tech
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
Yes, it's a concept. No, it's not that crazy. This 118-foot flying yacht could work. After all, it's just a very pretty ekranoplane , aircraft-ship hybrids that can float like a sea vessel and fly a few meters over the water surface.
This Stunning Yacht Can Actually Fly
Futuristic Bubble Car Takes Us for a Ride at CES [VIDEO]
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.
NASA’s Puffin Is Way Cooler Than a Jetpack | Autopia | Wired.com
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.Newly Discovered Molecule Will Make Rocket Fuel Super Efficient
Swedish scientists have just discovered a new molecule —one that has the potential of boosting future rocket fuel efficiency by 20 to 30% compared to the best fuels around today. The discovery was made at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. The molecule is called trinitramid—chemical formula N(NO2)3. It's the largest nitrogen-oxygen molecule so far, and the first discovered since the 18th century. Trinitramid was found by accident when the Swedish team was using quantum chemical computations to study the breakdown of a different compound—as part of a search for better alternatives to today's solid rocket fuel.
NASA Developing Tech to Reach and Colonize Other Worlds | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
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.Everyone knows very well that deserts are parched plains and comprise of endless dunes of sand, with death coming from every direction. Watch your step – you might just ruffle the pincers out of a poisonous scorpion, oh yeah, and there’s that small problem of not having enough water to keep you hydrated. Here’s the Water Vapor Project concept that might change the way life in the desert works, as it attempts to hydrate the parched desert landscape of Africa, resulting in an environment where greenery will thrive based on the basic principles of water vapor.
Water Vapor Project - Water Vapor Project concept could hydrate desert -- Ubergizmo
A submarine once seemed about as ridiculously impossible as an invisibility cloak seems today. But while technologies like the submarine, bomb, radar and tank once captured the imagination of science fiction authors , science has brought them to the mainstream awareness. Researchers are continuing to catch up with imagination, and it’s only a matter of time before the technologies we still consider fiction meet a similar fate.
8 Sci-Fi Technologies That Are No Longer Just Fiction
Nanotube-Tethered Flying Wind Turbines Could Harvest Energy At 30,000 Feet | Popular Science
TWind Airborne Turbine Concept TWind, an Italian concept for a tethered airborne wind turbine. Wikipedia 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.
New Class of Smart "Piezotronic" Materials Could Create Self-Powering Micro-Bots | Popular Science
Tiny Piezoelectrics Piezoelectric materials, like the ones above, can be extremely small, generating an appropriately tiny charge when they are put under mechanical stress. Adding logic gates to them means they can be both power source and computing device rolled into one device. FDominec via Wikimedia 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 .
This Navy Electric Railgun Annihilates Targets 100 Miles Away In Six Minutes
In the near future, US Navy ships won't use explosive cannons. They will destroy targets 100 miles away with the monster 33-megajoules railgun shown in this video. In the words of Rear Admiral Nevin P. Carr: This "really changes several games."
Observations: Inside the Military-Robotics Complex
The quiet, suburban neighborhoods and strip malls that line Route 128 , the main highway that circumscribes the Greater Boston area, hardly betray the area’s high-tech firepower. Since the 1950s, this corridor has played host to seminal technology companies such as Digital Equipment Corp., Raytheon and Sun Microsystems. Amidst this high-tech stew, the corridor has also become a hotbed for military robotics, particularly those that roll or even walk on terra firma.The Navy's Megawatt Laser Weapon Takes a Big Leap Forward with Powerful New Electron Injector | Popular Science
Naval Lasing Raytheon's prototype ship-borne laser system has effectively shot down UAVs from the deck of a ship. The Navy wants a more versatile free electron laser weapon to perform a variety of security tasks, including target designation, tracking, and--of course--target elimination. Raytheon 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.This Stack Of PS3s Is The 33rd Biggest Computer In The World
Kotaku is making some changes to its comment system that will require you to log in with a Facebook, Google, or Twitter account. You must convert your account to one of these services in order to continue using your account. Converting your account on Kotaku will do so on all Gawker Media Sites.Last month, Russia was the No. 1 source of spam in the world. It's probably because of Oleg Nikolaenko, a 23-year-old who was recently arrested for flooding the world with 10 billion spam emails a day. Using a network of over 500,000 zombie computers known as the Mega-D botnet, Nikolaenko churned out 10 billion spam emails a day at the height of his operation. These advertised mostly counterfeit goods and herbal remedies—one Rolex counterfeiter who was his client said he spent $2 million on spam advertising.
23-Year-Old Russian Hacker Was Responsible for One-Third of Global Spam
To Singularity, or Not To Singularity?
Computer, Technology