Chad's News

The linked article has a three-part video tour of the inside of a Lego factory. The vast majority of the manufacturing is automated.

Link: http://gizmodo.com/…
(via Slashdot)

This weapon is capable of identifying and destroying multiple ground targets. The first link is a video explaining how the weapon works, including real film footage. The second link has an embedded video showing a reconstruction of an Iraq war event where the BLU-108 played a major part. It’s just amazing how far weapons technology has come.

Link #1: http://www.youtube.com/…
(via digg)

Link #2: http://blog.wired.com/…

Back in November, Chad’s News discussed the possibility of using GPUs to perform computations. Well, now it’s been done officially. According to the linked article, a PC with four graphics cards (8 GPUs total) has the computational power of 300 dual-core CPUs. This comes with a caveat, of course, as GPUs only excel at certain types of problems. But still, I think it’s a pretty impressive accomplishment.

Link: http://www.dvhardware.net/…
(via Slashdot)

Researchers from SRI International have created a robot that can climb walls made of common building materials. From the article: “The as-yet-unnamed robot uses electro-adhesion to cling to the wall, generating electrostatic charges between the wall substrate and itself to keep from falling.” The linked article has a video of the robot in action.

Link: http://www.popularmechanics.com/…
(via Engadget)

Toshiba is creating micro nuclear reactors that are capable of powering a single building (or a city block). They’re self-contained and totally automatic, and last for about 40 years.

Link: http://www.nextenergynews.com/…
(via engadget)

The latest issue of Popular Science magazine has the best of what’s new for 2007. Here are a few items that caught my attention:

Using GPUs to solve complex problems – Some problems require massive amounts of fairly simple calculations. Turns out that the large number of processing units in a GPU, sometimes over a hundred, is the poor man’s supercomputer. Here’s a related Slashdot article.

Commercial holographic storage is a reality – Holographic storage has been in the works for some time, but it looks like it’s finally becoming a commercial reality. Pretty expensive, though. Chad’s News, of course, has been on top of this subject for years.

No-stink, one-coat paint – No smell and no primer or base coats required. And it’s not that expensive either.

A sensor in the ear detects tongue motion to control a wheelchair – This sounds much, much better than blowing in a straw, although I’m not sure that 97% accuracy is good enough.

Internet2 is a dedicated, second-generation internet that allows members (universities and some government/industry) to connect at very high transmission speeds. Currently they’ve achieved 100Gbps, with the theoretical ability to reach 1Tbps. That really puts my 1.5Mbps DSL link to shame. I’m not sure if/when Internet2 will be opened for general use, but even if it is, don’t look for it to be available to residential users any time soon, since it requires a dedicated fiber optic connection as well as specialized equipment.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

It’s not every day you see someone -asking- to be hit in the head with a shovel. The linked video is for a compound named D3O, and there’s a bit more explanation here.

I saw a similar (but more impressive) video where they drop an egg 72ft onto an inch-thick gel pad. The egg was unharmed. The gel pad is made of BetaGel, part of a line of AlphaGel shock absorption products from the Japanese company GELTEC.

Link: http://www.breitbart.tv/…
(via digg)

It’s been known for some time now that using capacitors to store electricity would do away with a couple shortcomings of rechargeable batteries—the long charge time and limited battery lifespan. The problem is that current capacitor technology isn’t able to store enough charge. This may soon be coming to an end, as a company named EEstor appears to have developed a capacitor suitable for electric cars.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Previously only in the domain of science fiction, IBM is doing some fundamental research into saving a data bit in a single atom and also into making an electronic switch out of a single molecule (thus replacing transistors). Right now it’s at the research level, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it out in the wild within the next decade or two.

Link: http://science.slashdot.org/…

For some time now I have been wondering why we can’t just directly create the stuff that we currently rely on nature to provide: oil, food, etc. These items are basically made from four very plentiful elements—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen—and I see no reason why we can’t just combine the elements in the right manner to create what we need. A company named LS9 has made a step in the right direction. They have developed bacteria that take corn-based sugars and convert them to oil. (They hope to eventually use switchgrass instead of corn.) One neat thing is that gasoline created from this oil is free of contaminants, such as sulfur, that exist in natural oil.

Link: http://www.technologyreview.com/…
(via Slashdot)

This system reads vinyl records with a laser instead of a needle. It can handle fragile and even broken records. Developed for the Library of Congress to help preserve old recordings, I can see a modified version becoming popular with audiophiles.

Link: http://www.npr.org/…
(via Slashdot)