You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April, 2007.
It is a common misnomer that “everything is available on the web.” You’ll also here people say that the answer to any question is just a Google search away. Neither of these ideas are true, but hopefully over time they’ll become more and more the reality. Today came news that we’re one baby step closer to that reality.
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“Anbar Province, long the lawless heartland of the tenacious Sunni Arab resistance, is undergoing a surprising transformation. Violence is ebbing in many areas, shops and schools are reopening, police forces are growing and the insurgency appears to be in retreat.”
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But research into vitamin D is suggesting both a plausible answer to this medical puzzle and a heretical notion: that cancers and other disorders in rich countries aren’t caused mainly by pollutants but by a vitamin deficiency known to be less acute or even non-existent in poor nations.
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Over the past four years, a thriving market for household solar panels has sprung up in India, with the help of a United Nations program which assists local banks in offering cheaper loans for the panels.
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Photos of nature from all over the world.
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A secretive Hayward, Calif. company has just announced it will build the largest solar power “farm†in North America, using solar cells manufactured in Silicon Valley.
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Unfortunately for most, traversing back and forth to Asia from America on a regular basis isn’t exactly in the cards, but thanks to a $500 million project agreed upon by a 17-member telecommunications consortium, visiting via fiber will soon be a whole lot snappier.
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Modern humans are bacteria-killing machines. We assassinate microbes with hand soap, mouthwash and bathroom cleaners. It feels clean and right. But some scientists say we’re overdoing it.
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We need this, to stay competitive on the global stage for technology.
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The government proposes to offer all citizens of India free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009, through the state-owned telecom service providers BSNL and MTNL. While consumers would cheer, the move holds the potential to kill the telecom business as we know it.
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James Simons, a 69-year-old publicity shy former math professor, uses complex computer-driven mathematical models to make bets on stocks, bonds and commodities, among other things.
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A paper about hyperdrives won ‘paper of the year’ from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. A hyperdrive motor would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds…a space propulsion researcher at the US Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories has said he would be interested in testing the idea!
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Interesting study (by Harvard, no less) on the effect of media manipulation in today’s conflicts
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MySQL, purveyor of the open-source database of the same name, is on the road to becoming a publicly traded company, bolstered by $50 million in revenue in 2006.
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“The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, told reporters Wednesday that sectarian murders in Baghdad have been reduced by about one-third since the beginning of the year.”
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The Dow industrials surged past 13,000 for the first time ever Wednesday morning - before retreating a bit - thanks to a strong read on durable goods orders and upbeat earnings from Amazon.com. Blue-chip barometer crosses barrier, backs off on earnings, durables orders; new home sales rebound, miss estimates.
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“Warp Drives”, “Hyperspace Drives”, or any other term for Faster-than-light travel is at the level of speculation, with some facets edging into the realm of science.
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Larger than Earth + Likely to Have Water…
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Page lists the 5 largest American wind farms. These farms are capable of powering thousands of American homes and feature hundreds of massive towers and blades spread across thousands of acres of land. Truly awe inspiring.
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Native plants are emerging as the new heroes in a growing struggle to deal with climate change. In dry regions drought resistant plants significantly reduce water usage. In places prone to torrential downpours plants like marsh milkweed, bloodroot, and great blue lobelia soak up water before it runs off taking fertile soil with it.
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An American billionaire who paid $25 million for a 13-day trip to outer space returned to Earth on Saturday in a space capsule that also carried a cosmonaut and a U.S. astronaut, making a soft landing on the Kazakh steppe.
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The city’s planning board has endorsed a proposal for a twisting lakefront tower that would become the nation’s tallest building.
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A blueberry farmer persuaded a federal court in 2005 that some regulations on organic milk were too lax, including those governing how a dairy farmer can convert to organic status. As a result, hundreds of dairy farmers decided to switch last spring so they could complete the yearlong conversion before the more stringent rules take effect.
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A group of students, former students and professors stood quietly in an electronics-filled room on a recent Tuesday, intently listening for contact from a 4-inch cubed satellite hurtling miles overhead. Those gathered are part of a program called Cubesat, which allows universities to cheaply launch satellites.
