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Aerospace: September 2007

Article: 31 August 2007—Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, say they have solved the mystery of satellite-zapping ”killer electrons” that are sometimes produced in Earth’s outer atmosphere. These highly energetic electrons—strong enough to damage electronics and human tissue—pose a danger to spacecraft,…

A Powerful Idea

Geek Life: July 2007

Article: In 1975, Carolyn Meinel was editing a quirky newsletter, the L5 News , devoted to discussions about space colonization. A common topic was how to get tons of materials into space cheaply, and at the time, one of the most intriguing ideas was to launch them with railguns or coilguns. These would unleash enormous electromagnetic forces to hurl payloads into…

Core Memories

Computing: July 2007

Article: One of the great achievements of the UNIVAC 1, the world’s first commercial computer, was its mercury delay-line memory, shown here. As J. Presper Eckert, co-inventor of the UNIVAC, and four other members of the Institute of Radio Engineers wrote in 1949: ”In a delay-line memory, information is stored in the form of…

Hiring Heats Up

Consumer Electronics: July 2007

Article: By the time George Robison finally got a pink slip from a fading auto industry start-up in Detroit in June 2006, he was already working on Plans B and C in his job hunt. Although the Motor City's woes continue, Robison, who holds a master's degree in alternative fuels, found a job by November. He even got a solid raise.The …

More Missiles Than Megawatts

Energy: July 2007

Article: For a developing country, India has pursued a uniquely ambitious and far-reaching nuclear technology program. During the last six decades, it has developed expertise and facilities covering the entire nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining and milling to reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. India also operates a pilot fast breeder reactor, one of seven…

For Love of a Gun

Consumer Electronics: July 2007

Article: One day in 1977, researchers at Australian National University were putting the finishing touches on an experiment that they hoped would cap nearly a decade’s worth of groundbreaking research on electromagnetic guns. Tantalized by the prospect of unleashing the pure power of electromagnetism to accelerate projectiles at rates never before achieved,…

Let There Be (a New Kind of) Light

Energy: July 2007

Article: Recent events on the business front and advances in the lab could soon transform the way we go about lighting our homes and buildings. Significant strides in developing organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) may allow architects in the next few years to integrate this power-efficient and tractable technology into basic building materials, enabling entire…

T-Rays vs. Terrorists

Biomedical: July 2007

Article: If you’re of a certain age, you may remember those miraculous-sounding ”X-ray specs” advertised in comic books. They’d let you see through walls, boxes, and—best of all, for a teenager, anyway—clothing. They were bogus, of course. But technology is finally on the verge of giving us all those capabilities, and more,…

Plastic Solar Cells Get a Boost by Doubling Up

Energy: July 2007

Article: 16 July 2007--Scientists in Korea and California have invented a new way of boosting the efficiency of cheap plastic solar cells, making them more competitive with traditional silicon solar cells. The key is to make the solar cells in pairs.The tandem cells, as they are called, consist of two layers of different types of light-absorbing, electron-emitting…

A New Way of Looking at the Internet

Computing: July 2007

Article: As the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But when you're talking about a picture of the Internet, it's worth a whole lot more (about 100 trillion words according to Google's director of research, Peter Norvig). Creating a complete map of the Internet is a goal that has remained largely elusive because of the ever-growing, highly …

Online Forecast: Bloggy With 100% Chance for Participation

Telecom: July 2007

Article: We’ve just completed another major upgrade to IEEE Spectrum Online (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org).Why keep fixing it? Well for one thing, magazine publishing can no longer afford to be print-centric. In a multimedia world, IEEE Spectrum’s ”readers” now expect to be able to get information in a variety of formats beyond print.…

Computer Rot

Computing: July 2007

Article: The other day I glanced wistfully at the new desktop computers in the electronics store. The new computers weren’t much faster than my old one, the hard drives were only a little larger, and there wasn’t much else in the way of hardware that I might use to rationalize a purchase. Why, then, did I want one anyway?In the past, …

Google Watches Its Watts

Computing: July 2007

Article: In June, Google and Intel announced a Climate Savers Computing Initiative to raise the energy efficiency of the world's computing equipment. The goal is to reduce the amount of global carbon dioxide emissions by 22 million metric tons per year by cutting the amount of energy consumed by computing equipment. According to the initiative's extrapolations, this…

Google Earth Pictures Open Windows on China's Nuclear Weaponry

Energy: July 2007

Article: 23 July 2007--Increasingly, tools readily available on the Internet enable independent specialists or even members of the general public to do intelligence work that used to be the monopoly of agencies like the CIA, KGB, or MI6. Playing the role of an armchair James Bond, Hans K. Kristensen, a nuclear weapons specialist at the Federation of American…

Imagine There's No DRM... I Wonder if You Can

Consumer Electronics: July 2007

Article: Digital rights management, the group of technologies that control copying and use of digital media downloads and disks, has infuriated consumers since its inception in the mid-1990s. Consumer advocacy groups rallied against it, arguing that locking digital content prevented not only illegal uses but legal ones as well. But the record and movie industries…

