Dell Departure Could Ravage Limerick

The big PC maker's relocation to Poland may push unemployment in Ireland's No. 4 city to 25%—and shocked local politicians have no Plan B [Read more...]

Scientists develop super spider silk

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Germany have discovered a way to make spider silk three times stronger by adding small amounts of metal.

The new technique could make the material useful for manufacturing super-tough textiles and high-tech medical materials, inlcuding artificial bones and tendons. 

The innovative method, developed by Seung-Mo Lee, utilizes a process called atomic layer deposition. The process coats spider dragline silks with zinc, titanium or aluminum, causing certain ions to penetrate the fibers and react within their protein structures. 

Kim Thompson, CEO of Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, termed the discovery "absolutely incredible." 

"Spider silk is already known as one of the strongest fibers found in nature and is recognized for its unparalleled capacity to absorb and dissipate energy in a very controlled manner. Being five times stronger than steel of the same diameter in its natural form, this enhancement reminds us again of the extraordinary potential spider silk has," said Thompson.

Photo-direct vehicle camouflage matches battlefield

While military camouflage patterns for vehicles have evolved, the application process has been stuck in the spray booth. Now, however, GI equivalents of Earl Scheib can apply a precut "wrap" of adhesive vinyl that will blend in on virtually any battlefield.

The process is similar to the advertising and decorative wraps commonly seen on cars and buses, except that this product from Military Wraps, called Photo Veil, is lightweight and incorporates images from cameras on drones, satellites, or lidar in the field and loops them back to be applied to vehicles or equipment as site-specific, high-resolution camouflage.

It combines "megapixel digital images, state-of-the-art inking systems and revolutionary lightweight and waterproof mesh material to duplicate precisely any operational environment," be it mountain, desert, jungle, forest, or urban terrain, according to Military Wraps. [Read more...]

FESTO Bionic Penguins that Swim and Fly!

VMware announces vSphere

There's a lot of speculation (not to mention misconceptions) flying around about VMware's recent move towards the "Cloud". Critics believe it to be absolute rubbish, a step back to the age of the mainframe, warning us of the dangers of centralized data storage and the security/availability issues that might bring about. "Only your own PC is safe enough for your data." Proponents counter these arguments by quoting the numerous applications that people use that basically require no more than a dumb terminal anyway. For example, our readers wouldn't technically need a monster PC to read our articles and their emails; just a thin client with web access would suffice. [Read more...]

Korean Beyonce Sexy Dance (Rihanna Let Me)

Scientists discover a nearly Earth-sized planet

In the search for Earth-like planets, astronomers zeroed in Tuesday on two places that look awfully familiar to home. One is close to the right size. The other is in the right place. European researchers said they not only found the smallest exoplanet ever, called Gliese 581 e, but realized that a neighboring planet discovered earlier, Gliese 581 d, was in the prime habitable zone for potential life.

"The Holy Grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the 'habitable zone,'" said Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist at Geneva University in Switzerland.

An American expert called the discovery of the tiny planet "extraordinary." [Read more...]

F-Secure says stop using Adobe Acrobat Reader

With all the Internet attacks that exploit Adobe Acrobat Reader people should switch to using an alternative PDF reader, a security expert said at the RSA security conference on Tuesday.

Of the targeted attacks so far this year, more than 47 percent of them exploit holes in Acrobat Reader while six vulnerabilities have been discovered that target the program, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of security firm F-Secure, said in a briefing with journalists. [Read more...]

Nvidia jumps on OpenCL for GPUs

vidia today released its first OpenCL driver and software development kit (SDK) for GeForce GPUs and Tesla HPC cards. It is a critical move for Nvidia that is yet another sign that OpenCL is emerging as the common development platform for GPGPU acceleration in software – and will show its impact in Apple’s Snow Leopard OS, scheduled for release later this year. [Read more...]

IBM cools 3D chips with integrated water channels

Why cool semiconductors with liquid on the surface when you can run water right through them? IBM believes that “tiny rivers of water” within stacked chips may not only advance Moore’s Law, but also pave the way to “green data centers”, significantly reducing the energy requirements by computers. [Read more...]

