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The California Department of Motor Vehicles began Tuesday to puzzle through the complex question of how to regulate cars that rely on computers—not people—to drive them. Once the stuff of science fiction, “driverless cars” could be commercially available by decade’s end. Google already has sent its fleet of Priuses and Lexuses, fitted with an array of sensors, hundreds of thousands of miles in California, and major automakers are testing their own models. …

Rechargeable, energy-dense bio-batteries running on sugar might be powering our electronic gadgets in as little as three years, according to a US team of scientists. The battery, created by the group of Percival Zhang, an associate professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech, can convert all the potential chemical energy stored in a sugar into electricity.The prototype is similar in size to a typical AA battery and has an energy storage density of 596 amp hours per kilogram – roughly one order of magnitude greater than a smartphone’s lithium-ion battery. This means that the battery could last at least...

Too Funny!

The 3-D printing technology is evolving so fast that 4-D printing, i.e. the combination of high resolution 3D printers with smart materials that change their shape in response to outside stimuli, is already there. The rising importance and complexity of materials suggests in our view that 3D Systems' (DDD) input costs will rise in the future, putting some pressure on the margins of its key consumables business. We reiterate our view that consensus margin expectations are way too high on 3D Systems and that the stock is a Sell. For those willing to invest in the 3-D printing sector in...

So far the story of Tesla Motors has been about exciting electric luxury cars and an even higher performing stock. Next week it will reveal plans for a much less sexy innovation that is more important to the company's future than either of those things: A huge new lithium battery factory dubbed the "Gigafactory" by Tesla founder Elon Musk. The plant is the key Tesla needs in order to produce an "affordable" long-range electric car in substantial enough numbers to join the ranks of the major automakers. "It's the future of the company," said Craig Irwin, analyst with Wedbush Securities....

Richard Branson has reiterated his plan to fly with his children on the inaugural flight of his long-planned commercial space operation, Virgin Galactic, despite the relatively untested nature of the technology and a departure date which has slipped repeatedly. "Everybody who signs up knows this is the birth of a new space programme and understands the risks that go with that," Branson said in an interview for Weekend magazine at Virgin Galactic's base in the Mojave desert north of Los Angeles. "But every person wants to go on the first flight." While insisting his plan is credible and the first...

f all goes according to plan, North Koreans will soon have free, uncensored Internet provided by satellites the size of toaster ovens. That's part of a project called Outernet, which hopes to launch hundreds of tiny satellites—known as CubeSats—to provide Internet to every person on Earth. Forty percent of the world's people currently don't have access to the Web. In a little more than a year, Outernet plans to have a fleet of 24 satellites operational and testing to pave the way for a globe-spanning network.

Want this article to load more quickly? Read it in space. Hong Kong has the world's fastest Internet. Internet on the moon is 10 times faster. How do our lunar-exploring spaceships get buffer-free video? Lasers. NASA and MIT are shooting "lasers full of Internet" to a ship named LADEE that's exploring the moon's atmosphere. According to NASA, speeds have reached 622 megabits per second (Hong Kong tops out at 63.6). Right now, the agency is using a pulsed laser beam to transmit a pair of HD video signals to and from the moon. The 239,000 miles between the New Mexico...

Dr. Eddie DewaldA millimeter-sized fuel capsule inside its target can, or hohlraum. As it approaches its fifth birthday, the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a troubled laser fusion facility in California, has finally produced some results that fusion scientists can get enthusiastic about. In a series of experiments late last year, NIF researchers managed to produce energy yields 10 times greater than produced before and to demonstrate the phenomenon of self-heating that will be crucial if fusion is to reach its ultimate goal of “ignition”—a self-sustaining burning reaction that produces more energy than it consumes.“This is a very significant achievement, and...

“[The company D-Wave] makes a new type of computer called a quantum computer that’s so radical and strange, people are still trying to figure out what it’s for and how to use it…. The supercooled niobium chip at the heart of the D-Wave Two has 512 qubits and therefore could in theory perform 2^512 operations simultaneously. That’s more calculations than there are atoms in the universe, by many orders of magnitude…. Naturally, a lot of people want one. This is the age of Big Data, and we’re burying ourselves in ­­information—search queries, genomes, credit-card purchases, phone records, retail transactions, social...

