This Stunning Yacht Can Actually Fly. Futuristic Bubble Car Takes Us for a Ride at CES. Ride along with us inside GM's EN-V (Electric Networked Vehicle), a tiny two-seater with a 40-mile range that whisked us around a hotel ballroom in smooth, quiet comfort. The little two-seater, employing the same balancing-act technology as the Segway scooter, sheds the two-wheeled scooter's nerdy Mall Cop image for a Pac-Man-esque bubble design. It was a hoot to take this egg-shaped hotrod for a spin inside a controlled environment, but we're not quite sure how it would do on the mean streets of the real world — say, pitted against a giant SUV.
But so what? Maybe the future this precocious car occupies doesn't include SUVs. That said, it gets even more sci-fi: The EN-V has an autonomous mode, where you can sit back, texting and enjoying your morning coffee while its GPS-driven navi system takes care of the driving for you. Didn't we already see a bubble car like this in a Woody Allen movie? NASA’s Puffin Is Way Cooler Than a Jetpack | Autopia. The engineers at NASA have combined every one of our geeky transportation dreams into a single little vehicle called the Puffin. It takes off like a helicopter and flies like a plane. It can cruise at 140 mph and, with a boost mode, hit about twice that. Oh — and it’s electric. If that sounds too good to be true, it is — for the moment. The tilt-rotor Puffin has a flight system similar to the V-22 Osprey, but instead of carrying a bunch of Marines and their gear, the Puffin carries one person in the prone position.
The Puffin is designed to stand on its tail, which serves as the landing gear (check out the video). So why call it the Puffin? “If you’ve ever seen a puffin on the ground, it looks very awkward, with wings too small to fly, and that’s exactly what our vehicle looks like,” Mark Moore, an aerospace engineer at NASA Langley Research Center, told Scientific American. Photo / video: NASA. Newly Discovered Molecule Will Make Rocket Fuel Super Efficient. NASA Developing Tech to Reach and Colonize Other Worlds | Gadget Lab. If human space exploration is going to extend to celestial bodies farther away than the moon or even Mars, we need to develop a tremendous amount of new technology in order to do it.
At this weekend’s Long Now-sponsored “Long Conversation” event, NASA Ames Director Simon “Pete” Worden outlined what the agency is doing to create that future. “The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds,” Worden explained. “Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.” Worden himself was fired by President George W. The most important near-term development is electric propulsion. “Within a few years we will see the first true prototype of a spaceship that will take us between worlds,” Worden said. Worden also thinks development of a high-power, high-efficiency electric propulsion system could have huge implications for air travel here on earth.
“We also hope to inveigle some billionaires to form a Hundred Year Starship fund,” Worden added. See Also: Water Vapor Project - Water Vapor Project concept could hydrate desert -- Ubergizmo. 8 Sci-Fi Technologies That Are No Longer Just Fiction. Nanotube-Tethered Flying Wind Turbines Could Harvest Energy At 30,000 Feet. Future airborne wind turbines could spin with greater gusto in the faster winds found at high altitudes, and send power back to Earth via nanotube tether cables. Swarms of energy-harvesting kites, whirling blimps or balloons could stay aloft for a year, and could be reeled in during storms or for maintenance. This vision, outlined by a researcher at NASA, recently sparked the first federally funded research effort into airborne wind farms.
In a bureaucratic infinite loop you just have to love, it's a study of what it would take to actually study the value of these ideas. NASA aerospace engineer Mark Moore says it's worth examining how flying wind farms would work, and how tethered turbines would affect airspace, for instance. Each wind turbine could have a two-mile protected no-fly zone, causing headaches for airliners and unmanned aircraft of the future. Plus, wind is more consistent and its velocity is higher at higher altitudes, and the power goes up with the cube of that velocity. New Class of Smart "Piezotronic" Materials Could Create Self-Powering Micro-Bots.
Piezoelectric materials have long been used to turn kinetic energy into electrical energy, but a clever application by Georgia Tech researchers is making those materials much smarter. By adding a gate to piezoelectric circuits, researchers have turned a mechanical action directly into a logic operation for the first time. This approach could turn conventional "dumb" circuits into computational circuitry that might run smaller micro-robots to harvest power as they perform their functions.
Piezoelectric materials generate a very tiny charge when placed under stresses like twisting or bending. That charge is too small to power most portable devices, although better and better materials have led to greater electricity yields from piezoelectric materials. One of these materials is zinc oxide, which isn't one of the highest yielding piezoelectric materials available, but it is a good semiconductor.
