chrb writes "Two days ago Slashdot discussed broke counties grinding their tarmac roads into gravel. Now the Telegraph reveals plans to raze huge sections of at least 50 US cities to the ground. The resulting smaller cities will be more economical to run, and the recovered land will be returned to nature."

A team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Germany has been experimenting with ways to infuse biopolymers with different kinds of metals. Finding some success with their tests on spider silk, the team was able to improve the tensile strength of the fibers, increasing the amount of energy required to break a strand as much as ten times. "Spider silk is not a practical engineering material, but materials scientists are trying to produce artificial fibers that mimic its properties. If they succeed, the result could be super-tough textiles. Knez thinks the technique has more immediate potential for toughening other biomaterials such as collagen. 'Mechanically improving collagen using our technique might open several new possible applications, like artificial tendons.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's long-awaited integrated security suite, codenamed Stirling, has been delayed by months and will now not be available until the fourth quarter 2009. According to Microsoft, the delay is due to the further development of the firm's behaviour based technology, the Dynamic Signature Service, 'to help deliver more comprehensive endpoint protection for zero-day attacks,' and efforts to add interoperability with third-party solutions, as per customer requests. When completed, the suite will combine a number of tools, such as the ISA Server and multiple Forefront products."

Stanislav_J writes "In a bizarre revelation, the judge who is presiding over the Isaacs obscenity trial in Los Angeles was found to have sexually explicit material on a publicly-accessible website. Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, acknowledged that he had posted the materials, but says he believed the site to be for personal storage only, and not accessible to the public (though he does acknowledge sharing some of the material with friends). The files included images of masturbation, public sex, contortionist sex, a transsexual striptease, a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows, and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. The latter two are especially ironic in that the trial involves the distribution of allegedly obscene sexual fetish videos depicting bestiality, among other things, by Ira Isaacs, an L.A. filmmaker."

Jeff recommends Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat's story from a community meeting with Northwest border control agents. Seems their monitoring for dirty bombs from the median of Interstate 5 caught a car transporting a radioactive cat. "It turns out the feds have been monitoring Interstate 5 for nuclear 'dirty bombs.' They do it with radiation detectors so sensitive it led to the following incident. 'Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour... Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car]. The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot.' Did he find a nuke? 'Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier.'"

Lucas123 writes "A new type of flash memory, called array-based memory, could offer a terabyte of data on a single chip within the next decade by bypassing current NAND memory technology, which is limited by the miniaturization capability of lithography. According to the Computerworld story, start-up Nanochip Inc. is being backed by Intel and others, and over 11 years has made research breakthroughs that will enable it to deliver working prototypes to potential manufacturing partners next year. And by 2010, the first chips are expected to reach 100GB capacity."

eldavojohn writes "Weighing in at a mere 20 billion trillion watts per square centimeter and containing a measly 300 terawatts of power, the University of Michigan has broken a record with a 1.3-micron speck wide laser. It's about two orders of magnitude higher than any other laser in the world and can perform for 30 femtoseconds once every ten seconds — some of the researchers speculate it is the most powerful laser in the universe. 'If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory ... To achieve this beam, the research team added another amplifier to the HERCULES laser system, which previously operated at 50 terawatts. HERCULES is a titanium-sapphire laser that takes up several rooms at U-M's Center for Ultrafast Optical Science. Light fed into it bounces like a pinball off a series of mirrors and other optical elements. It gets stretched, energized, squeezed and focused along the way.'" And ... cue the evil chortling.

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Physicists from both the University of Surrey and Salford University have devised a method to trap a multi-colored rainbow of light inside a prism. "Previous attempts to slow and capture light have involved extremely low or cryogenic temperatures, have been extremely costly, and have only worked with one specific frequency of light at a time. The technique proposed by Professor Hess and Mr Kosmas Tsakmakidis involves the use of negative refractive index metamaterials along with the exploitation of the Goos Hänchen effect, which shows that when light hits an object or an interface between two media it does not immediately bounce back but seems to travel very slightly along that object, or in the case of metamaterials, travels very slightly backwards along the object."