The earth is at risk from the universe suddenly turning inside-out
, causing human life to be extinguished at the speed of light. Dr Benjamin Allanach, from the particle physics laboratory at CERN in Geneva, warned of the prospect of a black wave sweeping over the world
Wind-up mobile phones could soon be the answer to fading batteries after scientists announced they had invented a clockwork charger
A Queensland university has developed a computer hard drive that holds 1000 times more data than current hard drives
Charles Connell, president of CHC-3 Consulting, who also teaches computer science at Boston University, says most software design is lousy
. In fact, he says most is so bad that if it were a bridge, no one would walk over it. The only reason software engineers get away with it is the general public can’t see inside software systems to observe the poor design, the bottlenecks and bugs, the impenetrable code
NEC and two Japanese government-affiliated research institutes have developed a fuel cell for use in mobile devices that could allow notebook computer battery life times of several days to become commonplace within the next few years
The advent of environmentally friendly explosives has moved a step closer, with German scientists solving the problem of water absorption in one promising compound — the moisture literally turns the compound into a damp squib
Future spacecraft could be shot into orbit from a giant flying air gun, according to a US Air Force plan. The radical launch system would be fitted to standard cargo planes in hours and could slash the cost of getting satellites into space
A material that might pass as Play-Doh for Magneto, the mutant master of magnetism in the Marvel Comics universe, may be critical to the success of future space missions in ways both mundane and exotic
The web’s once common page not found errors are themselves going missing, stripped from recent versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in favour of a search tool provided by — you guessed it — Microsoft. The software behemoth quietly introduced the change two weeks ago, updating Internet Explorer’s autosearch function to launch whenever someone types a misspelled or non-existent domain name into the browser’s address bar
The reclusive programmer Robert Elz has lost control of Australia’s domain name system to a private sector body after the Federal Government rejected his request for the Government to take over the custodianship instead
Renowned British scientist Stephen Hawking has claimed that humans should be genetically engineered if they are to compete with the phenomenal growth of artificial intelligence
Results from Britain’s first clinical trial of cannabis as a medicine show big benefits to those suffering chronic pain
Telstra has backtracked on its intentions to introduce three-gigabyte capping
and additional usage
options for broadband Internet users, but refuses to say whether it’s canned the idea completely
A man was sentenced to listen to four hours of polka king Frankie Yankovic’s greatest hits for driving through the city with his windows rolled down and his truck’s stereo blaring
What you’d really like is a solar panel array that would come on a flexible plastic substrate which would be extremely inexpensive and which you could roll out on your roof like wall paper. It would be efficient enough at energy conversion to economically generate power
An electronic circuit, grown from silicon and nerve cells, brings brain-repair chips, advanced biosensors and biological computers a small step towards reality
The IDEO Dilbert cubicle. A comic design breakthrough that simply had to happen. Or something
When it comes to technological arrogance, nature has a nasty sense of humour
Thousands of scientists around the world will soon be boycotting academic journals that refuse to make their contents freely available on the web soon after publication. The boycott could mean scientists refusing to submit papers to journals and refusing to review the work of their peers for any journal that does not deposit research papers into an online public library of science
The European Space Agency is studying science fiction for ideas and technologies that could be used in future missions. A panel of readers is currently combing sci-fi novels and short stories published in the early decades of the last century to see if technology has caught up with ideas that were futuristic when first put into print
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