[Discovery News] This Navy Electric Railgun Annihilates Targets 100 Miles Away In Six Minutes. The Navy's Megawatt Laser Weapon Takes a Big Leap Forward with Powerful New Electron Injector. It's unclear which is the bigger news coming out of the Office of Naval Research; the fact that the Navy's Free Electron Laser (FEL) program has demonstrated an injector capable of producing the necessary electrons to fuel a megawatt-class laser beam, or the fact that a next-generation future weapon under development by the military is months ahead of schedule. Both are good news for the Navy, which might begin lasing threats out of the sky sooner than it anticipated.
Development of the FEL program has been a large undertaking for the Navy, which has invested at least $163 million in a new kind of variable-wavelength laser weapon that should be effective at sea, where moisture and aerosols in the air can severely limit the effectiveness at lasers at certain wavelengths. The FEL itself isn't new—it was invented decades ago—but fielding a high energy beam is something else entirely. FYI, more on the FEL via the ONR below.
Nokia Morph Concept (short) Claytronics. This Stack Of PS3s Is The 33rd Biggest Computer In The World. 23-Year-Old Russian Hacker Was Responsible for One-Third of Global Spam. The A.I. Revolution Is On | Magazine. Today’s A.I. bears little resemblance to its initial conception. The field’s trailblazers believed success lay in mimicking the logic-based reasoning that human brains were thought to use. Photo: Dwight Eschliman; Illustration: Zee Rogér Diapers.com warehouses are a bit of a jumble. Boxes of pacifiers sit above crates of onesies, which rest next to cartons of baby food. In a seeming abdication of logic, similar items are placed across the room from one another. A person trying to figure out how the products were shelved could well conclude that no form of intelligence—except maybe a random number generator—had a hand in determining what went where. But the warehouses aren’t meant to be understood by humans; they were built for bots. The computers are in control.
The Kiva bots may not seem very smart. This explosion is the ironic payoff of the seemingly fruitless decades-long quest to emulate human intelligence. All aboard the algorithm. Model trains are easy to keep track of. —Jon Stokes. Silicon quantum computer a possibility. Xmds: eXtensible Multi-Dimensional Simulator. Tom Beddard Grows Fractals Into Works of Art | Co.Design. You may not know what fractals are, mathematically speaking, but you know what they look like: tangled, crenelated forms bending and burbling in on themselves into infinity in a geometric, yet weirdly organic way. Generating fractal images is more like exploration than design -- and Tom Beddard explores an entire "fractal planet" in the video below. Beddard completed a PhD in laser physics before moving into web development and design. "I'm interested in how equations and formulas can be used to create interesting, unpredictable imagery," he tells Co.Design.
Fractals are the quintessential example of this kind of generative art, but exploring their contours can be difficult on a desktop computer because of all the heavy math required to render them visually. Tweak one aspect of the math, and the changes are dramatic: Beddard doesn't write the actual mathematical equations himself -- for that he goes to the geniuses on FractalForums.com. Institute of Noetic Sciences | Consciousness | Science | Spirituality | Wisdom. Global Consciousness Project -- consciousness, group consciousness, mind. To Singularity, or Not To Singularity? Future Shock at 40: The Tofflers Stir Up "Cyberdust" With New Scenarios. Carlos Slim Helú--the world's richest man--Steve Case, and seemingly half the military-industrial complex are gathering at a private club in Washington D.C. this morning to honor the husband-and-wife futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler on the 40th anniversary of their first and most influential book, Future Shock.
Published under Alvin's name in 1970, Future Shock added "information overload" and "prosumer" to the lexicon, along with its title--which refers to the culture shock that results when the culture that's changing so fast it feels foreign is your own. Today's invitation-only event is essentially a retirement party for the pair, structured as an opportunity to reflect on their track record. And, as part of the proceedings, Future Shock is revisited--and spun forward. Many of the new Tofflerian predictions are merely predictable: China will rise; cities will grow; Social Security will cease to exist, and Iran's leaders will remain irrational. OpenStack: An Open Cloud Initiative Makes its 1st Release - ReadWriteCloud. It's official.
Open Stackhas made its first release. It's a major moment for the nascent open cloud initiative, a service that combines the Rackspace object storage capabilities with NASA's Nebula, the open computing effort from the U.S federal space agency. It feels like the start of something, doesn't it? Just writing "U.S. federal space agency," gives us a sense of what makes this exciting for the cloud computing movement. OpenStack is split into two projects: OpenStack Object Storage and OpenStack Compute. OpenStack Object Storage This is the storage environment that Rackspace turned over to OpenStack. Dell community evangelist Barton George did this interview with project lead Will Reese: From the OpenStack site: "Because OpenStack uses software logic to ensure data replication and distribution across different devices, inexpensive commodity hard drives and servers can be used in lieu of more expensive equipment Storing media libraries (photos, music, videos, etc.)
