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Here are some links, and here is a link to a video presentation given to the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Berkeley. TWR is teh bomb (well, not literally).

The Fujitsu FLEPia is already released, last year in fact:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_FLEPia
http://ezinearticles.com/?Fujitsu-Flepia-E-Reader-Review&id=3326541
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22332/?a=f

It has 40-50 hours battery life, so yes, it is reasonable to consider this as an e-reader (as opposed to most handheld devices that only have a few hours of battery life).

I found this with a trivial Google search. Although it's sad that from reading Slashdot, I'd have no idea of it's release (I can't find any stories for it?), yet for the Apple iVaporware, we've already had endless stories about just rumours, and if the thing is actually ever released, no doubt we'll get daily stories on it like Apple's phone. Bottom line - this site is good for Apple rumours, but don't rely on it for "news for nerds", or geek stuff that matters in general.

Of course, I predict that you will redefine the category so that it doesn't include this device, but makes Apple "first".

Not to mention destroy your DNA, and give you cancer.

Radiation in general isn't the problem. There's some evidence that millimeter wave radiation in particular can un-zip DNA, even at its low energy, due to resonant effects.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24331/

Now it's not yet clear *how* damaging regular exposure to a millimeter wave scan would be -- millimeter waves already exist in the natural environment and haven't killed us all yet -- so it's entirely possible that there is no real danger. But I'd like to see some of the billions spent on these machines used to verify that before we get too far along.

This is a better link to information on the damage to DNA from Terahertz scanners. It was covered in Slashdot earlier, don't know why it is not a related story.

Quoting the earlier story:
"Now a team led by Los Alamos National Labs thinks it knows why. They say that although the forces that terahertz waves exert on double-stranded DNA are tiny, in certain circumstances resonant effects can unzip the DNA strands, tearing them apart. This creates bubbles in the strands that can significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication. With terahertz scanners already appearing in airports and hospitals, the question that now urgently needs answering is what level of exposure is safe."

By most accounts, a functional prototype reactor is 20 years away.

The designer of the molten salt Thorium reactors ran his reactor non-stop for over 10 years IIRC. This was in the 1960s. What is unproven exactly?

Extracting thorium from the ground is harder than for uranium,

Which we will run out of in 10 years.

Thorium will also produce dangerous, radioactive by products,

And Uranium produces candy canes and puppies? If Thorium really is harder to refine or weaponize than Uranium, we'd be better off switching to Thorium, so you contradict yourself.

Also, Thorium reactions do not produce plutonium. The fact that Thorium reactions do not produce weaponized by products is one of its huge advantages, above and beyond its abundance and higher efficiency as nuclear fuel when compared to Uranium.

Because we're scheduled to run out of easily mined Uranium within the next 10 years, unless the US's military stockpiles are released. Thorium is far more abundant, is safer since it can't be weaponized and it's meltdown-proof in liquid salt reactors, and more importantly, is much, much more efficient as a nuclear fuel. So I disagree with all of your points, save one: Uranium is not abundant or safe, but I grant you that Uranium is more well known; it's infamy can also be considered a problem however.

Actually, in addition to nuclear waste the world may be running out of uranium: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2007/08/nuclear-react-1.html And not only that, but uranium mining is a very polluting affair http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=493&Itemid=66 http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24414/

(Of course, the World Nuclear Association downplays these issues: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html )

Ironically you need to burn fossil fuels in order to mine uranium; mining vechicles use diesel while the mining industry runs mainly on coal -- or have you heard of any solar-powered nuclear enrichment plants?

Hell, they've got EEG game controllers now.

the threats have been demonstrated in the lab by a fella named Kevin Fu

It should also be mentioned that Prof. Kevin Fu was recently named Technology Review's 2009 Innovator of the Year for this work.

You're vastly underestimating the cost of developing a strong AI machine (not serial).

As an example of Strong AI, take a human brain: it has ~100 billion neurons, this is about 500k worth of custom 'neural' FACETS chips.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22339/?a=f

Let's say each of these custom chips costs $100 x 500k = $50 million just for the CPUs alone, not to mention the bus, networking, interconnects etc that would need to be developed.

Emulating 'neural networks' with serial computers (traditional chips) is horribly inefficient, I doubt combining all the top 50 supercomputers in the world could simulate 100 bill neurons in one human brain in real time.

