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That's why they call it engineering. Do you think when they crash test cars and check to see how much damage will occur if you hit a cow? Of course not, because we stay within the bounds of accepted principles. We don't need to know the answer to everything.

Do elks count?

Car makers such as Volvo and Saab factor in elk crashes when designing and building cars. VTI, the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute has developed an elk crash test dummy called Mooses.

The dummy features similar weight, centre of gravity as well as dimensions to a live elk, and is used to recreate realistic elk collisions. A very popular European car failed its first Moose test and today is one of the safest in the world, thanks to the test results that initiated more stringent safety development.

In certain situations/locations, triangulation from Cell bases can be more effective than GPS in determining your location. Hell, people are doing it with wifi. Maybe the iPhone will have an accelerometer, so you set the phone from a known location and it keeps track of itself after that (I doubt this, but it's an interesting idea).

GPS is not the only geo location technology out there.

As vaguely mentioned in the article ("A UK company called Splashpower has also designed wire-less recharging pads"), IPT or Inductive Power Transfer http://www.ferret.com.au/articles/f9/0c01c3f9.asp is already a lot more mature and far more on the way to reaching consumers than this technology which has yet to reach prototype stage so I fail to see the significance.

I thought I had seen this sort of device already and a quick search shows that I rememberred correctly. Check out Ripesense and here and Juicy Idea and I am sure many more. Can a professor get in trouble for plagiarism???

After a year, their capacity is usually half what it started as. And they're way too expensive given how short their useful life-span is. They also take too long to charge. One technological advance we need to make "battery-based" cars viable is the super-capacitor.

Are people buying Pentium 4s to run DOS in Real Mode?

The frightening answer to that question is yes. There are still a plethora of programs in a variety of niche applications (machine control, point of sale, etc) that still run in real mode DOS. Many of these applications rely on hardware compatibility with the original IBM PC. That is why they still sell Pentium 4 motherboards with ISA slots.

Actually many researchers are in fact seriously pursuing using diamond as a future replacement for silicon. Both diamond and silicon are *very bad* conductors in their pure state. Both have to be doped (with phosphorous, boron, etc.) to become p-type or n-type semiconductors, which makes them useful as a substrate for microprocessors (note that when doped they are semiconductors, not conductors... your microchip would just short-out if the entire wafer was made of a metal/conductor).

Diamond's superior thermal, optical, and chemical-resistance properties make it attractive for future microprocessors... but unfortunately it is more difficult to make it work as a semiconductor, which is why silicon has always been the substrate of choice.

It's very interesting research, and we'll see where it goes. For more info, this C&E News article is good, or check here, or here and there's a bit here.

Will the next batch of rovers be equipped with windsocks, to measure the direction of the wind? And what do you call those spinning things to measure airspeed?

They are called anemometers. Some of the less advanced models do use spinning cups, however this can interfere with the wind flow you are studying (especially for small phenomenon length scales) and only works for two dimensions. There is another type, called an Acoustic Anemometer (don't be afraid to click on ferret.com.au :)) that uses sound advection (sound waves dragged along by the wind) to determine wind velocity in up to three dimensions.

A researcher friend of mine at Cornell University is working on using this concept on Mars, but AFAIK it's not been selected for any mission just yet. It's much more difficult because the atmosphere on mars is so thin that it attenuates signals at those frequencies very quickly.

No, he probably meant this.