Qualcomm : SnapDragon Platform

This is the new phone using Q's new SnapDragon chip [Read more...]

Soon soldiers will have 3 tiny choppers in their pocket

The PD-100 isn't the same as your common-or-garden cheapo remote control toy copter, great as those are. As owners will know, these little machines don't offer full control of the sort a real chopper does: there's no real option to hover in one place, speed up, decelerate etc. Remote-control copters which can fly like a real full-size one are comparatively large, complex and expensive - indeed, some of them are full size. [Read more...]

ATI vs. NVIDIA on Linux - the showdown

For 2009 which video card company produces the best card for Linux users? It seems it's still nVidia with their current proprietary driver lineup. Let's take a look at the details. [Read more...]

Strokers Dallas Promo

The Pentagon's bionic arm

When Americans are wounded in Afghanistan or Iraq, no expense is spared to save their lives. But once they're home, if they have suffered an amputation of their arm, they usually end up wearing an artificial limb that hasn't changed much since World War II.

In all the wonders of modern medicine, building a robotic arm with a fully functioning hand has not been remotely possible.

But as 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley reports, that is starting to change. One remarkable leap in technology is called the DEKA arm and it's just one of the breakthroughs in a $100 million Pentagon program called "Revolutionizing Prosthetics." [Read more...]

Spies hacked into U.S. electricity grid

Spies from other countries have hacked into the United State's electricity grid, leaving traces of their activity and raising concerns over the security of the U.S. energy infrastructure to cyberattacks.

The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday published a report saying that spies sought ways to navigate and control the power grid as well the water and sewage infrastructure. It's part of a rising number of intrusions, the article said, quoting former and current national security officials. [Read more...]

New Version of Super LoiLoScope Makes HD Video Editing Quick and Easy With NVIDIA CUDA-Enabled GPUs

Super LoiLoScope Editing Software Edits, Plays and Outputs Full HD Movies at Incredible Speed on NVIDIA GeForce GPUs

FUJISAWA CITY, Japan, April 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- LoiLo Inc. (CEO: Koji Sugiyama) has released Super LoiLoScope MARS , a new version of the company's easy to use video editing software that makes editing high definition (HD) movies accessible for the average consumer. By using the parallel processing power of NVIDIA(R) GeForce CUDA-enabled GPUs, Super LoiLoScope MARS creates movie files up to 10 times faster(1) than CPU powered encoders, dramatically lowering the cost of a PC powerful enough to edit high definition content.

"Most amateur videographers will attest that playing, editing and rendering HD movies on an average personal computer was a frustrating task that took an exorbitant amount of time," said Koji Sugiyama, CEO of LoiLo Inc. "Super LoiLoScope MARS lets you edit full resolution HD movies quickly and output files for playback on various devices, and the web at incredible speed thanks to NVIDIA." [Read more...]

Acer PC joins Nvidia's 'Ion' with Intel's Atom

Acer launched a PC Tuesday that attempts to bring PC-class performance to Atom-processor-based PCs. The Acer AspireRevo, about the size of a hardcover book, combines Nvidia graphics with the Intel Atom processor. The Acer AspireRevo is the first Atom-based PC from a major PC supplier to use Nvidia's Ion chipset that packs GeForce 9400M graphics, the same graphics used in the Apple 13-inch MacBook and MacBook Air. By design, Atom is a more power frugal and, concomitantly, slower processor than Intel's mainstream Core 2 chip architecture. [Read more...]

Hydrogen-powered UAV in the works

In what it says is a "first of its kind" initiative, the U.S. Navy plans to launch sometime this spring an unmanned aerial vehicle for a 24-hour endurance flight carrying a 5-pound payload and powered entirely by a hydrogen-powered fuel cell. [Read more...]

Apple's iPhone emerges as gaming platform

Apple's iPhone has emerged as a serious videogame platform, fulfilling the long-held promise of mobile phone gaming and positioning itself as a legitimate competitor to handheld consoles. [Read more...]

IBM to enter "cloud computing" software market

IBM will sell a suite of Web-based collaboration software for businesses, including contact management, instant messaging and file sharing programs, the computing giant's biggest effort to date to sell software as a service. [Read more...]