vile8 writes "With the high gas prices and ongoing gas gouging in my hometown many people are trying to find a reasonable way to save gas. One of the things I've noticed is people driving exceptionally slow, 30mph in 45mph zones, etc. So I had to take a quick look and find out if driving slow is helpful in getting better mileage. I know horsepower increases substantially with wind resistance, but with charts like this one from truckandbarter.com it appears mileage is actually about the same between 27mph and 58mph or so. So I'm curious what all the drivers out there with the cool efficiency computers are getting ... of specific interest would be the hemis with MDS; how do those do with the cylinder shutoff mode at different speeds?" Related: are there any practical hypermiling techniques that you've found for people not ready to purchase a new car, nor give up driving generally?

Colin Smith writes "TradElect, the Microsoft .Net based trading platform for the London Stock Exchange, was offline for about seven hours, meaning that their 5-nines SLAs are shot for approximately the next 100 years. The TradElect system was launched back in June of 2007 and was designed for increased speed and system capacity."

Roland Piquepaille writes "A researcher from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) claims that 68 molecules can explain the origins of many serious diseases. After reviewing findings from multiple disciplines, he 'realized that only 68 molecular building blocks are used to construct these four fundamental components of cells: the nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), proteins, glycans and lipids,' and he said that 'these 68 building blocks provide the structural basis for the molecular choreography that constitutes the entire life of a cell.'"

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that a new RFID chip from Verayo claims to be unclonable through the use of the new Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF), sort of an electronic DNA for silicon chips. "Basic passive RFID chips can be easily cloned by copying the data residing on one chip to another. Verayo's PUF-based RFID chips cannot be cloned, and provide a very strong and robust authentication mechanism. No other chip or device can be disguised as the original chip, even if the data is copied from one Verayo RFID chip to another."

Hybride And The Groom writes "Building hybrids uses machinery that pollutes the environment. The solution? Ship the parts of a hybrid individually and get your customers to put the car together themselves. That's exactly what Robert Q Riley Enterprises is doing, according to a story on CNet today, with its XR-3 hybrid. It'll cost you $25,000 for the bits, plus zero dollars in manufacture, I hope. Better yet, cough up $200 for the blueprints and schematics and even build the parts yourself. It's no secret that many hybrid drivers are smug enough as it is. Allow them to brag about having built the damn cars themselves and we might be entering obscenely smug territory."