Not to mention the cost of the doing the hard part, developing the software.

Stories like this will (soon) be as quaint as the circa 1909 stories about flivvers racing from Dover to Calais. Will it be Zn-air batteries or fuel cells or next-gen Li ion ... ?

Taxi stands could have built-in charging cables for electric taxis.

Replace taxi with bus and we're already living in the Future.

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23247/

The technology involved is bloody well obvious.

"Cognitive Prosthetics" is bleeding-edge.

The tech has to be proven in clinical trials. Digital technology eyed in fight against Alzheimer's

Clinical trials cost money.

On November 27, Microsoft announced that it was giving $550 000 in funding to six teams of academic researchers in the United Kingdom and North America. One of the researchers, Fergus Gracey, a clinical psychologist from the Oliver Zangwill Centre for Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, in Ely, U.K., is planning to use SenseCam to help the rehabilitation of patients with acquired brain injury. "Many of our clients have a shorter fuse or find it difficult to manage emotional arousal," says Gracey. "We hope to use the reviewing of SenseCam images of the trigger situation, along with heart-rate recordings of the individual during that situation, to help prompt recall and to help the person tune in physiologically to what was going on." A Camera to Help Dementia Patients

Interesting! this is exactly what was written in Technology Reviews Blog http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24211/. Might want to not be so predictable.

I don't get this comment from the article:

Unfortunately, Abubakr's arrangement means that the table can only be read by rotating it. That's tricky with a textbook and impossible with most computer screens.

Take a look at the table. Are there really people who can't read it without rotating it?

As a followup, how long until we see a netmainframe?

This particular one would probably evolve into a "netcluster". See: 1 instant-on Linux/ARM, 1 Linux/ARM in the network controller, 1 Linux/GPU in the videocard, and 1 Linux inside the BIOS.

Oh, and I forgot the dual-core Atom running Windows.

I read this item immediately after reading the A Genetic Fountain of Youth article in Technology Review. There on page two:

The new study also implicated the protein AMPK, a component of the TOR pathway even further downstream than S6K1, as a key potential drug target. The role of AMPK is especially intriguing because it is activated by metformin, a widely prescribed drug for treating type 2 diabetes. Withers says this means it may be possible in the next few years to design clinical trials that would test metformin's ability to prevent or treat age-related diseases.

Turns out chimps have evolved more than humans. As you said, in a different way. http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/18544/

Q: How can you travel long distances in electric powered vehicles without long recharge breaks?
A: Battery switching stations

Click here to skip straight to posting on /. about how dumb you are! Whatever you do, don't consider clicking the link to take you past the Ad to get to the article. After all, online news outlets should be required to give all their content away ad-free.

I know you could be going for funny, but there is a project in Israel that does exactly this they have 1,000x parabolic concentrating reflectors that reflect all their light onto a single PV panel.

http://www.greenmomentum.com/wb3/wb/gm/gm_content?id_content=2365 The image seems to be missing, so here is the Manufacturers site. http://www.zenithsolar.com/

Also this Fresnel Lens gets 1,000x concentration but isn't really a reflector

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22204/?a=f

of carbon nanotubes causing cancer? I am aware of several studies that show this stuff behaving like asbestos. http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20815/

Will it drop a spacecraft in your lap? Heck no! Are these technologies and those of the future likely materially improve the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of manned spacecraft on multiyear (or even multidecadal) missions? Big time.

Objective-C uses a two-phase dispatch for method calls. When you see a call in the Objective-C source code that looks like:

[myObject init];

the dispatch system:

1. Looks up the function pointer for the method "init" in a table.
2. Calls the "init" function via the function pointer.

C++ follows the same steps. The big difference is that in Objective-C, the dispatch table is an associative array (C++ unordered_map, Java HashMap, Python dict) from strings to function pointers, not a plain array (C++ vector, Java ArrayList, Python list).

In my opinion as an experienced application developer the user should never run into the problem that Superfetch attempts to solve. Anti-malware scans or backups are generally limited by I/O transfer rates, not by CPU. In such situations, using lots of memory to pre-load data makes no sense. It is relatively easy to write a two-buffer, threaded, streaming system for situations that are constrained by disk transfer rates without consuming scads of memory.

But then you rely on the operating system to provide a method for applications to provide cache hints, and you rely on the antivirus software to provide such hints. SuperFetch tries to infer these even for applications developed prior to widespread knowledge of these hints or ported from systems that lack these hints.

