Historic Photos Reveal a Mercury Never Seen Before

Of the four rocky planets in our solar system -- Earth, Mars and Venus are the other three -- Mercury is the smallest, the densest, the one with the oldest surface, the one with the largest daily variations in surface temperature, and the least explored. Of particular interest is whether Mercury might have some vestige of a magnetic core. "The only reason we have an atmosphere and don't die is because of our magnetic field," noted SLU professor Paul Czysz. NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft on Tuesday and Wednesday captured and delivered to Earth the first photographs of Mercury ever taken from within the planet's orbit   Taken...

Read More

Red Hat's New Java Alternative: From Coffee to Tea

"The only way Ceylon can kill Java is by driving developers to suicide from switching back and forth between the two languages," said Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. "I'd say Java's about as likely to be killed by Cylons as by Ceylon. Larry Ellison's Battlestar Oracle has nothing to worry about on this front." When a FOSS company gets to be the size of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), pretty much every move it makes is of interest to those of us here in the Linux community. So when said company unveils plans to create an alternative to none other than Java, well, let's just say everyone sits up and starts listening. Sure enough, that's just what leaked...

Read More

The Rare-Earth Crisis

Today's electric cars and wind turbines rely on a few elements that are mined almost entirely in China. Demand for these materials may soon exceed supply. Will this be China's next great economic advantage? Mighty mine: This 50-acre mine on the eastern edge of California’s Mojave Desert was once the world’s leading supplier of rare-earth metals. Water pooled at the bottom of the mine while it lay idle after being shut down a decade ago. Credit: Photography by Daniel Hennessy On the eastern edge of the Mojave Desert, an hour's drive southwest of Las Vegas in Mountain Pass, California, lies a 1.4-billion-year-old deposit of cerium, neodymium,...

Read More

Sensors for Tracking Home Water Use

Sensors track devices' electricity, water, and gas consumption from one spot.  Finding the flush: This sensor attaches to a water pipe and wirelessly communicates changes in pressure to a microcontroller that infers the use of specific fixtures. A Bluetooth transmitter streams the data to a personal computer. When a cell phone or credit-card bill arrives, each call or purchase is itemized, making it possible to track trends in calling or spending, which is especially helpful if you use a phone plan with limited minutes or are trying to stick to a budget. Within the next few years, household utilities could be itemized as...

Read More

Microsoft Explores Privacy-Protecting Personalization

A researcher is experimenting with ways that a Web browser could tighten the limits on information provided to websites. Today, many websites ask users to take a devil's deal: share personal information in exchange for receiving useful personalized services. New research from Microsoft, which will be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in May, suggests the development of a Web browser and associated protocols that could strengthen the user's hand in this exchange. Called RePriv, the system mines a user's behavior via a Web browser but controls how the resulting information is released to websites that want to offer...

Read More

Batteries that Recharge in Seconds

  A new process could let your laptop and cell phone recharge a hundred times faster than they do now. Foam power: This lithium-ion battery cathode can be used to make a battery that holds as much energy as a conventional one, but can recharge a hundred times faster. Credit: Paul Braun   A new way of making battery electrodes based on nanostructured metal foams has been used to make a lithium-ion battery that can be 90 percent charged in two minutes. If the method can be commercialized, it could lead to laptops that charge in a few minutes or cell phones that charge in 30 seconds. The methods used to make the ultrafast-charging...

Read More

The Case for Moving U.S. Nuclear Fuel to Dry Storage

One of the lesser-noted facts of the Fukushima nuclear disaster—where loss of coolant in spent-fuel pools has resulted in massive radiation releases—is that some fuel at the plant was stored in so-called dry casks, and these casks survived the March 11 earthquake and tsunami intact. This fact is likely to result in new calls to move some spent fuel out of water pools at reactor sites in the United States—where it is packed more densely than the fuel in the stricken Japanese pools—and into outdoor dry casks, experts say. "What will likely happen very quickly is that the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] and utilities will arrive at a consensus...

Read More

A Browser that Speaks Your Language

Early adopters can now get a sneak peek at the future of the Web by downloading the latest prerelease, or "beta," version of Chrome, Google's Web browser. One of the most interesting new features is an ability to translate speech to text—entirely via the Web. The feature is the result of work Google has been doing with the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML Speech Incubator Group, the mission of which is "to determine the feasibility of integrating speech technology in HTML5," the Web's new, emerging standard language. A Web page employing the new HTML5 feature could have an icon that, when clicked, initiates a recording through the computer's...

Read More

Zotac GeForce GTX 580 AMP! Edition

The scaly green dragon spewing fire from its maw, as depicted on the both the box of and the decal affixed to Zotac's GeForce GTX 580 AMP! Edition video card, is an apt symbol for this particular piece of hardware. Like the original GTX 580 reference version, this one is a killer: the most powerful single-GPU video card you can buy, featuring all of Nvidia's latest innovations and technologies and giving you an outstanding gaming experience. The AMP! is also overclocked, to give you even more performance. But, as it springs from Nvidia's standard, you'll have to deal with the twin demons of high price ($529.99 list)...

Read More

Droid Incredible 2 Pictures Leaked

Recently, a leaked image of the Droid Incredible 2 has established one thing for sure, that this handset will be coming Verizon branded. Many rumors have surfaced regarding the branding of the smartphone which is yet to hit the stores. The picture also discloses that this phone will be quire similar to the Incredible S in outer features. The fact that Incredible S holds the same brand is perhaps a plain coincidence besides other similarities. Though, we are not definite whether or not Android 2.3 would be the final OS, the leaked image shows it is running on Android 2.2.1. HTC is likely to incorporate a 4 inch WVGA SLCD capacitive display its...

Read More