Land Rover says their new S1 mobile is the world's strongest phone. Testing done by Land Rover and the staff at The Sun showed the S1 would still work after being stepped on by an elephant, run over by a Land Rover, dropped from a second-story window, buried in mud, soaked in a pint of beer, and roasted in an oven at 150 degrees centigrade. A forklift truck proved to be its match, and was able to crush the S1 under its three-tonne weight. The phone comes with 1,500 hours of battery life, a 2.0 megapixel camera, an extra loud ringtone and an unconditional three-year guarantee.

Seal writes "Erlang, originally created at Ericsson in 1986, is a functional programming language which was released as open source around 10 years ago and flourished ever since. In this Q&A, Erlang creator Joe Armstrong talks about its beginnings as a control program for a telephone exchange, its flexibility and its modern day usage in open source programs. 'In the Erlang world we have over twenty years of experience with designing and implementing parallel algorithms. What we lose in sequential processing speed we win back in parallel performance and fault-tolerance,' Armstrong said. He also mentions how multi-core processors pushed the development of Erlang and the advantages of hot swapping."

David Cage, writer and director of Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain, has released a lengthy video of an entire level from the game, along with detailed commentary about how the game works. He demonstrates how to operate the UI, showing how contextual menus let you control actions, dialog, and even your character's thoughts, while also showcasing how the game's investigatory system works and even a few fighting-related quick-time events. 1Up recently spoke with Cage about his time in the games industry, including his previous work on Indigo Prophecy. They also did a Heavy Rain preview of their own, and spoke briefly about post-launch plans. The game is due out next year for the PS3.

KentuckyFC writes "All invisibility cloaks to date work by hiding an object embedded inside them. Now a group of physicists have worked out how to remotely cloak objects that sit outside a cloaking material. The trick is to make the cloaking material with optical properties that are exactly complementary to the space outside them. Complementary means that the material reverses the effect the space has on a plane wave of light passing through it. To an observer this space would appear to vanish. The scientists say that to cloak an object sitting outside the cloaking material, first measure its optical properties and then embed a "complementary image" of the object within the cloak. So a plane wave is first distorted by the object but then restored to a plane by the complementary image of the object within the cloak (abstract). An observer sees nothing. This method has another benefit. Objects hidden in conventional cloaks are blinded because no light enters the cloaked region. But objects that are remotely cloaked like this should still be able to see their surroundings."

Google researchers are claiming that a newly developed approach to visual search may do for image searching what PageRank did for text search. "The research paper, 'PageRank for Product Image Search,' is focused on a subset of the images that the giant search engine has cataloged because of the tremendous computing costs required to analyze and compare digital images. To do this for all of the images indexed by the search engine would be impractical, the researchers said. Google does not disclose how many images it has cataloged, but it asserts that its Google Image Search is the 'most comprehensive image search on the Web.'"