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Dear AMD, in light of you losing $600M for Q4, I am still left wondering how you can ignore quality Linux drivers…
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The pre-installed Linux on Dell Inc’s notebook and desktop computers may be coming before the end of April, DesktopLinux’s sources say. “We still do not know which Linux Dell Inc. will be installing on its desktops and laptops. Among the distributions we know to be under consideration are: Novell/SUSE, Red Hat, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu. …
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Switzerland has year after year turned in one of the world’s lowest murder rates even while sending machine guns to every home of every member of their citizen army. And they do not keep their machine guns in safes or encumbered with trigger locks. They keep them at the ready.
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A Google-backed start-up that began as an MIT doctoral thesis has begun selling $50 wireless mesh networking routers. Meraki’s Linux-based “Mini” routers can be used singly but are at their best when used in clusters, sharing a single broadband Internet connection.
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Scientists are reporting a major advance in technology for water photooxidation –using sunlight to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuel from ordinary water.
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Russia plans to build the world’s longest tunnel, a transport and pipeline link under the Bering Strait to Alaska, as part of a $65 billion project to supply the U.S. with oil, natural gas and electricity from Siberia. The project, which Russia is coordinating with the U.S. and Canada, would take 10 to 15 years to complete.
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Tiny “smart” devices that can be borne on the wind like dust particles could be carried in space probes to explore other planets, UK engineers say. The devices would consist of a computer chip covered by a plastic sheath that can change shape when a voltage is applied, enabling it to be steered.
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The first LHC sector has been cooled to below 2 K (-271°C), a triumph of technology achieved in several stages over the last two months.
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Chinese cars are coming, but when? China exports vehicles (mostly commercial vehicles) to developing countries now, but they are not shy about voicing their desire to sell their cars to consumers in Europe, the US and Canada. But are they anywhere near ready?
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Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, announced plans on Tuesday for a lottery which would send its winner into space in a bid to spread the dream of extraterrestrial travel beyond the super-wealthy.
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Sharp Corp. has developed advanced LCD panels that would offer sharper moving images on portable devices such as mobile phones, pitting it against organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays. The new panels have a response speed three times as fast as its conventional panels and the world’s highest contrast ratio for 2-inch LCDs.
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Making money on the moon is an essential part of the U.S. plan for space exploration, NASA officials said on Friday after a four-day strategy workshop with international space officials and scientists. NASA emphasizes importance of having “real companies going to the moon and making money.”
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This study demonstrates among a sample of 100 Wikipedia entries, which included 168 sources or references, only two percent of the entries provided links to open access research and scholarship. However, it proved possible to locate, using Google Scholar and other search engines, relevant examples of open access work for 60 percent of the entries.
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Saudi Arabia has agreed to forgive 80 percent of the more than $15 billion that Iraq owes the kingdom, Iraqi and Saudi officials said yesterday, a major step given Saudi reluctance to provide financial assistance to the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.
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The billions of dollars thrown at global health problems by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are changing the game in drug discovery, posing big challenges to the world’s top drugmakers, according to a report on Tuesday.
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This is a collection of the most beautiful bridges in the World. 37 photos.
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“Sun Microsystems lives up to its name and puts energy efficiency at its core. Why? Computers draw 4-5 percent of total world power”
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Title says it all
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“Clearly, we are in a new era of anti-retroviral therapy.”
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This was the third time in 45 minutes and it had never happened before. After I had upgraded to a ATI Radeon X1650XT, things started to go awry in a very annoying fashion.
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Yes - *that* IKEA. The one with the cheap “insert tab A into slot B” bookshelves. They are in the housing business, and its coming to the UK. Could the press-board king be building homes in the USA soon?
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Texas Congressman Ron Paul sounds like a liberal when he bemoans the growth of the military-industrial complex. And he sounds like a conservative when he puts down bureaucrats and big government.
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Supporters of open sourcing for computers have been given a shot in the arm by news the French police are abandoning Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for the Mozilla Foundations browser Firefox.
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The French Parliament looks to be the next big Ubuntu switcher according to reports. Recently the Parliament produced an official government report that recommended the use of free software over proprietary software. The switch to free software is expected to provide a substantial savings to the tax-payers according to the government study.