In the bigger picture, Superfetch attempts to learn the times of day when apps are used and pre-loads their binaries. This is a nice concept, but I have serious doubts as to how useful it really is.

Having my applications ready to start at 08:57 when I'm about to grab the mouse at 08:58 improves my productivity. Consider that employees have sued their employers for requiring that employees be present during application startup time but not paid until the application has fully started up.

Mac OS X is less likely to need such anti-malware scans in the first place as the application binaries are now digitally signed by the developer.

But who signs the developer's certificate? And what keeps malware publishers from signing their trojans?

Any malware that attempts to insert itself into applications will run into problems.

Unless an application tries to insert itself as, say, an assistive technology using the accessibility API.

Recent advances in the production of titanium may bring this metal into wide use in airframes. And everything else.

The very last line in the linked article:

"An unreleased follow-up study by Melzer reveals another undesirable result: that violent play can negatively impact a player's opinion of a brand."

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/23336/page2/

Wind also doesn't scale as easily - you're not taking transmission costs into account

Even nuclear has to be transmitted and so has a cost too. Of course adding solar, wind, and other sources of power to the grid will mean the grid has to be rebuilt and made smart. However according to "Rebuilding the Power Grid" problems related to the grid and power quality costs the US $80 Billion to $180 billion a year. If so then it only makes sense to rebuild the grid, and businesses are working on that. Xcel Energy is working on the Smart City Grid for instance. What stands in the way of a smart grid is government. It's not simple, well physically it is but not politically, to erect transmission lines from where the power is produced to where it's used. There are all the property owners as well as governments, from cities, counties, and states to deal with.

Then when you also add in heavy transmission line costs, you also get to deal with rights of way and environmental impact studies for that entire transmission line route, etc, etc.

As stated above that applies to nuclear power as well. It applies to all sources of electricity including coal and gas fired powerplants. The fact you're only applying it to wind shows you're biased against wind.

Falcon

Watch this tech: http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22926/

It works in the lab and is darn impressive. Once the corroding cathode issue is solved, it'll be ready for mainstream.

Maybe the Nokia engineers *did* solve it?

Nah... 12 hours = prolly just marketing.

If you found those interesting the article "First Life and Next Life" in the June issue of Tech Review should be more interesting. I just happened to be reading it when this thread started.

Falcon

...was featured on the arxiv blog not long ago: First Free-Electron Light Source on a Chip . Well, it isn't a Laser, yet. I know. But this also looks very promising for integrated optics and the team that's working on it want to get it lasing.

To be "DNA" doesn't it need to be able to self-replicate or something like that? Given the appropriate raw materials, will the DNA chips self-replicate and expand themselves?

DNA can and does both self assemble and self replicate. I'm reading an article in "Tech review" on this subject, "First Life and Next Life". In experiments the author showed that the, artificial, DNA could also evolve.

Falcon

Nuclear power is NEVER a viable solution to ANY problem for the simple reason that the knowledge to create nuclear power is the knowledge to make nuclear weapons. For the simpler people in the crowd, NUCLEAR POWER EQUALS NUCLEAR WEAPONS. There is NO SUCH THING as a "peaceful" nuclear program. All nuclear material can and will be weaponized. For this reason alone nuclear power must be forever abolished and forgotten.

Thorium reactors don't make plutonium. No need for a light water or breeder reactor for it. I'm told that the fission byproducts are an order of magnitude safer as well, but I haven't seen the math for it yet.

Please check Kirk Sorensen's Google Talk about thorium nuclear reactors. And here are the actual slides used in the presentation.

From the Introduction and Basic Principles of thorium based reactors on Kirk's blog: A liquid-fluoride thorium reactor operating only on thorium and using a "start charge" of pure U-233 will produce almost no transuranic isotopes. This is because neutron capture in U-233 (which occurs about 10% of the time) will produce U-234, which will further absorb another neutron to produce U-235, which is fissile. U-235 will fission about 85% of the time in a thermal-neutron spectrum, and when it doesn't it will produce U-236. U-236 will further absorb another neutron to produce Np-237, which will be removed by the fluorination system. But the production rate of Np-237 will be exceedingly low because of all the fission "off-ramps" in its production.

