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Transportation

Transformer-Style Scooter Lets You Ride Your Briefcase To Work 102

Posted by Soulskill from the pretty-much-what-meets-the-eye dept.
cartechboy writes "If you're going to sell a brief case for $6,000, there better be a pony inside — or at least an electric scooter. Who wouldn't want to transform their boring old briefcase into an electric scooter and zip off to (or away from) work? The Commute-Case, as it's known, is essentially a briefcase you can ride to work. While in briefcase mode, if you extend sections of the front and back, wheels, handlebars and a step for your feet pop out. In 3 to 5 seconds, your briefcase is now an electric scooter that can go up to 25 miles on a single charge and weighs 27 pounds. Don't count on actually carrying stuff to work with this briefcase (there's a scooter inside)."
Power

Germany Sets New Solar Power Record 568

Posted by Soulskill from the bright-sunshiny-day dept.
An anonymous reader sends this quote from a Reuters report: "German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity per hour — equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity — through the midday hours on Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank said. The German government decided to abandon nuclear power after the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, closing eight plants immediately and shutting down the remaining nine by 2022. ... The record-breaking amount of solar power shows one of the world's leading industrial nations was able to meet a third of its electricity needs on a work day, Friday, and nearly half on Saturday when factories and offices were closed."
Wireless Networking

Engineers Hijack Libyan Phone Network For Rebels 76

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-see-what-you-did-there dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A team led by a Libyan-American telecom executive has helped rebels hijack Col. Moammar Gadhafi's cellphone network and re-establish their own communications. The new network, first plotted on an airplane napkin and assembled with the help of oil-rich Arab nations, is giving more than two million Libyans their first connections to each other and the outside world after Col. Gadhafi cut off their telephone and Internet service about a month ago."
PlayStation (Games)

USAF Unveils Supercomputer Made of 1,760 PS3s 163

Posted by Soulskill from the going-for-the-gusto dept.
digitaldc writes with this excerpt from Gamasutra: "The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has connected 1,760 PlayStation 3 systems together to create what the organization is calling the fastest interactive computer in the entire Defense Department. The Condor Cluster, as the group of systems is known, also includes 168 separate graphical processing units and 84 coordinating servers in a parallel array capable of performing 500 trillion floating point operations per second (500 TFLOPS), according to AFRL Director of High Power Computing Mark Barnell."

Submission + - The End of the Dr. Demento Show on radio. (drdemento.com) 1

Submitted by damnbunni
damnbunni writes: Dr. Demento has announced that his long-running comedy radio show will be ending. Modern 'format' radio has been less and less friendly to oddball and offbeat programming, and after years of declining station membership the Doctor announced on June 6th that his radio show will be no more. He will still stream shows from his web site, drdemento.com. While I'm very sad to see the show go, 30 years is a pretty good run.
Science

Invisibility Cloak Created In 3-D 113

Posted by kdawson from the can-you-see-me-now dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have created the first device to render an object invisible in three dimensions. The 'cloak,' described in the journal Science (abstract; full text requires login), hid an object from detection using light of wavelengths close to those that are visible to humans. Previous devices have been able to hide objects from light travelling in only one direction; viewed from any other angle, the object would remain visible. This is a very early but significant step towards a true invisibility cloak." The "object" hidden in this work was a bump one micrometer high. The light used was just longer than the wavelengths our eyes detect. To get a visible-light cloak, the features of the cloaking metamaterial would need to be reduced in size from 300 nm to 10 nm.
Space

Nearby Star Forecast To Skirt Solar System 135

Posted by Soulskill from the we're-doomed dept.
PipianJ writes "A recent preprint posted on arXiv by Vadim Bobylev presents some startling new numbers about a future close pass of one of our stellar neighbors. Based on studies of the Hipparcos catalog, Bobylev suggests that the nearby orange dwarf Gliese 710 has an 86% chance of skirting the outer bounds of the Solar System and the hypothesized Oort Cloud in the next 1.5 million years. As the Oort Cloud is thought to be the source of many long-period comets, the gravitational effects of Gliese's passing could send a shower of comets into the inner Solar System, threatening Earth. This news about Gliese 710 isn't exactly new, but it's one of the first times the probability of this near-miss has been quantified."
The Courts

Court Rules Photo of Memorial Violates Copyright 426

Posted by kdawson from the stamp-of-disapproval dept.
WhatDoIKnow sends in a story about an appeals court ruling in a singular case that might have the effect of narrowing "fair use" rights for transformative uses of artworks. "The sculptor who designed the Korean War memorial [in Washington DC] brought suit against the Postal Service after a photograph of his work was used on a postage stamp. Though first ruled protected by 'fair use,' on appeal the court ruled in favor (PDF) of the sculptor, Frank Gaylord, now 85."

Comment Adapting Coax to Twisted Pairs (Score 1) 608

by veektor (#31187456) Attached to: Suggestions For a Coax-To-Ethernet Solution?
You have more problems than just selecting 4 wires. Each pair of wires from the 100 megabit Ethernet is a balanced pair, and coax is unbalanced. Also, the coax impedance is probably 75 ohms (if I remember correctly) and the twisted pair is around 120 ohms. So you would need a transformer for each pair to match the impedances and handle the balanced to unbalanced conversion. Finally, these transformers would need to be small and broadband to avoid unintentional impedance mismatches. Like the others have suggested, just use the coax as a pull wire for Cat 5e.
Space

Astronomers Discover the Coolest Known Sub-Stellar Body 60

Posted by Soulskill from the miles-davis's-home-planet dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Science Daily reports that using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii, astronomers have discovered what may be the coolest sub-stellar body ever found outside our own solar system. Too small to be stars and with insufficient mass to maintain hydrogen-burning nuclear fusion reactions in their cores, 'brown dwarfs' have masses smaller than stars but larger than gas giant planets like Jupiter, with an upper limit in between 75 and 80 Jupiter masses. 'This looks like the fourth time in three years that the UKIRT has made a record breaking discovery of the coolest known brown dwarf, with an estimated temperature not far above 200 degrees Celsius,' says Dr. Philip Lucas at the University of Hertfordshire. Due to their low temperature these objects are very faint in visible light, and are detected by their glow at infrared wavelengths. The object known as SDSS1416+13B is in a wide orbit around a somewhat brighter and warmer brown dwarf, SDSS1416+13A, and the pair is located between 15 and 50 light years from the solar system, which is quite close in astronomical terms."
Technology

Using EMP To Punch Holes In Steel 165

Posted by timothy from the you'll-need-some-big-batteries dept.
angrytuna writes "The Economist is running a story about a group of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology in Chemnitz, Germany, who've found a way to use an EMP device to shape and punch holes through steel. The process enjoys advantages over both lasers, which take more time to bore the hole (0.2 vs. 1.4 seconds), and by metal presses, which can leave burrs that must be removed by hand."

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