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Only a few years ago, premium cars were all the rage. Now automakers around the world are scrambling to build cars that cost less than $10,000. And some are even striving for a sticker price as low as $3,000.
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These hangers replace the hook with a magnet, accompanied by a suspended piece of metal to allow full freedom of arrangement and display.See more ..
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Mexican telecom magnate Carlos Slim has quietly overtaken investor Warren Buffett as the world’s second-richest man and is close to wresting the top spot from Bill Gates, Forbes magazine reported Wednesday.
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Want to scout out some hikes before your next trip? Google Earth’s new layer has hundreds of them. Specifically, the Trimble Outdoors Trips layer features GPS-marked trails for activities including hiking, biking, backpacking and running. The info includes directions to trailheads, a difficulty ranking, and notes on interesting sights to see along
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Google reached an agreement today to acquire DoubleClick, the online advertising company, from two private equity firms for $3.1 billion, according to people with knowledge of the deal.
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Two bald eagles nesting on California’s Santa Cruz Island are now proud parents. See the chick grow daily with this live nest cam!
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ABI Research predicts that mobile phones with Near Field Communication (NFC) capabilities will make up 20 percent of the global phone market by 2012, but that prediction depends highly upon the decisions made about NFC today.
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You’ve seen the draft rules for the Auto X Prize and one of the first competitors (from Team Velozzi) for this 100+ mpg production-ready vehicle contest. Now, Neal Anderson, senior director for the prize, explains what the group was thinking when they came up with the rules, how they’ll judge the vehicles, and the different races the cars will run.
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Royal Dutch Shell is patenting a technique to convert shale to petroleum at a cost of only about $30/barrel. If it works, the world’s single largest source of oil would be… the United States. What would the world be like if all the oil in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Iraq, Nigeria, and elsewhere was suddenly nearly worthless?
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it is made with a transparent high tech plastic and yellow trim which sort of makes it look like an insect — but it is definately amazing!
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The OCRopus engine is based on two research projects: a high-performance handwriting recognizer developed in the mid-90’s and deployed by the US Census bureau, and novel high-performance layout analysis methods. OCRopus is development is sponsored by Google and is initially intended for high-throughput, high-volume document conversion efforts.
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As the federal government orders more ethanol, farmers are literally reaping the benefits
—especially in Midwest corn country. Here is a list of top ten ethanol producing states.
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He’s been on a shuttle AND he’s worth a lot of money…ALLLLLL THIS WEEK, ON THE LINUX ACTION SHOOOOOOW! (cue totally awesome music and get pumped)
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Incredible solar powered aircrafts ready to change the way we’ll fly in the green future.
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One day - soon, possibly, maybe - you might find yourself using a form of Linux, even if you’re a diehard Windows user. It’s the next big thing.
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This article compares Google to Starbucks, making the case that Google has almost no friction as a business - whereas Starbucks has to deal with geography, maintenance, marketing and people. But in the decade to come, will there be a better business model than Google’s current Internet model?
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Three-dimensional fabrication tools have been common in industry for years, but their high cost have put them out of reach of hobbyists… until now. Ars explores at Fab@Home, an open-source home fabrication project that will let you build your own 3D desktop fab.
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This company takes a gas heater and turns it into small electrical power plant!
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The Linux community is going to put a Linux sponsored car in this year’s Indianapolis 500… and you can help! Today marks the launch of Tux500.com, a community-powered marketing effort!
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A company called Spectrolab has achieved a new world record in solar cell efficiency. By using concentrated sunlight, Spectrolab demonstrated the ability of a photovoltaic cell to convert 40.7% of the sun
’s energy into electricity. By contrast, regular solar cells are 12 - 20% efficient.
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For the first time, water has been identified in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet. Water is a crucial ingredient for life as we know it.
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“The Dry Valleys of Antarctica get almost no snowfall, and except for a few steep rocks they are the only continental part of Antarctica devoid of ice. The terrain looks like something not of this Earth; the valley floor occasionally contains a perennially frozen lake with ice several meters thick…”
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Chemicalstore.com, they got acids and oxides, and even glassware. A one stop shop for blowing up your living room.