OpenStack Compute. Spirit - server energy maintenance - How New Software Can Help Save The Planet. A software that can drastically reduce CO2 emissions (and energetic costs) on computers all over the world has been developed by Portuguese scientists and is freely available to anyone interested. The program is called SPIRIT and is the first automated system capable of turning the computers of a server on and off according to need to prevent the energetic waste of idle units. In the last year, just in the 200 computers of the Interdisciplinary Complex of Lisbon University, the software saved energy equivalent to 5 tons of CO2 emissions. And its potential is huge like Carlos Reis and Jorge Pacheco, the two scientists behind the project, explain: “ used worldwide SPIRIT could result in yearly savings equivalent to the energy produced by a 1000 MW Nuclear Power Station, or, in other words, a reduction of about 5 million tons of CO2 emissions every year” (the emissions of 6.5 millions London-NY flights (2)).
And it’s here that the new software SPIRIT steps in. So how can SPIRIT help? Internet users to exceed 2 billion this year. Demand for Cars with WiFi to Increase 40 Times by 2017. By Chuong Nguyen on 11/29/2010 iSuppli is forecasting that demand for cars with built-in WiFi will increase to 7.2 million vehicles in 2017, a 40-time increase from today’s 174,000 connected cars. Though integrated WiFi may provide a more limited role in getting road warriors mobile broadband access than an integrated 3G modem, auto-makers are relying on WiFi as a means of connectivity that’s low cost and may not deter budget-conscious consumers from balking at high data costs or long-term contracts in new “smartcars.” Right now, Ford’s Sync system uses a similar WiFi approach, but can enable mobile broadband and serve as a mobile MiFi-like device when a 3G USB modem dongle is plugged into the Sync system. This may be more beneficial to users as they can take their mobile broadband connection with them when they leave the car and not have to purchase another device or rely on another plan for data.
Hydrogen Highway Is One Station Closer to Reality | Autopia. A SunHydro hydrogen fueling station has opened in the parking lot of Proton Energy Systems in Wallingford, CT, the first in a network of hydrogen stations that SunHydro’s founder hopes will eventually line the East Coast. Back in January, we first told you about SunHydro’s ambitious plans to open enough solar-powered hydrogen refueling stations to create a “hydrogen highway” from Maine to Miami. Now, the first station is open and refueling a fleet of test cars from Toyota (shown above). Eventually, it will serve local fleets and public transportation systems in New Haven and Hartford. In addition to the network of stations it will eventually join, the Wallingford refueling facility differs from other hydrogen stations in how it produces fuel — using electricity generated from on-site solar panels to derive hydrogen from water with a proton exchange membrane that Proton Energy built.
After founding Lumber Liquidators, Sullivan bought Proton last August for $10.2 million. Photo: Toyota. 3D printing with visible light. What Happens When Water is Dropped Onto Water-Repelling Carbon Nanotubes? How a Physically Aware Internet will Change the World. Pete Hartwell is a Distinguished Technologist in HP’s Quantum Structures Research Laboratories. You can learn more on HP’s Data Central Blog as well as on the HP YouTube channel. If you think about it, the first “Internet” looked nothing like it does today. In fact, it was created as a specialized network architecture for the purposes of national defense and security. It goes without saying that, since then, the Internet has had an impact on creativity, global business and economic growth that surpasses even the wildest expectations of the innovators who created it.
But if you ask me, we still haven’t even scratched the surface. The next revolution of the Internet is not going to be built on manual input of information by 500 million or a billion users. Most of us have only recently become aware of sensors from swinging Wii tennis rackets, or switching our smartphones from landscape to portrait mode.
I see sensors tackling our world’s largest issues: safety, security and sustainability. Exoskeletons, Robo Rats and Synthetic Skin: The Pentagon’s Cyborg Army | Danger Room. Seven Creepy Faux Pas of Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In the last few months Eric Schmidt, the gaffe-prone CEO of Google, has made public statements that make us question whether the company's slogan still is "Don't be evil. " In interview after interview, Schmidt has made tactless comments on especially sensitive and controversial topics such as online privacy and net neutrality. As CEO, one of Schmidt's largest roles is to act as a spokesperson for the company, but that ironically seems to be his Achilles' heel.
Here are some of his more recent faux pas. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Robotic Exoskeleton turns grunts into Super Soldiers. Amazing 3D immersion technology. Computer, Technology. Fastest Integrated Circuit Doubles the Previous Record, Getting. Chrome Extensions. We are never ever alone. DARPA's "Prophecy" Wants to Predict Virus Evolution to Make Drug Biz Proactive. Superfeedr : Real-time feed parsing in the cloud - Atom over PubSubHubbub and XMPP. Dynamism - Online shopping for Ultra-mobile Tech and Gadgets. "Google will be one node on a vast social web" | News | TechRada. Alone Together? | Wired Science RFID Modules | ThingMagic's RFID Blog - Radio Frequency Identification Company and Industry News - ThingMagic.com.