Every time you use an internet search engine, your inquiry is stored in a huge database. Would you like such personal information to become public knowledge? Yet for thousands of AOL customers, that nightmare has just become a reality. Andrew Brown reports on an incident that has exposed how much we divulge to Google & co.
A car built by JCB has broken the diesel engine land speed record after reaching 328.767mph (529km/h). A JCB Dieselmax spokesman said the vehicle attained the average speed during two runs in Utah, USA. Confirmation was given on Tuesday by the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile. An attempt to better the record will be made on Wednesday.
Arrays of thousands of tiny "super prisms" controlled by robotic muscles could bring real colour to TV screens for the first time, scientists say. The devices, known as electrically tunable diffraction gratings, have been built by researchers in Switzerland. They manipulate light to reproduce the full spectrum of colours on screen, impossible using existing technology.
Gamers are getting the chance to take over and run a portion of an online role-playing world. French game maker Nevrax is releasing tools that let players craft and run their own sophisticated scenarios set in the Ryzom game world. The scenario creation kit can be used to create quests for other players to complete and, once written, edited and uploaded, will become part of the larger game that anyone can play.
An unpopular pigment used by artists in the 18th Century could lead to more energy efficient, faster computers. Cobalt green, as the dye is known, has been tested by a US team who believe it could be used in "spintronic" devices. Spintronics involves manipulating the magnetic properties of electrons to do useful computational work.
Google has started warning users if they are about to visit a webpage that could harm their computer. The warning will pop up if users click on a link to a page known to host spyware or other malicious programs. The initiative comes out of a larger project cataloguing programs that plague people with unwanted ads, spy on web habits or steal personal data.
The vision of a digital home in which music and video is streamed between devices is still 10 years away, says a leading music technology businessman. John MacFarlane, chief executive of Sonos, said neither consumers nor the technology itself were ready. Sonos makes wireless (wi-fi) music streaming systems, aimed at customers who want to listen to their digital music around the house.
A wi-fi music device developed for audiophiles will offer better audio output than CD players, says its maker. Transporter is being billed as the world's first network music player for lovers of pure sound. The $1,999 (£1,079) player is aimed at people who encode music using so-called lossless formats, such as Flac or Wav.
A chip the size of a grain of rice that can store 100 pages of text and swaps data via wireless has been developed by Hewlett-Packard. The tiny chip was small enough to embed in almost any object, said HP. The chip could be used to ensure drugs have not been counterfeited, on patient wristbands in hospitals or to add sounds or video to postcards, said HP.
Brain-implant enables mind over matter
(Jul 13, 2006)
A man paralysed from the neck down by knife injuries sustained five years ago can now check his email, control a robot arm and even play computer games using the power of thought alone. Matt Nagle's extraordinary abilities were first reported in March 2005. Now details of the technology that lets him perform these tasks are published in the journal Nature.
A microchip which can store information like a hard drive has been unveiled by US company Freescale. The chip, called magnetoresistive random-access memory (Mram), maintains data by relying on magnetic properties rather than an electrical charge. One analyst told the Associated Press news agency that the chip was the most significant development in computer memory for a decade.
Quantum computers could be more easily mass produced thanks to the development of a two-dimensional ion trap - one of their key components. A quantum computer could be much faster than a conventional computer. While electronic bits can exist in one of two states – "0" or "1" – a quantum bit, or qubit, can be in both states simultaneously. Connecting lots of qubits together would allow many more calculations to be carried out simultaneously.
IBM's BlueGene/L computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, has once again been crowned world champion by the TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers used for scientific applications. This giant among giants has 131,072 processors and a computing speed of 280.6 terraflops per second (1 teraflop equals 1 trillion calculations or 'floating point operations').