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The Colorado Rockies have joined that fairly elite group of baseball franchises with the introduction of a 46-panel solar array, built in partnership with Xcel Energy.
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“Mammatus Clouds, or “breast-clouds”, are fascinating formations in the sky, made mostly from the cumulus cloud base. Although they are not a sure sign that a tornado is about to form, they often accompany tornado-producing storms, or even may be direct byproduct of tornado activity…”
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“Watching a car burning off an inch or two of rear rubber in almost dead silence is eerily unnatural. If electric cars are where we’re headed, their quiet operation, especially performance cars, is gonna take some getting used to. But 0-60 times of 3.1 seconds could help ease us into the future.”
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Scottish scientists have developed a computer the size of a matchstick head, thousands of which can be sprayed onto patients to give a comprehensive analysis of their condition.
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New Zealanders discover means to “generate electricity from sunlight at a 10th of the cost of current silicon-based photo-electric solar cells”.
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A consortium of European designers and companies are working on a radical redefinition of what a general aviation aircraft is. Modeled after a tuna, the SmartFish flies without slats, spoilers or flaps. The group even has a working prototype
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“Long-term and even daily marijuana use doesn’t appear to cause permanent brain damage, adding to evidence that it can be a safe and effective treatment for a wide range of diseases, say researchers.”
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Despite a rocky start, two unmanned spacecraft have succeeded in their first autonomous satellite refueling demonstration while orbiting high above Earth.
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“Electronic paper” has long been hyped as the future of newspapers and books, but products like e-books have been slow to take off. That may soon change, say executives involved in the pioneering technology.
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The MPAA asked Harvard for advice on how to handle movie smoking. Harvard’s response? “We’re suggesting that they take smoking out of youth accessible films: G, PG and PG-13, which make up 85% of all movies.” And the MPAA is listening.
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Thomas Freidman writes about how Kenya is doing something most African countries aren’t. They’re keeping their most educated from leaving and using them to come up with solutions to the problems that plague the country.
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23 year old dentist in Iraq finds the love of his life in a war zone. This video was shot entirely by an Iraqi crew in Baghdad.
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Karl Auerbach stated that it costs VeriSign roughly 14 cents per domain. The recent increase price pushes their margin of 4200% to 4500%! Always nice to have a monopoly
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Google threw a new product called Goog-411 into Google Labs today - a free telephone based information service that could replace toll 411 calls. About 2.6 billion 411 calls are made in the U.S. each year, and it is a $7 billion/year market.
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See this map that shows how much area of the planet we would need to power everything (including what we get from oil) with solar at 8% efficiency. Current panels are closer to 20%, so in fact that’s even less.
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Despite claims by some critics that the Bush administration invaded Iraq to take control of its oil, the first contracts with major oil firms from Iraq’s new government are likely to go not to U.S. companies, but rather to companies from China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia.
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Draft proposal for a shared, open & extensible mega-crawler. Pay as you go, costs only, with the cost going down with time. Should we build it?
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Now here’s a great idea from Addonics: replace a laptop’s 2.5″ hard disk with flash memory, using a $30 adapter that lets you boot from CompactFlash cards. Suddenly you’ve converted that lappy into a solid-state notebook without spending an arm and a leg. That’s what Addonics has done with its CompactFlash Hard Drive Adapters for notebooks
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Effectively, the Compiz project will be split into two divisions, the ‘Compiz-Core’ and the new (temporarily named) ‘Composite Community’ that works on plug-ins separate from the Compiz-Core, and takes the best of Beryl Plug-ins and ‘Compiz-Extra’ plug-ins! Thanks and congrats to all those who helped to make this work!
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Some Ubuntu geeks are making new free electronic Ubuntu magazine with the main focus on how-tos. http://fullcirclemagazine.org/ A “beta version” of issue #0 is now available for download. They have a wiki at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuMagazine?action=show&
redirect=MarketingTeam%2FMagazine
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Make Google Maps your maps. Create and share personalized, annotated maps of your world.Mark your favorite places on your map. Draw lines and shapes to highlight paths and areas. Add your own text, photos, and videos. Publish your map to the web. Share your map with friends and family. Check it out. http://maps.google.com/
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Silicon shortage meant that it was $300,000 per tonne! Yet demand keeps increasing and profits are going up even faster. There should be more high-purity silicon supply by 2015.
