In a new pact with NASA, Google will help to develop new search capabilities, imaging systems, and other technologies to help make space exploration more appealing to Internet users
Organic — or carbon-based — transistors are not new and can be used to design flexible computer displays, RFID tags and sensors. However, these organic single crystals could not be mass-produced because they needed to be individually handpicked. But now, researchers at Stanford University and the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed a new method for building flexible organic transistor arrays. Even if the researchers have reached a density of 13 million crystals per square inch (or 2 million per square centimetre), there are still several issues to solve before this method can be used for commercial applications of these fast transistors
Panasonic said it has developed a lithium-ion battery that won’t overheat even if a short circuit occurs. The new battery includes a heat-resistive insulator inside the battery cell, next to an existing separator that insulates the anode and cathode. If that separator is punctured a short circuit occurs that typically causes the battery to overheat and in some circumstances catch fire. Panasonic said its insulation layer ensures that the battery won’t overheat even in the event of a short circuit
The Tasmanian government hopes it can drive down the cost of broadband in the state after a strong response to calls for companies to help manage fibre optic cables
CSIRO has won another small battle in its long fight against the globe’s technology giants over wireless LAN royalty payments. The court cases brought against CSIRO over its 1996 patent have been moved from California to Texas, where the science agency recently won a case on the same issue
Microsoft has quietly released an update for Internet Explorer that fixes a problem with the browser’s phishing shield. The feature that protects against fraudulent Web sites, new in IE7, in some cases could bog down computers running Windows, according to an article on Microsoft’s support site published last week. This could happen when a Web page contains many frames or when a user browses many frames in a short time
Google has launched a service designed to help inventors search patents. The site is currently indexing the seven million patents granted by the USPTO, and will soon add other sources
Australia’s $3.5 billion free-to-air commercial television industry is being threatened by the internet more quickly than expected, with a new online study showing 53 per cent of respondents regularly download TV shows from the internet, most of them illegally
Nanotechnology, the use of subatomic materials as microscopic building blocks for thousands of consumer products, has turned into a big business so quickly that few are monitoring its effects on health and the environment. So the government of Berkeley, California, is intending for the city to be the first to step into the breach and try to regulate this industry
The New York Times unveiled a new service that allows readers to quickly post stories that they find on the newspaper’s Web site to Digg, Facebook and Newsvine. It marks the first time that the country’s third-largest newspaper has added a news-sharing tool to its Web site, allowing readers to develop conversations and post comments about specific stories. Readers will be able to add headlines and a small portion of text to the social media sites by clicking on the logos of Digg, Facebook and Newsvine
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said his company, Wikia, is ready to give away all the software, computing, storage and network access that web site builders need to create community collaboration sites. Wikia, a commercial counterpart to the non-profit Wikipedia, will go even further to provide customers — bloggers or other operators who meet its criteria for popular web sites — 100 per cent of any advertising revenue from the sites they build
At least half of Google’s Checkout service has been opened up to countries other than the United States. Now, regardless of where you live, you can purchase items with Google Checkout
Emerging internet file-sharing services have begun to derail attempts by some wireless internet providers to weed-out bandwidth hogs on their services. Managing director of Sydney-based wireless ISP BigAir Jason Ashton said there was nothing the company could do to stop the traffic and pointed to Rapid Share, a web-based file-sharing system, as an example of one of the new breed causing headaches for the company’s technical staff
Flash memory and hard-disk drives could face a challenge from a new chip technology, dubbed phase-change
memory, being developed by a group of companies led by IBM. The companies claim the technology does a better job of storing songs, pictures and other data on iPods and digital cameras than current flash memory, and could someday replace disk drives. The companies have built a prototype device that runs 500 times faster than today’s flash memory while using half as much power to write data to a memory cell
US Department of Energy (DOE) Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Alexander Karsner today announced that with DOE funding, a concentrator solar cell produced by Boeing-Spectrolab has recently achieved a world-record conversion efficiency of 40.7 percent, establishing a new milestone in sunlight-to-electricity performance. This breakthrough may lead to systems with an installation cost of only $3 per watt, producing electricity at a cost of 8-10 cents per kilowatt/hour, making solar electricity a more cost-competitive and integral part of our nation’s energy mix
After years of selling online music digitally wrapped with copy and playback restrictions designed to hinder piracy, major music labels are beginning to make some songs available in the unrestricted MP3 file format
Manchester is planning the largest Wi-Fi zone in Europe to enable more citizens and local businesses to access the Internet. The proposed wireless area would cover 400 square miles of the city, allowing its business and residents to access the Internet for free
Hackers are distributing a file that they say lets users of the corporate version of Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system get around the software’s anti-piracy mechanisms. Windows Vista must be activated
, or authorised by Microsoft, before it will work on a particular machine. To simplify the task of activating many copies of Vista, Microsoft offers corporate users special tools, among them Key Management Service (KMS), which allows a company to run a Microsoft-supplied authorisation server on its own network and activate Vista without contacting Microsoft for each copy. The software Microsoft.Windows.Vista.Local.Activation.Server-MelindaGates lets users spoof that KMS process, allowing them to activate copies of the enterprise editions of Vista, its creators say. The hacked download is available online on sites including The Pirate Bay and other file sharing sites
Apple may be cool and hip with consumers, but it’s anything but a trendsetter when it comes to good environmental policies, according to activist group Greenpeace
The CSIRO demonstrated the world’s fastest
wireless radio link by transmitting sixteen full quality DVD streams over a 250m link and only using a quarter of the available bandwidth. The CSIRO ICT Centre announced that it has achieved over six gigabits per second over a point to point wireless connection with the highest efficiency (2.4bits/s/Hz) ever achieved for such a system
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