From a distance they look like white toothpicks standing up out of the ocean. Up close they are towering engines of motion, whirring in the face of unforgiving gusts of wind. Offshore wind farms are a blossoming field of green energy, with trillions of watts of untapped energy flowing along our coasts everyday. Pioneering farms in the EU and China have already begun to harvest a small fraction of this power, and … Read More → "Endless windmills in the ocean power our cities? It’s not sci-fi, it’s here…at least in the EU"

There is a sense amongst my generation that Michael Winslow’s best performing days are behind him. (You’ll remember Winslow as Officer Sound Effects from Police Academy.) After all, we live in the age of the beatboxing flautist. You might change your tune after watching Winslow do Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love. The first 28 seconds are like, oh, I’ve heard this before yawn zzzzzzzzzz WHOA, WHERE THE HELL DID THAT GUITAR NOISE COME FROM??!

And then it goes bananas right around 1:30. This is a must-see. via Read More → "Michael Winslow gets the Led out (yes, as in Zeppelin)"

The Gordon supercomputer, currently being built here at the San Diego Supercomputer Center by Appro International, is the first of its kind. Utilizing a quarter-petabyte of flash memory, Gordon will power through data-heavy applications way faster than vanilla parallel-processing supercomputers.

With 200 teraflops of total computing power, 64 terabytes of DRAM, 256 terabytes of flash memory, and four petabytes of storage space, Gordon will rank among the world’s 30 most powerful supercomputers when it’s completed. It could potentially achieve up to 35 … Read More → "The Gordon Supercomputer is a solid state powerhouse"

Must say, as I am writing about developing safety-critical systems, I would have severe qualms about having too many of these on the road. Yet then again, when I think about some of the people who hold driving licences, perhaps we would be better off. At least these don’t crawl out of a bar and then drive at high speed through a residential area, or do they?

A team of researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Lab have created a radar array that provides a realtime picture of what’s happening on the other side of solid concrete walls, even when they’re eight inches thick and 60 feet away. That’s no simple feat. More than 99 percent of radar signal is lost passing through the wall–and another 99 percent is lost as the reflected signal passes back through. But by leveraging signal amplifiers, a clever filtering technique, and some powerful digital processing, the new radar system is able to produce what basically … Read More → "MIT’s X-ray vision system can see straight through concrete walls"

Though only in prototype, the electric DMC-12 aims to follow in the footsteps of the Tesla roadsters. As such, the cars won’t be consumer priced — expect something more along the lines of $90,000 per vehicle. But these won’t be just for show, since the company is hoping to not only match the (somewhat lackluster) performance of the original, but perhaps to even improve upon it. The car is also expected to need far, far less … Read More → "DeLorean apparently building an electric version of the iconic car"

Scientists at the Imperial College London just announced that they have discovered a way to build digital devices out of bacteria and DNA. The breakthrough could one day create the building blocks needed for microscopic biological computers that can do everything from deliver medications to single out and eradicate cancer cells. via Inhabitat

Continue … Read More → "Scientists build digital devices out of bacteria and DNA"

Dr. Gagnon, a radiation oncologist, uses the app when he sees patients in his Fairhaven, Mass., office. He pulls

his iPhone out of his pocket, and then he and a patient, side by side, can view images on it and … Read More → "FDA clears medical apps to assist with diagnoses"

It was mid-1971. Ten scientists met at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Tech Square in Cambridge. They had been given a task by the director of the Pentagon’s Information Processing Techniques Office. The moment had arrived, Larry Roberts told the group’s leaders, to publicly demonstrate IPTO’s crowning achievement: the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, forerunner of the Internet.

The ARPA Network, “was virtually unknown everywhere but the inner sancta of the … Read More → "ARPANET’s coming out party: when the Internet first took center stage"

Researchers combine a Kinect sensor with a pico projector to expand the possibilities for interactive screens.

A new prototype can transform a notebook into a notebook computer, a wall into an interactive display, and the palm of your hand into a smart phone display. In fact, researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University say their new shoulder-mounted device, called OmniTouch, can turn any nearby surface into an ad hoc interactive touch screen.

OmniTouch works by bringing together a miniature projector and an infrared depth camera, similar to the kind used in Microsoft’s Kinect … Read More → "Kinect turns any surface into a touch screen"