Designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau have created a clock that is powered by "eating" bugs. The clock traps insects on flypaper stretched across a roller system and then drops them into a vat of bacteria. The insects are then "digested" and the ensuing chemical reaction is transformed into power that keeps the rollers moving and the LCD clock working. The two offer another version that is powered by mice and an even cooler machine that picks insect fuel from spiderwebs with the help of a robotic arm and a video camera.

theodp writes "On Tuesday, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation will examine the nomination of Aneesh Chopra as the first-ever federal Chief Technology Officer. Senate sources said they were not aware of any debate surrounding his nomination. You'd think the hack-for-$10-million-ransom of Virginia's Prescription Monitoring Program might be good for a question or two. Or the wisdom of appointing a CTO who's no technologist. It might also be worth bringing up Chopra's membership in TiE-DC, a group which promises 'exclusive peer networking events' with government officials and Federal contractors, including TiE-DC sponsor Microsoft. Are there any other issues that might make the Confirmation Hearing more than a rubber-stamping?"

avishere writes "People are losing their jobs, but for some execs the economic meltdown seems like the perfect time to get their software into the hands of those who can't afford their multi-thousand-dollar price tags. Software giants Autodesk and SolidWorks have each latched onto the worst-economic-disaster-since-the-Great-Depression meme and released free versions of their flagship computer-aided-design brands before their potential users are forced to sell their laptops on Craigslist. 'In these uncertain economic times,' Autodesk coos sympathetically, it will give away temporary licenses of AutoCAD and other software to those unemployed in the fields of architecture, engineering, and design. (They are also developing a Mac version, two decades after abandoning the platform.) SolidWorks was quick to respond with its subtly titled Engineering Stimulus Package. So if anyone out there has their weekdays free, jumpstart your hardware and design projects for cheap. Legally, too."

seanpark writes "Who will President Elect Obama select for the recently established post of Copyright Czar? Biden has a longstanding relationship with Big Content, and he was partly responsible for the PRO-IP Act that created the position. The short list according to the article includes a few lobbyists (who would likely be disqualified by stringent ethical guidelines) and Lawrence Lessig, who was a technology adviser to the Obama Campaign."

FornaxChemica writes "In a surprise move, Google announced today, both on-site and in its blog, that it will permanently shut down its 3D virtual world, Lively, by the end of the year. This makes Lively one of Google's few scrapped products, and one of the most short-lived, too, barely lasting 6 months. No official reason was given, only that Google wants to 'prioritize [its] resources and focus more on [its] core search, ads and apps business.' Lively might have taken too much and given back too little, even by Google's standards."

ThanatosMinor writes "September's quench at the Large Hadron Collider is going to cost CERN at least $21 million and delay future collisions until June of 2009 at the earliest. Enjoy your last few months outside of an event horizon."

Hugh Pickens writes "Discover magazine has an interesting article on the multiverse theory — a synthesis of string theory and the anthropic principle that explains why our universe seems perfectly tailored for life without invoking an intelligent creator. Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. While most of those universes are barren, some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life. The idea that the universe was made just for us — known as the anthropic principle — debuted in 1973 when Brandon Carter proposed that a purely random assortment of laws would have left the universe dead and dark, and that life limits the values that physical constants can have. The anthropic principle languished on the fringes of science for years, but in 2000, new theoretical work threatened to unravel string theory when researchers calculated that the basic equations of string theory have an astronomical number of different possible solutions, perhaps as many as 101,000, with each solution representing a unique way to describe the universe. The latest iteration of string theory provides a natural explanation for the anthropic principle. If there are vast numbers of other universes, all with different properties, at least one of them ought to have the right combination of conditions to bring forth stars, planets, and living things." So far xkcd is simulating just one single universe.

Barence writes "An open-source digital rights management (DRM) scheme says it's ready to supplant Apple and Microsoft as the world's leading copy protection solution. Marlin, which is backed by companies such as Sony and Samsung, has just announced a new partner program that aims to drive the DRM system into more consumer devices. 'It works in a way that doesn't hold consumers hostage,' Talal Shamoon told PC Pro. 'It allows you to protect and share content in the home, in a way that people own the content, not the devices.' When asked about the biggest problem of DRM — that customers hate it — he argued that 'the biggest problem with DRM is people have implemented it badly. Make DRM invisible and people will use it.'"

OriginalArlen writes "NASA's next-generation rover, the nuclear-powered, laser-equipped Mars Science Laboratory is reported to be at a serious risk of cancellation due to budget and schedule overruns, including non-delivery of vital parts by a subcontractor. Costs are running over $2B so far, and the already thin schedule of Mars missions planned for the next decade — with budget ring-fenced for an outer-planets flagship mission — is in danger of further cuts."

Lucas123 writes "Today Sanyo said it has created a new blue laser diode with the ability to transfer data up to 12 times as fast as previous technologies. The laser, which emits a 450 milliwatt beam — about double that of previous Blu-ray Disc systems — can read and write data on discs with up to four data layers, affording Blu-ray players the ability to store 100GB on a disc, or 8 hours of high-definition video."

Elektroschock writes "At a Red Hat retrospective panel on the ODF vs. OOXML struggle panel, a Microsoft representative, Stuart McKee, admitted that ODF had 'clearly won.' The Redmond company is going to add native support of ODF 1.1 with its Office 2007 service pack 2. Its yet unpublished format ISO OOXML will not be supported before the release of the next Office generation. Whether or not OOXML ever gets published is an open question after four national bodies appealed the ISO decision."