Peace Corps Online writes "The Maldives will begin to divert a portion of the country's billion-dollar annual tourist revenue to buy a new homeland as insurance against climate change. Rising sea levels threaten to turn the 300,000 islanders into environmental refugees as the chain of 1,200 island and coral atolls dotted 500 miles from the tip of India is likely to disappear under the waves if the current pace of climate change continues to raise sea levels. The UN forecasts that the seas are likely to rise by up to 59 cm by the year 2100. Most parts of the Maldives are just 150 cm above water so even a 'small rise' in sea levels would inundate large parts of the archipelago. 'We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere. It's an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome,' says the Muslim country's first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, adding that he has already broached the subject with a number of countries and found them to be 'receptive.' India and Sri Lanka are targets because they have similar cultures and climates; Australia is worth looking at because of the immense amount of unoccupied land in that country. 'We do not want to leave the Maldives, but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades.'"

Destructoid has a neat post about a gamer whose condition prevents him from using a standard video game controller. With the help of a company called GimpGear, which markets devices for people with limited mobility, he designed and built a custom input device that makes use of fingers, toes, and even sips or puffs of air to control his favorite games. Pictures and a video of the setup are both available in the post.

Roland Piquepaille writes "This distinction goes to a future autonomous version of the 700-tons Caterpillar mining truck. In this article, Discovery News reports that Caterpillar engineers and computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have teamed up to develop this autonomous truck. Japan-based Komatsu has already delivered autonomous mining trucks to its customers, but these are smaller than the Caterpillar ones. Both companies are transforming their trucks into 'robots' for three reasons. Improvements in safety, efficiency and productivity will reduce costs and increase availability."

coondoggie writes with this excerpt from NetworkWorld: "What do you get when you mix the government, the court system, company lawyers and Joe Consumer? A serious mess that would send most people screaming into the night. But the Federal Trade Commission is no such entity. It wants to straighten Intellectual Property (IP) out and today said it will hold a series of hearings — the first in Washington, DC on Dec. 5 — it will use to examine IP law and the myriad issues surrounding it. Interested bigwigs from the tech industry, including Cisco, Yahoo and the Computer & Communications Industry Association are expected to testify along with professors, lawyers and other industry players. The patent system has experienced significant change and more changes are under consideration, the FTC said." The FTC held some different, but related hearings this week which addressed topics such as copyright law and DRM interoperability. Transcripts, podcasts, and summaries of the talks are available on the FTC-hosted "Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade" site.

Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the semiconductor industry, maskless nanolithography is a flexible nanofabrication technique which suffers from low throughput. But now, engineers at the University of California at Berkeley have developed a new approach that involves 'flying' an array of plasmonic lenses just 20 nanometers above a rotating surface, it is possible to increase throughput by several orders of magnitude. The 'flying head' they've created looks like the stylus on the arm of an old-fashioned LP turntable. With this technique, the researchers were able to create line patterns only 80 nanometers wide at speeds up to 12 meters per second. The lead researcher said that by using 'this plasmonic nanolithography, we will be able to make current microprocessors more than 10 times smaller, but far more powerful' and that 'it could lead to ultra-high density disks that can hold 10 to 100 times more data than today's disks.'"

kpearson writes "Distributed.net's 8-year-old OGR-25 distributed computing project has just proven conclusively that the predicted shortest 25-mark Golomb ruler is optimal. 'The total length of the ruler is 480, with marks at positions: 0 12 29 39 72 91 146 157 160 161 166 191 207 214 258 290 316 354 372 394 396 431 459 467 480. (This ruler may alternatively be expressed in terms of the distance between those positions, which is how dnetc displays them: 12-17-10-33-19-...).' 124,387 people participated in the project and two people found the shortest ruler, one on October 10, 2007 and the other on March 24, 2008."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Flower robots are not new, and some have already been developed in the US. Now, South Korean researchers have created a robotic plant which acts like real ones. This robot has humidifying, oxygen-producing, aroma-emitting, and kinetic functions. It is about 1.30 meters tall and 40 centimeters in diameter. The robotic plant can interact with people when they approach, and it can 'dance' when music is played. The researchers don't say when a commercial version of their flowers will come to the market. They also don't mention a retail price."

Fallout 3 is due to be released in a few weeks, and Bethesda recently announced that all versions of the game have gone gold. They provided the systems specs for the PC release as well. Unfortunately for them, the Xbox 360 version was leaked onto torrent sites almost three weeks early. Bethesda is "looking into" how the game was distributed. In preparation for the launch, game director Todd Howard spoke at length with Gamasutra about the scope of the project, and the differences from their previous games, such as Oblivion. CrispyGamer recently ran a three-part series detailing their four hours of hands-on time with the game. We've previously looked at some gameplay videos for Fallout 3, and discussed the fact that no mod tools will ship with the game.

Lumenary7204 writes "The Register has a story about the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a project to build a 6.7 meter effective-diameter ground-based telescope that will be used to map some of the faintest objects in the night sky. Jeff Kantor, the LSST Project Data Manager, indicates that the telescope should be in operation by 2016, will generate around 30 terabytes of data per night, and will 'open a movie-like window on objects that change or move on rapid timescales: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects.' The end result will be a 150 petabyte database containing one of the most detailed surveys of the universe ever undertaken by a ground-based telescope. The telescope's 8.4 meter mirror blank was recently unveiled at the University of Arizona's Mirror Lab in Tucson."