-k

Nuclear power is NEVER a viable solution to ANY problem for the simple reason that the knowledge to create nuclear power is the knowledge to make nuclear weapons. For the simpler people in the crowd, NUCLEAR POWER EQUALS NUCLEAR WEAPONS. There is NO SUCH THING as a "peaceful" nuclear program. All nuclear material can and will be weaponized. For this reason alone nuclear power must be forever abolished and forgotten.

Thorium reactors don't make plutonium. No need for a light water or breeder reactor for it. I'm told that the fission byproducts are an order of magnitude safer as well, but I haven't seen the math for it yet.

when physicians injected a gene encoding a functional copy of the protein into a small part of one eye â" about eight-to-nine millimeters in diameter.

That's 1/3 of an inch! How many injections did it take to cover that area? Or, is the article so poorly written that the author failed to convey there was just a single injection with the injected material spreading out that far? Maybe we should ask the author directly?

Bah put my reply in the wrong post.

Any way they are working on this. http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21117/page1/

From what I heard on Talk of the Nation a few weeks ago, it actually makes the concrete stronger

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21117/

Further, he claims that the end product is more durable, more resistant to shrinking and cracking, and less permeable to water.

Click here to start on page 1. The link in the summary is for page 2?

So now I can print my own batteries, recharge them with my own printed solar panels, to power my inkjet printed LCD panels.

Awesome! If only I could get a printer that does the whole lot.
 

I didn't realize that "I dun have no cuzmers" was a valid defense against patent violations.

That's not all of his argument. Although his letter is unprofessional and poorly organized, he says:

To Sam Baxter - if you wish to acknowledge my email and realize your mistake on claiming CitiWare in your suit on Bedrocks behalf, then remove any claims against CitiWare / CityWare and I can remove this page and any publicity about filling an invalid lawsuit against a company that never used your patent or for that matter even developed any product sold or used (CityWare only used Open Source code under GPL for personal projects or other employers)!

He's probably flabbergasted that they didn't do any development, they just repackaged/administered GPL licensed open source products and now find themselves the target of a lawsuit. And like the article says, they don't care about him or what he says or the validity of targeting him, they care about keeping the case in East Texas District Court.

This guy doesn't need a defense, he just needs to reside in East Texas and he's part of this case no matter how ill placed the blame is.

Government-2006 energy review
http://www.carbon-info.org/carbonnews_100.htm

That is from 2006 when the then president, Bush, waged a war against science. I also noticed it says "nuclear energy produces significantly less CO2 compared to the normal fossil fuels" and says in the graph that wind emits 10 grams of CO2 per KWh and nuclear only emits 7. There is nothing there about solar.

Also I take it you couldn't re arsed reading this when I linked to it earlier.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/cft.pdf

Three hundred and eighty three pages? My eye's be killing me after 10 pages. I did go through the chapter on solar and the paragraphs themselves focus on solar in Great Britain. Figure 6.16 only lists 2 locations in GB for average sunshine, W/m^2, the greater of the 2 is London with 109. New York City and the rainy city of Seattle, WA, on the other hand each show 147. LA, CA, shows 225. The chapter on wind says that though it doesn't provide enough energy to power the UK it can provide some and provide it economically. However SciAm's article "A Grand Solar Plan" says that by 2050 solar power can provide 69% of the US's electrical needs. And the study Global potential for wind-generated electricity published by the National Academy if Sciences of the USA says wind can provide "40 times current worldwide consumption of electricity, >5 times total global use of energy in all forms."

You know why solar and wind don't get as much total? because they're no hopers. They get money to placate people who know fuck all about generating power for the grid but want a symbol of how very green their power is.

Only those who know nothing about solar and wind support it? Those who live Off the grid know nothing? They're only source of electricity is alternatives sources but they know nothing? John Doerr, appointed a member of Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board knows little? As venture capitalist and partner of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers he has invested billions in alternative energy but he knows nothing? Vinod Khosla, cofounder of Sun and another venture capitalist also knows little?

Did you even read my post?wind+solar cannot be used for more than 20% of the grid

Did you read the science links I provided saying solar can provide 69% of the electricity of the USA by 2050 and that wind could provide 400% of the world's energy?

Add in some kind of smart grid and you might, might just push that up to 30% and that's at an insane cost.

