derekmead writes "Meshworm is a toughened, robotic earthworm that can crawl virtually silently at a speed of about 5 millimeters per second. DARPA wants to send it into battle. Believe it or not, the Pentagon's been working on building a robotic earthworm for a while. They tried putting one together with gears. They tried with air-powered and pneumatic pumps, but the results were bulky and untenable. Then, researchers at Harvard, MIT and Seoul National University in Korea put their heads together and designed an 'artificial muscle.' It's essentially a polymer mesh that's wrapped with nickel and titanium wire designed to stretch and contract with heat. When an electric current is applied, the mesh mimics the circular muscle system of an earthworm to scoot forward."

1sockchuck writes "The Pirate Bay says it plans to deploy servers on airborne drones several kilometers above international waters. The site said it was experimenting with servers using Raspberry Pi, a credit-card sized Linux computer. April Fools come early? Torrent Freak says the plan is real. It's apparently a literal approach to cloud computing."

An anonymous reader writes "The days of dealing with very reflective glass panels may soon be behind us. Nippon Electric Glass has used the FPD International 2011 conference in Japan this week to show off its new 'invisible glass' panel. What NEG has done is added anti-reflection films to both the front and back of the glass that are only nanometers thick. Look at a typical sheet of glass and you will see about 8% of the light reflected off of it. With NEG's anti-reflection film in place, that is reduced to just 0.5%."

Harperdog with this excerpt from a story about using statistics to fight crime: "It’s great when cops catch criminals after they've done their dirty work. But what if police could stop a crime before it was even committed? Though that may sound like a fantasy straight from a Philip K. Dick novel, it's a goal police departments from Los Angeles to Memphis are actively pursuing with help from the Department of Justice and a handful of cutting-edge academics. It's called 'predictive policing.' The idea: Although no one can foresee individual crimes, it is possible to forecast patterns of where and when homes are likely to be burgled or cars stolen by analyzing truckloads of past crime reports and other data with sophisticated computer algorithms. 'We know where crime has occurred in the last month, but that doesn't mean it'll be there next month,' Los Angeles Police Department Lt. Sean Malinowski says. 'The only way for us to continue to have crime reduction is to start anticipating where crime is going to occur.'"

An anonymous reader writes "According to two former US Army intelligence officers, the multi-billion-dollar DCGS-A military computer system that was designed to help the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan simply doesn't work. DCGS-A is meant to accrue intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and provide real-time battlefield analysis and the current location of high-value targets — but instead, it has hindered the war effort rather than helped. Major General Michael Flynn, the top intelligence officer in Afghanistan, says that DCGS-A's faults have even resulted in a loss of lives (PDF)."

Prosthetic_Lips writes "A programmer named Grant Galitz has released a GameBoy Color emulator written in HTML5/JavaScript, and it will run ROM images stored locally. What's amazing is that it runs the games at a playable speed. We discussed a different, but similar project six months ago, but it seems like this one is pretty complete at this point. It's also open source."

Hugh Pickens writes "Pulitzer prize winning writer Thomas Friedman writes that in few years we may be looking back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? 'We're currently caught in two loops,' writes Friedman. 'One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability.' According to the Global Footprint Network we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth's resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. 'Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,' says Paul Gilding. 'We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we're not stupid.'"

CrtxReavr was one of a small avalanche of readers to let us know about a press conference NASA scheduled for Thursday at 2pm to discuss an "astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life." I've heard rumors ranging from "proof of life on Titan" to "first contact," depending on how optimistic/crazy you are.

hackingbear writes "Countering accusations that China's high-speed rail technologies are knockoffs, the head of China's Intellectual Property Administration in a conference said (paraphrasing): "We bought technologies from German, Japan, France, and Canada. We paid up. It is perfectly legal. We then innovate on top of them like most other inventions in the world. Why is that pirating?' (Link is to a Google translation; here is the original.) He cited China's ability, the world's first, to build high-speed rail in a high mountain area as an example of additional innovation."

Google85 writes "The OpenOffice.org Project has unveiled a major restructuring that separates itself from Oracle and that takes responsibility for OpenOffice away from a single company. From now on, OpenOffice's development and direction will be decided by a steering committee of developers and national language project managers. Driving home the changes, the OpenOffice.org project is now The Document Foundation, while the OpenOffice.org suite has been given the temporary name of LibreOffice."

norton123 writes "SEE has announced plans to published a Michael Jackson themed MMO. From the article: 'Planet Michael is described by SEE as "a massive social gaming experience" with "collaborative in-game activities," set in "an immersive virtual space themed after iconic visuals drawn from Michael's music, his life and the global issues that concerned him."'"

An anonymous reader writes "I'm moving to a rural community in the central United States. On the property is a satellite dish in excess of 3 meters in diameter that seems to still be in excellent condition. I already enjoy shortwave radio and was wondering what interesting TV feeds I might be able to catch with the dish. What kind of equipment would I need and how much should I expect to spend? If it's not useful for that purpose, what other fun projects might I use it for?"