intellitech writes "Using state-of-the-art theoretical computations, a University of Kentucky-University of Louisville team demonstrated that an alloy formed by a 2 percent substitution of antimony (Sb) in gallium nitride (GaN) has the right electrical properties to enable solar light energy to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, a process known as photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting. When the alloy is immersed in water and exposed to sunlight, the chemical bond between the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in water is broken (abstract). Because pure hydrogen gas is not found in free abundance on Earth, it must be manufactured by unlocking it from other compounds. Thus, hydrogen is not considered an energy source, but rather an 'energy carrier.' Currently, it takes a large amount of electricity to generate hydrogen by water splitting. As a consequence, most of the hydrogen manufactured today is derived from non-renewable sources such as coal and natural gas. The team says the GaN-Sb alloy has the potential to convert solar energy into an economical, carbon-free source for hydrogen."

scottbomb writes "Well, that didn't take long: 'After only a few months at Google, Java founder James Gosling has left the search engine giant to go to a small startup company specializing in ocean-based robotics.' In a brief blog post about his new company, Gosling says, 'They have a growing fleet of autonomous vehicles that roves the ocean collecting data from a variety of onboard sensors and uploading it to the cloud. The robots have a pile of satellite uplink/GSM/WiMax communication gear and redundant GPS units. They have a bunch of deployments. For example, one is a set of robots patrolling the ocean around the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico monitoring water chemistry. These craft harvest energy from the waves for propulsion and can stay at sea for a very long time. The longest that one craft has been out is 2.5(ish) years. They can cross oceans.... Slowly. They only move at 1-2 knots, which is a great speed for data collection.'"

First time accepted submitter Dr Max writes "During Display Taiwan, Transcend and Taiwan's ITRI displayed a finger-long USB stick that reportedly offers 2 TB of storage. That's no typo. It somehow holds up to 2 terabytes worth of information. So far neither company has released anything official in regards to specs or a simple introduction, nor does the high-capacity USB 3.0 stick appear on Display Taiwan's website. But as seen in the video below, the 'Thin Card' thumb drive is even smaller than a thumb, measuring slightly thicker than a penny. It offers a minimum of 16 GB and a maximum of 2 TB."

adeelarshad82 writes "While a $99 TouchPad running webOS is a pretty good deal on its own, most of us got it hoping developers would eventually figure out how to run Android on it. And though we were warned against wandering off to the darker side, it seems the developers behind CyanogenMod wanted the device to boldly go where no TouchPad has gone before. In a video demonstration, they show off a very early version of its software running Android 2.3.5 on a TouchPad."

With his first accepted Slashdot submission, Zandamesh sends this excerpt from ZDNet: "On earth, nuclear reactors are under attack because of concerns over damage caused by natural disasters. In space, however, nuclear technology may get a new lease on life. Plans for the first nuclear power plant for the production of electricity to be used by manned or unmanned bases on the Moon, Mars and other planets have been unveiled at the 242nd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. 'The reactor itself may be about 1 ½ feet wide by 2 ½ feet high, about the size of a carry-on suitcase. There are no cooling towers. ... The team is scheduled to build a technology demonstration unit in 2012."

An anonymous reader writes "This article explores one of the stumbling blocks currently facing EV adoption: 'Sure, there are already public charging stations in service, and new ones are coming online daily. But those typically take several hours to fully replenish a battery. As a result, the ability for quick battery boosts — using a compatible direct current fast charger, the Leaf can refill to 80 percent capacity in 30 minutes — could potentially become an important point of differentiation among electric models. But the availability of fast charging points has in part been held up by the lack of an agreement among automakers on a universal method for fast charging — or even on a single electrical connector.'"

First time accepted submitter phonewebcam writes "Here's something to liven up your weekend: a video of the Raspberry Pi running Quake 3. We're still working on ironing a few kinks out (specifically, there seems to be a library issue which means our framerate, while good, isn't quite as spectacular as we know it can be; we're working on it as I post this) – but this is what test boards are for, and we're making great progress getting the boards running smoothly."

An anonymous reader writes "The developers behind the Mesa 3D graphics library, which provides the default graphics driver support for most hardware on Linux (and BSD/Solaris), has ended their support for older hardware. Being removed from Mesa (and therefore versions of Linux distributions) is support for hardware like the 3Dfx Voodoo, Intel i810, ATI Rage, and S3 Savage graphics processors. Also drivers being dropped were for Matrox and VIA graphics. Mesa developers also decided it's time to end support for the BeOS operating system. Dropping this code lowered the developers' responsibility by some 100k L.O.C., so maybe we will see GL3 support and OpenCL in Linux a bit sooner."