Monday, January 27, 2007: In order to give a boost to the NASA's new Lunar Cargo Transportation and Landing by Soft Touchdown CATALYST program, the space agency conducted a teleconference in Washington DC, USA. The purpose of a conference of this format was to create more opportunities to trigger commercial cargo transportation capabilities to the moon.

 AMD today released two new Opteron chips based off the company's "Piledriver" core. Part of the 6300 series codenamed "Warsaw", the 6370P packs 16 cores and the 6338P has 12 cores. Both of these new processors are fully socket and software compatible with the existing AMD Opteron 6300 Series. AMD boasts that the new Opterons are ideal for the Open 3.0 Open Compute Platform, complex compute needs of data analysis, xSQL and traditional databases, citing reasons of power efficiency and cost effectiveness. Specifically, these Warsaw parts have a TDP of 99 W. As far as cost effectiveness, the 16 core...

Google’s popular Chrome search engine might be doing more than helping you find websites — it might be helping websites find and listen to you through the microphone in your computer. TalAter.com reports the search engine’s voice recognition functionality can be compromised by websites that allow Chrome users to navigate their site via voice. The problem is once you give Chrome permission, the websites you’ve visited retain that permission — even if you’re not on the site, allowing them to tap into your computer’s onboard microphone and listen in at any time. Any site operator that chooses to adopt Chrome’s...

Nearly all of the ATMs in the world are running the Windows XP operating system, introduced by Microsoft 13 years ago—and incredibly out of date, as any tech enthusiast will tell you. On April 8, Microsoft will officially end the tech support for the aging OS, which was replaced by Windows Vista in 2007, Windows 7 in 2009, Windows 8 in 2012 and Windows 8.1 in 2013. […] If an ATM isn’t upgraded, it will continue to function, experts said. Withdrawals, deposits, and other transactions will work as they did before. But the machines will be more vulnerable to cyber...

Forget hand-cranked chargers and solar-powered cases, the latest way to solve the ever-present problem of a dying phone battery is by using thin air. Researchers from Texas have developed a miniscule ‘micro-windmill’ that is just 1.8mm wide and can transform wind energy into electricity. The team behind the design claim hundreds of the nickel devices could be fitted to a phone case, for example, and users could charge their phone simply by waving it in the air. - - - - The technology was built by micro-engineering experts at the University of Texas Arlington (UTA). Each windmill is made of...

SAN ANTONIO – When Chance Darby received the helmet that saved his life in Afghanistan, he said it successfully stopped an enemy rifle bullet but left him with two big headaches. One headache lasted a few days after the impact from a high-velocity round. The other lasted several weeks as he tried to keep the news of the incident from his mother, Lynlee Darby, and his then-fiancée and now wife, Cheryl. Chance proposed to Cheryl shortly before deploying to Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne Division. On May 31, 2012, Taliban ambushed his platoon while it was dismantling an improvised explosive...

Video At: http://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America/US/2014/01/CMAX-solar.mov/jcr:content/renditions/cq5dam.video.firefoxhq.ogg

It's time for a new HTML reference so you can make your posts look cool. HTML means Hyper Text Markup Language. It's a set of simple commands used to format the text of your posts, add images, or links, or change the appearance. URL is Uniform Resource Locator. It's the name of the page or the picture that you see, the www.http:// stuff. You'll need to use the URL to make links and post pictures. Quotation Marks Quotes have to be used around the URLs for web pages and images on Free Republic. Some systems do not require this. Ours...

Until this morning I’d never heard of Odon. Then I read this article in the New York Times about a 59-year-old Argentine car mechanic who invented a mechanism for safely extracting babies stuck in the birth canal. The device involves a plastic bag, which is inflated around the baby’s head and can then be used to pull the baby out, potentially causing less damage than forceps or suction cups. The World Health Organization has endorsed the device. Becton Dickenson licensed it for production. The idea came to Odon in a dream after he viewed a Youtube video about extracting...

You may not have noticed it, but over the past year Google has bought eight robotics companies. Its most recent acquisition is an outfit called Boston Dynamics, which makes the nearest thing to a mechanical mule that you are ever likely to see. It's called Big Dog and it walks, runs, climbs and carries heavy loads. It's the size of a large dog or small mule – about 3ft long, 2ft 6in tall, weighs 240lbs, has four legs that are articulated like an animal's, runs at 4mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rubble, climbs muddy hiking trails,...