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Submission + - New Solar Fuel design (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers Alexie Kolpak and Jeffrey Grossman at MIT have designed a new Solar Fuel competitive with lithium ion battery technology. Such technology could retrofit coal fired power plants as a renewable resource, or provide concentrated renewable heat in other applications. Finally we are getting the first glimpses of nano engineered solutions to the energy crisis.

Comment Re: Not really new from him. (Score 1) 347

by maXXwell (#35551576) Attached to: Michio Kaku's Dark Prediction For the End of Moore's Law

I remember this. Quote from that programme:

"Prof MICHIO KAKU (City University of New York): The end of Moore's Law is perhaps the single greatest economic threat to modern society, and unless we deal with it we could be facing economic ruin."

Really?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2004/hendrikshontrans.shtml
Image

Quadruped CHEETAH Robot To Outrun Any Human Screenshot-sm 177

Posted by samzenpus from the robot-gorillas-to-hunt-the-robot-cats dept.
cylonlover writes "Robots are faster than humans at a lot of things, but up until now running hasn't been one of them. That is set to change with robotics company Boston Dynamics recently awarded a contract by DARPA to design and build a quadraped CHEETAH robot that is faster than any human. The contract also includes the creation of an agile, bipedal humanoid robot. It's hard to say which one might ultimately be creepier."
Transportation

Ford Building Cars That Talk To Other Cars 239

Posted by samzenpus from the who-does-your-tires? dept.
thecarchik writes "Ford's new system works over a dedicated short-range WiFi system on a secure channel allocated by the FCC. The company says the system one-ups radar safety systems by allowing full 360-degree coverage even when there's no direct line of sight. Scenarios where this could benefit safety or traffic? Predicting collision courses with unseen vehicles, seeing sudden stops before they're visible, and spotting traffic pattern changes on a busy highway. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported in October that vehicle-to-vehicle warning systems could address nearly 80 percent of reported crashes not involving drunk drivers. As such, it could potentially save tens of thousands of lives per year."

Comment Re:ICANN is open? (Score 1) 27

by maXXwell (#34903040) Attached to: Today, the IETF Turns 25

ICANN has a history of antipathy toward public participation.

Kieren McCarthy, who has alternately been a journalist covering ICANN and also worked as ICANN's , general manager of public participation, has very good commentary on ICANNs merits (there are a few) and foibles (there are many):

http://kierenmccarthy.com/category/internet-governance/icann/
The Military

Mystery 'Missile' Identified As US Airways Flight 808 335

Posted by timothy from the just-what-they-want-you-to-think dept.
sean.peters writes "The mystery missile discussed on Slashdot Tuesday? It was US Airways 808 from Honolulu to Phoenix. An amateur sleuth checked the time against airline schedules, then the following day, checked out a webcam that was trained in the appropriate direction. He found the exact same contrail at the time AWE808 was coming over. The author deals persuasively with a number of objections to his argument."
Transportation

Heroic Engineer Crashes Own Vehicle To Save a Life 486

Posted by kdawson from the delta-vee dept.
scottbomb sends in this feel-good story of an engineer-hero, calling it "one of the coolest stories I've read in a long time." "A manager of Boeing's F22 fighter-jet program, Innes dodged the truck, then looked back to see that the driver was slumped over the wheel. He knew a busy intersection was just ahead, and he had to act fast. Without consulting the passengers in his minivan — 'there was no time to take a vote' — Innes kicked into engineer mode. 'Basic physics: If I could get in front of him and let him hit me, the delta difference in speed would just be a few miles an hour, and we could slow down together,' Innes explained."
United Kingdom

Badgers Digging Up Ancient Human Remains 172

Posted by samzenpus from the someone-get-a-snake dept.
One of England's oldest graveyards is under siege by badgers. Rev Simon Shouler now regularly patrols the grounds of St. Remigius Church looking for bones that the badgers have dug up. The badger is a protected species in England so they can not be killed, and attempts to have them relocated have been blocked by English Nature. From the article: "At least four graves have been disturbed so far; in one instance a child found a leg bone and took it home to his parents. ... Rev. Simon Shouler has been forced to carry out regular patrols to pick up stray bones, store them and re-inter them all in a new grave."
The Military

Russian Army Upgrades Its Inflatable Weapons 197

Posted by samzenpus from the blowing-up dept.
jamax writes "According to the BBC: 'The Russian military has come up with an inventive way to deceive the enemy and save money at the same time: inflatable weapons. They look just like real ones: they are easy to transport and quick to deploy. You name it, the Russian army is blowing it up: from pretend tanks to entire radar stations.' But the interesting thing is these decoys are not dumb - actually they appear to be highly advanced for what I thought was a WWII-grade aerial photography countermeasures. Apparently they have heat signatures comparable with the military tech they represent, as well as the same radar signature."
News

Ray Kurzweil Responds To PZ Myers 238

Posted by Soulskill from the dem's-fightin'-woids dept.
On Tuesday we discussed a scathing critique of Ray Kurzweil's understanding of the brain written by PZ Myers. Reader Amara notes that Kurzweil has now responded on his blog. Quoting: "Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn't at my talk), [claims] that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome. This is not at all what I said in my presentation to the Singularity Summit. I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies — from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain."

Comment Re:learn python (Score 1) 565

by maXXwell (#33105094) Attached to: How Can an Old-School Coder Regain His Chops?

While learning Python isn't the only reasonable option, it's way up there. It has several key advantages:

1. Object oriented

This is one of the key paradigm shifts since you were coding, and Python embodies the principle more cleanly than Perl or C++ . In fact, learning Python will probably make it easier to understand C++, Objective C and Java, which are arguably more awkward embodiments of OO.

2. Interpreted

The rise in interpreted languages is another major development since the 80s. It also helps speed the edit-test-debug cycle, making it faster to learn.

3. Popular

Python is one of the top 10 most popular languages at the moment: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html. It's pretty much eclipsed Perl, which has been on the wane for a while. Interest in Ruby (the other "hot" interpreted language) also seems to be flagging.
The Internet

Woman's Nude Pics End Up Online After Call To Tech Support 197

Posted by samzenpus from the how-was-your-service-today? dept.
Tara Fitzgerald couldn't find the nude pictures she planned on sending to her boyfriend, but instead of just taking more, she decided to see if a Dell tech support call could fix her problem. Apparently the tech support guy found them. Unfortunately, he then put them up on a site called "bitchtara."

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