News

Cable-Laying Boom, Boost Internet

Dozens of new undersea internet cables are set to be laid over the next couple of years, providing a huge boost to worldwide capacity.

Pioneer, 400GB Optical Discs

Pioneer has developed a 16-layer read-only optical disc which it claims can store 400GB of data.

Paper Stronger Than Cast Iron

Researchers in Sweden have created 'Nanopaper' with over 1.6 times the tensile strength of cast iron

Toshiba Going After Blu-ray?

Unconfirmed rumours claim a High-res upgrade for existing DVD technology is in the works.

1TB optical drive

Call/Recall has announced it is developing a 1TB optical drive and disk, backwards compatible with Blu-ray.

Asus desktop Eee PC, Ebox

Asus will finally launch the desktop version of its elfin Eee PC early next month.

JFK, LAX To Test Millimeter-Wave Scanners

TSA Administrator Kip Hawley says that that the potentially revealing body scans (YouTube) would not be stored and that 90% of passengers subject to secondary screening opt for a millimeter wave scan over a pat-down.

Ion engine enters space race

The engine will be used in an ESA spacecraft tasked with mapping the Earth's gravitational field from orbit.

Laser Triggers Lightning

European researchers using a high-power laser deliberately triggered electrical activity in two passing thunderstorms.

Most powerful laser in the world

The Texas Petawatt laser reached greater than one petawatt of laser power.

Sweat Ducts Antenna for Lie Detection

This discovery might eventually result in lie detectors that operate at a distance.

Mobile Service Fights Speed Camera

Information about red-light cameras and where police tend to operate speed traps is kept in Trapster's database.

Large Hadron Collider Sparks Doomsday Lawsuit

The builders of the world's biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter.

Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking

Stewart Alsop, the editor of InfoWorld, predicted that the last mainframe computer would be unplugged by 1996. Just last month, IBM introduced the latest version of its mainframe, and technologies from the golden age of big-box computing continue to be vital components in modern infrastructure.

Intel Wi-Fi Provides 6 Mbps Over 100 km

Intel has announced plans to sell a specialized Wi-Fi platform later this year that can send data from a city to outlying rural areas tens of miles away, connecting sparsely populated villages to the Internet. The wireless technology, called the rural connectivity platform.

Intel to Ship 160GB Flash Drives

Intel has confirmed plans to ship a new line of solid-state drives for laptop and notebook PCs with storage capacities of 80GB to 160GB. Direct competition with hard drive manufacturers such as Toshiba Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co.

Camera Sees Through Clothes, Preserves Privacy

A Camera claiming to use Terahertz radiation to detect foreign objects under clothing, without revealing body details.

Brain Scanner

A brain scanning systems that can accurately tell what you're looking at by analyzing your brain's electrical activity. Using a database constructed of readings taken on test subjects who were shown thousands of photographs, the system works in real time to decipher what you're seeing.

Large Sheets Carbon Nanotubes

Scientists have developed sheets of nanotubes that measure up to three feet by six feet.

Robots, Daily Life in Japan

Many simple yet social jobs are being filled by robots of increasing sophistication.

Clothes That Clean Themselves

Australian researchers are developing a process that could lead to self-cleaning wool jumpers and silk ties.

The hunt for the God particle

The God Particle, which can help explain the Standard Model and get us closer to explain the Grand Unified Theory. CERN's scientists, the people who brought us the W and Z particles, anti-hydrogen atomsare building the Large Hadron Collider to discover, Higgs boson, a particle that carries a field which interacts with every living or inert matter.

Synchrotron. A Black Hole Factory?

The Large Hadronic Collider (LHC), which is to be the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, is currently being constructed at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.

Most Powerful Laser in the Universe

If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory.

Nanoscience: DNA Technique Yields 3-D Crystalline Organization Of Nanoparticles

Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have for the first time used DNA to guide the creation of three-dimensional, ordered, crystalline structures of nanoparticles. The ability to engineer such 3-D structures is essential to producing functional materials that take advantage of the unique properties that may exist at the nanoscale.

Another Perpetual Motion Device

this inventor breaking all the laws of physics as far as free energy goes. It even provoked interest from "esteemed Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Markus Zahn". I would like to know how this seemingly backyard enthusiast's experimental set up has not been tried a million times over the years. It seems so simple and too good to be true. The article has links to a multi-part video demo of the device accelerating an electric motor under load for free.

Low-tech Inventions That Help Change Lives

Popular Mechanics is featuring their Breakthrough Awards program for inventors. Some of the winning inventions help improve the living conditions for people in third world countries using low-tech materials and assembly methods.