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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.

Futuristic Bubble Car Takes Us for a Ride at CES

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. The engineers at NASA have combined every one of our geeky transportation dreams into a single little vehicle called the Puffin.

NASA’s Puffin Is Way Cooler Than a Jetpack

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. Newly Discovered Molecule Will Make Rocket Fuel Super Efficient. NASA Developing Tech to Reach and Colonize Other Worlds. 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.

NASA Developing Tech to Reach and Colonize Other Worlds

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. Water Vapor Project - Water Vapor Project concept could hydrate desert. 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.

Nanotube-Tethered Flying Wind Turbines Could Harvest Energy At 30,000 Feet

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. 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.

New Class of Smart "Piezotronic" Materials Could Create Self-Powering Micro-Bots

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. 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.

The Navy's Megawatt Laser Weapon Takes a Big Leap Forward with Powerful New Electron Injector

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. 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. Today’s A.I. bears little resemblance to its initial conception.

The A.I. Revolution Is On

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. Silicon quantum computer a possibility. Xmds: eXtensible Multi-Dimensional Simulator. Tom Beddard Grows Fractals Into Works of Art. 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.

Tom Beddard Grows Fractals Into Works of Art

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. "Traditionally with fractal generation, you have to wait seconds or minutes for the image to appear," Beddard says. Tweak one aspect of the math, and the changes are dramatic: Institute of Noetic Sciences.

Consciousness, group consciousness, mind. To Singularity, or Not To Singularity? Future Shock at 40: The Tofflers Stir Up "Cyberdust" With New Scenarios. OpenStack: An Open Cloud Initiative Makes its 1st Release - ReadWriteCloud. It's official.

OpenStack: An Open Cloud Initiative Makes its 1st Release - ReadWriteCloud

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.

We are on the edge of the great beyond in many ways. 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. 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.

spirit - server energy maintenance - How New Software Can Help Save The Planet

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)). 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. Hydrogen Highway Is One Station Closer to Reality. 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.

Exoskeletons, Robo Rats and Synthetic Skin: The Pentagon’s Cyborg Army. 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. 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" Alone Together? ThingMagic's RFID Blog - Radio Frequency Identification Company and Industry News - ThingMagic.com.