According to the article "Lifeline for Renewable Power" by Tech Review currently because the grid is now failing it costs businesses $80 billion dollars a year, so the grid needs to be rebuilt and made smart period. Even with more nuclear power plants that's true. But you're only using it against solar and wind, which is hypocritical.

Geothermal is fantastic for the few places where there's magma near the surface

I agree geothermal is not usable everywhere, no energy source even nuclear power is good everywhere. That's why I want a mix of different energy sources used. Biofuels can be used for fuel for things like aircrafts. The US Department of Defense is working to create biodiesel for jets.

Sounds like a great new technology but I get frustrated when product seems to take forever to get to market.

It's important to keep perspective on news items like this as "research results" rather than "products." That misunderstanding takes the fun out of a great spectator sport. ;-) Sometimes results out of the lab are immediately applicable, more often they take a quite a number of years to work out the practical kinks. E.g. this recent article on silicon for photo detectors in Tech Review has a good examples of the kinds of problems researchers have to muddle through on the way from breakthrough to reality. It doesn't help that popular tech reporting (and some researchers) love to add 'hooks' of tantalizing applications for new work... but for all those lofty dreams it's still just a research result.

In short, it's best not to hitch one's proverbial horse to any one of these announcements. Instead, read a lot of them to get a good sense of where technology is headed and where academia and industry are investing their efforts.

Many of the skills that make a good technical worker can make a good technical manager. You need to pay attention to details, keep track of a lot of different tasks, break up problems into manageable pieces, quantify risks and benefits, deal with unreasonable folks on occasion.

Some people claim that a good manager does not need to know much about the industry being managed. The idea is that a good manager can find the proper people that understand what they need to do and do it. I think this is true in an ideal world, but a technical manager who can dissociate himself from the technical aspects can make an exceptional manager.

There's an incremental financial benefit to management, but in the right organization you should be able to progress quite well in the technical track too.

All that said, I just saw this article:
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23800/

Personally the thought of managing more than a couple people is unpleasant to me. I could probably do an adequate job, but it would not be something that I'd relish.

Spiral Arms Did Not Cause Climate Change on Earth

A new map of the Milky Way galaxy proves that the sun's motion through the spiral arms could not have caused a well-known climate-change cycle.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23763/

Throw in a little water and it's easy to "convert sunlight into hydrogen". That's a silly way to phrase it, since you're really using sunlight to bust up water molecules, but that's what they call it.

If wifi,bluetooth and am/fm waves are so similar, there must be plenty of energy floating around us. Why can't we just recover that energy?

nokia's working on it

'm sure these companies are looking out for their best interests, and probably don't want alternative fuels to compete with their product. This is normal business practices.

It is business as usual but if different people get together to fight for or against something I'd say it was a conspiracy. Not that one has to be bad.

But I'm guessing there isn't some huge, organized, push to quash all such technologies across the whole globe.

Agreed.

As much as a pick on the Libertarians here, I do believe that if there was a miracle fuel out there, someone would develop it and sell it,

Except established businesses and industries get large subsidies and they can use that money for PR to scare people or what have you. Of course some environmentalist do the same, however they depend on donations not government subsidies.

Right now there are some generally good ideas for making our national power scheme better. The problem remains cost, and the fact that what we have right now works good enough for most people.

According to the article "Rebuilding the Power Grid" in MIT's Tech Review "grid-related power outages and problems with power quality reportedly cost the nation $80 billion to $188 billion per year." I's say that was costly too.

Falcon

I also would like to point out that this "smart" grid would have to be really "smart" to be able to create electricity when there is no wind.

One, with as bad as the grid is in the US is has to be rebuilt anyway. Currently "grid-related power outages and problems with power quality reportedly cost the nation $80 billion to $188 billion per year." The Northeast Blackout of 1965 and again the there one in 2003 as well as others have shown that the nation electrical grid needs to be upgraded and made smart. Next, once we have a smart grid, this link is to an update on Excel Energy's smart grid work, we can use a blend of energy sources. There are biomass, geothermal, solar, tidal, and wind energy sources available.

Falcon

Remember when they pretended to kill Total Information Awareness after public outcry, and really just moved parts of it to NSA where it wouldn't be seen until whistleblowers came forward?

But even if Napalitano actually has managed to end this program (and good on her if she has) for now, there is this persistent authoritarian streak across a wide swath of career folks in D.C. that isn't going away. It's going to be a constant and continuous battle to keep these people from pissing on the Bill of Rights.