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In case you didn’t know, my ability to post (at least aside from having Digg post items) was broken (so I thought). It’s not anymore.
Also, I’ve tweaked the design, licensing, and format of the site just a little bit. I hope you like it.
MARS is a lighter-than-air tethered wind turbine that rotates about a horizontal axis in response to wind, generating electrical energy. This electrical energy is transferred down the 1000-foot tether for immediate use, or to a set of batteries for later use, or to the power grid.
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A Columbia professor believes that converting skyscrapers into crop farms could help reduce global warming and make New York cleaner. It
’s a vision straight out of Futurama—but here’s how it might work.
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While the buzz around mobile Internet continues to grow, we look at the pricing of mobile Internet services and ask: can the iPhone, Q, or consumer Blackberry kick off the service price war that is so badly needed?
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Listen to the full Year Zero album on NIN-s official website
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A California condor has laid an egg in Mexico for the first time since at least the 1930s, biologists at the Zoological Society of San Diego announced Monday. If the chick hatches and survives, scientists hope it will herald the return of a breeding condor population to Mexico, decades after the iconic giant of the skies was wiped out there.
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The new series of SATA 3.0Gbps drives feature a 7,200rpm spin, 8MB buffer, and manage to damp the noise level down to a mere 24/27.5 decibels at idle/seek. That’s damn quiet.
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Airlines will start turning their airplanes into WiFi hotspots beginning early next year, WSJ reports. Here’s what you need to know…
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lighttpd powers several popular Web 2.0 sites like YouTube, wikipedia and meebo. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting, etc) LightTPD is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems!
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Tony Blair is considering calls to legalize poppy production in the Taliban’s backyard. The plan could cut medical shortages of opiates worldwide, curb smuggling - and hit the insurgents. Under this pilot program, farmers in Afghanistan, which currently produces 80% of the world’s opium, would produce and sell their crop legally to drug companies.
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The Purdue University engineers, following mathematical guidelines devised in 2006 by physicists in the United Kingdom, have created a theoretical design that uses an array of tiny needles radiating outward from a central spoke. The design, which resembles a round hairbrush, would bend light around the object being cloaked. Background objects….
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Google is set to enter the TV advertising business, inking a deal with EchoStar to automate buying, selling, and measuring the effectiveness of TV ads.
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Up to 25% of people in whom psychiatrists would currently diagnose depression may only be reacting normally to stressful events. The finding could have far-reaching consequences for diagnosis of depression, the growing use of symptom checklists to identify those who may be depressed, and $12 billion-a-year U.S. market for antidepressant drugs.
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This isn’t your father’s perfect wave, and unless seeing your next birthday doesn’t rank on your list of priorities, it isn’t yours either. Tahiti’s Teahupoo (pronounced cho-pu) is essentially a glorified closeout — a hideous, deadly barrel promising a heap of trouble for even the most capable of surfers.
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The Automotive X-Prize foundation just released the first draft rules for the upcoming green car X-Prize (the Ansari X-Prize brought you Spaceship One back in 2004) for public comment. There will be two vehicle categories, and they have to be production-viable, not pie-in-the-sky concept vehicles. Official release at the NY Auto Show this week.
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Another 17 high quality, in depth, articles all about free software.
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Madison, Wisconsin-based Musicnotes announced a licensing agreement with the Harry Fox Agency that will bring legal, ad-supported Music tablatures back to the ‘Net.
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MIT does it again! Check this picture out of the MEMS artificial muscle… It can power bionic insects the size of fleas!
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SEMI, the chip association (semiconductors, displays, nano-scaled structures, micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and related technologies), is projecting the MEMS market to exceed $95 Billion in just over the next four years. MEMS allow for better camera and sensors, smart materials, displays, biotech stuff that is really cool.
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