Mark Cuban: YouTube is Doomed

Computing: July 2007

Article: Billionaire Mark Cuban is known for his sideline antics as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, but he built his empire on technology from his pioneering online broadcasting service, Broadcast.com, to his high-definition television network, HDNet. In the second part of our interview, Cuban discusses a few of his favorite high-tech topics: file…

A Telescope Takes Flight

Aerospace: July 2007

Article: A landmark moment in the exploration of the deep cosmos occurred recently. A powerful flying telescope, SOFIA--the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy--made its first checkout flights, having survived a bureaucratic near-death experience only a year ago.SOFIA is a joint project of NASA and DLR, Germany's space agency, based in Bonn and…

Putting Electricity Where The Rubber Meets the Road

Green Tech: July 2007

Article: In-wheel motors improve fuel economy and safety The electric motors in hybrid vehicles do a lot to save fuel and cut emissions, providing the push that gets a hybrid going from a dead stop and the extra getâ''up-and-go for rapid acceleration or hill climbing. They also recapture some of the energy that goes to waste every time a driver applies …

Quake-hit nuclear plant shut down indefinitely

Energy: July 2007

Article: 19 July 2007—Three days after a deadly earthquake damaged the world’s most powerful nuclear complex, the woes for operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) continue to multiply after experts determined that the Kashiwazaki Kariwa facility—about 200 kilometers north of Tokyo—may be located on a previously undetected extension of a…

Review: "Design for the Other 90%"

Geek Life: July 2007

Article: The designs now on display at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, aren't as sleek as an iPhone. They're not as glossy as a pair of Nike Shox, nor are they as sexy as a souped-up Bugatti. ”The majority of the world's designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10 percent of the…

Virtual Jamming

Computing: July 2007

Article: You live in San Francisco and play the guitar, your bassist lives in Reno, and your drummer lives in Vancouver. To rehearse or even just get together and jam from so far away you need a way to meet in the same virtual performance room. The main problem is lag, the delay between the sounding of a note at one …

Checkers, Solved!

Computing: July 2007

Article: 19 July 2007—You might have to find a new game to play on your computer or cellphone soon, because checkers will only frustrate you. Even if you play it perfectly—without any mistakes, choosing the best strategy in each situation—you’ll have absolutely no chance of winning. One of the most popular board games in history, checkers has…

Power Tool for Making Nanoscale Objects

Semiconductors: July 2007

Article: It’s a big deal in the realm of the very small.Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, have invented a microscopy technique to carve tiny gold, silver, and aluminum structures a few nanometers across. Using a special electron microscope, assistant professor of physics Marija DrndiÄ' and her graduate student Michael D. Fischbein…

UPDATE: More Problems at Quake-hit Nuclear Plant

Energy: July 2007

Article: 25 July 2007—Ten days after a deadly earthquake damaged the world’s most powerful nuclear complex, the list of incidents and shut down has risen to 63 from the 50 known last week, and the Japanese government is receiving strong criticism. The Kashiwazaki-Kariwafacility—located about 200 kilometers northwest of Tokyo—is closed…

Can Mark Cuban Take Hollywood Hi-Def?

Computing: July 2007

Article: It's just before a Mavericks basketball game at the American Airlines Center in Dallas. ”Bringing Down the House” blasts from the speakers. Fat guys in blue face paint scream. Kids wave oversized foam hands. But there's no bigger fan than the Mavs' 48-year-old owner, Mark Cuban. Dressed in a sleeveless gray T-shirt, jeans, and leather sandals,…

Hey, Soccer Moms: Drive These SUVs!

Green Tech: July 2007

Article: ”Ummmm, who’s got that restart key?”The speaker is a slightly worried Mike Wahlstrom, co–team leader for the University of Waterloo’s Challenge X team. The impetus for his question is your intrepid reporter, who has managed to stall the Canadian team’s unique, fuel-cell-powered Chevy Equinox. It won’t restart, and…

Slideshow - More Core Memories

Computing: July 2007

Article: There are coffee-table books about birds, surrealism, mountain climbing, true crime magazines, record album covers, comic books, and now there's one drawn from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Our slide show presents nine images from Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers, recently published by Chronicle Books, San…

Nine Cautionary Tales

Computing: September 2006

Article: 1. Bomb in a Box Illustration: Brian Staufffer On 20 March 2007, North Korean dictator Kim Jongâ''Il blackmails the world’s wealthiest nations, threatening to detonate a 2-kiloton atomic bomb hidden inside a shipping container somewhere in the port city of Hong Kong unless he receives US $50 billion in gold bullion within 48 hours.Kim says in a…

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IBM Informix TimeSeries: Benchmark Testing Demonstrates Unprecedented Performance and Scalability for Meter Data Management

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COMSOL: Drastically Improve Compute-Intense Applications in the SuperComputing Cloud