Eric Schmidt Defines Web 3.0

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was recently at the Seoul Digital Forum where he was asked to define Web 3.0 by an audience member.

IBM wants to improve communication between cars, roads, and drivers.

Vehicles are getting smarter all the time, thanks to a combination of sensor and wireless communications technologies. Car manufacturers say that tomorrow's drivers will be assisted by a wealth of safety information generated by vehicles that can talk to not only each other but to the roadway itself. But with so much data often comes information overload. And that's why computing giant IBM has launched a project to help the driver get the right information at the right time.

IBM calls the research initiative collaborative driving, and the company says it's designed to prevent accidents and reduce traffic congestion. The work will be spearheaded by the IBM lab in Haifa, Israel. "More than a million people die on the roads every year around the world, and people waste a lot of time and money sitting in traffic jams," says IBM researcher Oleg Goldshmidt. "You would like to help with both problems in any way possible."

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The Future of Tires

Jet engine tested at 10 times speed of sound

An experimental jet engine has been successfully tested at speeds of up to 11,000 km (6,835 miles) per hour, or 10 times the speed of sound, during trials in Australia's outback, defense scientists said on Friday.

The experimental scramjet engine is an air-breathing supersonic combustion engine being developed by Australian and U.S. defense scientists that researchers hope will lead to super-high speed flight.

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Plastic That Heals Itself

Researchers have developed a new material that can fill in its own surface cracks.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have made a polymer material that can heal itself repeatedly when it cracks. It's a significant advance toward self-healing medical implants and self-repairing materials for use in airplanes and spacecraft. It could also be used for cooling microprocessors and electronic circuits, and it could pave the way toward plastic coatings that regenerate themselves.

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Wireless energy promise powers up

A clean-cut vision of a future freed from the rat's nest of cables needed to power today's electronic gadgets has come one step closer to reality.

US researchers have successfully tested an experimental system to deliver power to devices without the need for wires.

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Text messaging could soon be the new way to call for help

Texting on your mobile could soon be the quickest way to call for police help.

The Government has given the go-ahead for a new 999 text-messaging emergency line which will work in tandem with the traditional call centre.

Soon typing in text speak "hlp 5-o sum1 hs brokN n2 my hous" - 'Help police, someone has broken into my house' - should summon an emergency response.


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Turning cars into wireless network nodes

Taking It to the Streets: UCLA Scientists Seek to Turn Cars Into a Mobile Communications Network

It's no secret Americans love their cars, and modern computer systems have enhanced vehicle performance and safety. For computer science professor Mario Gerla and researcher Giovanni Pau at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, the next step is to take that digital processing power and push it outward even further — by using cars as computer nodes in a mobile network on wheels.

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ONARCHITECTURE- Intelligent design: Will robots take over architecture?

What if a building could build, repair, dismantle, and recycle itself? What if a building were equipped with sensors to track your movement through a space and could adapt its shape, texture, light, sounds, and heat to your presence? Finally, what if you could talk to a building and it could talk back?

Those are the kinds of questions students in UVA architecture professor Jason Johnson's Robotic Ecologies seminar are encouraged to ask and explore.

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Homemade Microwave Weapons

The US military is hard at work designing, building, and using directed energy weapons (HERFs -- high energy radio frequency or microwave weapons) for use against micro-electronics and fuel vapor.

Unfortunately, directed energy weapons are much more valuable to global guerrillas than nation-state militaries due to the target imbalance between nation-states and non-state foes. The technology needed to build these weapons is generally available and inexpensive (numerous experiments, including this one, scroll to bottom, with a converted microwave oven demonstrate this).

Homemade directed energy weapons will eventually become the weapon of choice for global guerrillas intent on infrastructure destruction.

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Hi-tech tool tracks city graffiti

US cities are battling the problem of vandalism head on with a hi-tech system that analyses and tracks graffiti and its perpetrators.

In the US, cleaning up graffiti is estimated to cost about $10bn (£5bn) per year. Rather than simply obliterate the graffiti, the system keeps a permanent record of it which allows police to compile a database of similar daubings.

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TV Screen: Thin as Paper

In the race for ever-thinner displays for TVs, cell phones and other gadgets, Sony may have developed one to beat them all - a razor-thin display that bends like paper while showing full-color video. Sony Corp. released video of the new 2.5-inch display.

In it, a hand squeezes a display that is 0.3 millimeters, or 0.01 inch, thick. The display shows color images of a bicyclist stuntman and a picturesque lake. Although flat-panel TVs are getting slimmer, a display that's so thin it bends in a human hand marks a breakthrough. Sony said it has yet to decide on commercial products using the technology.

"In the future, it could get wrapped around a lamppost or a person's wrist, even worn as clothing," said Sony spokesman Chisato Kitsukawa. "Perhaps it can be put up like wallpaper."

New tech may boost indoor mobile coverage

A new technology to boost the indoor coverage of mobile-phone networks — and a possible rival to combined fixed-mobile offerings, such as BT's Fusion — is set to hit the mass market in less than a year, a manufacturer said.

Several companies are developing so-called femtocells, small indoor base stations for third-generation mobile-phone networks, allowing operators to improve indoor coverage at a substantially lower cost than the traditional way of adding more cell towers.

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Microsoft introduces their new "virtual reality"

Backlash against RFID is growing

Civil rights and privacy rights groups have opposed radio frequency identification, or RFID, for years. But now, researchers in the field and some lawmakers are beginning to voice concerns about the security of the technology.

In the past year, twenty-two states have introduced legislation regarding RFID technology, which uses tiny radio transmitter chips, or "tags," that can be inserted in a pallet full of goods, a pair of jeans, or a passport.

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New Book: Five minds for the future

We live in a time of accelerating globalisation, mounting information, growing hegemony of science and technology and clash of civilisations. Our time calls for new ways of learning and thinking in school, business and professions.

To know how psychologist Howard Gardner defines the cognitive abilities that will command a premium in future, read on. . .

Lasers for video surveillance

Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have built a new optical surveillance based on lasers. Their Laser-Based Item Monitoring System (LBIMS) is designed to protect high-value items in high security environments.

It’s also supposed to respect your privacy and be the equivalent of cameras with a 10,000-megapixel resolution. The LBIMS can be used in situations where conventional surveillance systems cannot be employed, such as areas where video surveillance has been specifically prohibited and areas where a RFID system could trigger an explosion. It should become commercially available this year.

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Face recognition next in terror fight

Homeland Security leaders are exploring futuristic and possibly privacy-invading technology aimed at finding terrorists and criminals by using digital surveillance photos that analyze facial characteristics.

The government is paying for some of the most advanced research into controversial face-recognition technology, which converts photos into numerical sequences that can be instantly compared with millions of photos in a database.

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Merging of Man and Robot

Seapower is the official magazine of the Navy League but under the direction of Richard Barnard, Peter Atkinson, and Rick Burgess in recent years it has also emerged as a great source of future tech news and information.

The May issue of Seapower is no exception. Among features on micro air vehicles and new uses for fighter targeting pods is a cover story about the merging of man and robot to fight the wars of the not-so-distant future.

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A Big Ball of Connectivity

An antenna that blows up like a balloon brings satellite communications anywhere, anytime.

No, it's not a giant beach ball. It's an ultralight, ultraportable antenna tucked inside an inflatable shell that can pull down a superfast broadband satellite connection at any location. The GATR-Com is designed for disaster-relief responders, far-flung video producers and front-line troops—anyone whose job (or life) depends on getting digital information—video, Internet, calls—in and out of remote places.

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