [...]
It was just days after the release of the iPad — Apple’s slate computer heralded as a tool for gaming, book and magazine reading and Web consumption — when the announcement arrived.
One of the world’s biggest porn companies claimed it had created a way to stream its videos onto the device, skipping the Apple store [...]
In Chris Harrison’s ideal world, mobile phones would be the size of matchbooks. They’d have full-size keyboards. They’d browse the Web. They’d play videos.
And, most importantly, you’d never have to touch them.
Sound like too much to ask? Maybe not.
Harrison, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University and a former intern at Microsoft Research, has developed [...]
Photographers have their own version of sleight of hand. They can manipulate people, objects, landscapes and light in images, fooling lesser humans into believing the final product is a representation of reality, rather than something created by hand.
In the old language, we called this “trick photography.” Now, in the PC age, we just call it [...]
It’s the hottest new bit of hardware in the arms race – a non-lethal hand grenade loaded with the world’s most powerful chillies.
Military experts in India have developed a new crowd control grenade packed with ground seeds from the Bhut Jolokia, officially recognized as the hottest chili on the planet by Guinness World Records.
When deployed [...]
Cisco unveiled a new Internet technology Tuesday that it says will provide the ultra-fast data speeds necessary to stay ahead of users’ rapidly growing online video demands.
The new technology, known as “CRS-3,” is a network routing system that will be able to offer downloads of up to 322 Terabits per second, according to the company.
Translation: [...]
A 42-year-old HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable HIV in his blood and no symptoms after a stem cell transplant from a donor carrying a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to the virus that causes AIDS, according to a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. Read More
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Hackers in Europe and China successfully broke into computers at nearly 2,500 companies and government agencies over the last 18 months in a coordinated global attack that exposed vast amounts of personal and corporate secrets to theft, according to a computer-security company that discovered the breach.
The damage from the latest cyberattack [...]
The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.
As part of its budget for the next year, [...]
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s unsurprising affirmation of support for network neutrality is a victory for the high-minded principle of open, unfettered internet access. Too bad it means the days of all-you-can-eat, flat-rate internet access are probably over.
Net neutrality sounds like a good idea. After all, it’s the internet’s openness to any and all users, applications [...]
The World Health Organization (WHO) is considering a plan to ask governments to impose a global consumer tax on such things as Internet activity or everyday financial transactions like paying bills online.
Such a scheme could raise “tens of billions of dollars” on behalf of the United Nations’ public health arm from a broad base of [...]
Google said Tuesday the company and at least 20 others were victims of a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” originating in China in mid-December, evidently to gain access to the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
“Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective,” according to a statement [...]