According to the New York Post — among many others — Amazon is expected to launch its long-anticipated color tablet in late September or October, and the device is slated to sell for 'hundreds less' than the iPad, which implies a price of $300 or less. MSNBC says much the same, but adds some (their words) "generic looking mockups" to illustrate. I expect millions of Kindle owners will happily skip the added weight and shorter battery life of a full-fledged tablet, but it's good to have options.

An anonymous reader writes "After recently running a full-page ad in the WSJ saying, 'PC gaming is not dead,' Razer has now announced a new laptop, the Blade, for the express purpose of playing video games. Its most distinctive feature is what they call the 'Switchblade' UI, which is an area next to the keyboard that has a multi-touch LCD screen and 10 dynamic keys. The screen can receive and display information from games, and the keys can show unique icons particular to the game you're playing. The requisite hardware for a gaming laptop makes it weigh almost seven pounds, but it's less than an inch thick. Another distinctive feature is the price — at $2,800, they price a lot of gamers right out of the market. As the article says, 'It's a gamble, but an exciting one.'"

RogueyWon writes "Eurogamer reports some encouraging news for console-bound fans of online shooters. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the new stand-alone version of the wildly successful Half-Life mod recently announced by Valve, will support mouse and keyboard controls on the PlayStation 3. This isn't entirely unprecedented; 2007's Unreal Tournament 3 had a similar feature, but the idea has never gained momentum. If the idea of allowing PC-style controls on a console does catch on, could this help remove some of the stigma associated with first-person shooters on consoles?" Players of the Xbox 360 version will still be required to use controllers, and they won't be able to participate in cross-platform play. Valve boss Gabe Newell has had a hard time convincing Microsoft to open up Xbox Live enough to integrate services like Steamworks.

In his first accepted submission, Anon8---) writes "As published on nature.com, a process called electrowetting, 'in which a conductive liquid droplet, placed on an electrode, is physically deformed by an applied electric charge,' could be used to provide 10 watts of juice to smartphones and other gadgets as you walk. 'The technique depends on the use of a dielectric material — which is usually an insulator but that can be polarized in an electric field — to coat the electrode. When the dielectric is charged the droplet can wet the surface more easily, and deforms. In his system, Krupenkin runs this process backwards, using the changing physical form of liquid drops between dielectric-coated plates to generate charge and therefore electrical power.' So far, Krupenkin and Ashley Taylor have been able to produce a few milliwatts of power along tiny channels a few millimeters wide. They have patented the idea and are now concentrating on scaling up the device and designing a shoe to contain it."

MrSeb writes "Smashing all known records by some margin, IBM Research Almaden, California, has developed hardware and software technologies that will allow it to strap together 200,000 hard drives to create a single storage cluster of 120 petabytes — 120 million gigabytes. The data repository, which currently has no name, is being developed for an unnamed customer, but with a capacity of 120PB, it's most likely use will be a storage device for a governmental (or Facebook) supercomputer. With IBM's GPFS (General Parallel File System), over 30,000 files can be created per second — and with massive parallelism, and no doubt thanks to the 200,000 individual drives in the array, single files can be read or written at several terabytes per second."

retroworks writes "According to a story in Digitimes, Acer chairman JT Wang is predicting the end of 'tablet fever.' 'Commenting on tablet PC's impact on the notebook industry, [Acer chairman JT Wang] pointed out that tablet PC fever is already starting to cool down and consumers are also being attracted by notebooks again with Intel's Ultrabooks and Microsoft's Windows 8 the major attractions.' Back to the old model then... PC and laptop sales, driven by Windows upgrades?"

An anonymous reader writes "I went to Best Buy the other day to get a new laptop for a client. I didn't realize till I got it home that they had broken the seal and opened the box. They put a sticker on the box that said, 'Inspected by Best Buy.' I found they had created the user profile, recovery disks, and installed a trial of Trend Antivirus. Seems to me this is more of a marketing agenda than inspection."

jfruhlinger writes "Hurricane Irene is bearing down on the heavily populated U.S. Northeast Corridor. If you work in IT, you know that there are few things that are worse for electronics than water; so, what's your plan? Tom Henderson has come up with a checklist, which sensibly includes backing everything up, twice; not that you have time for it now, but for future reference you might want to consider just moving your whole data center to a location that's been conveniently pre-hardened, like a water tower or a boiler room." Note that Irene has been no joke in the Caribbean; in Puerto Rico (with relatively modern infrastructure), about a third of the island lost power.

Joining the ranks of accepted submitters, HumanEmulator writes "The NY Times reports on how the Hollywood summer-movie business model is being applied to tech products: 'Every release needs to be a blockbuster, and the only measure of success is the opening-weekend gross. There is little to no room for the sleeper indie hit that builds good word of mouth to become a solid performer over time.' New products are being pulled from shelves only weeks after a lackluster release. What if the TouchPad, the Microsoft Kin, or even Google Wave had had more time on the market? Is this blockbuster-or-bust model a good thing for consumers, or for the industry in general?"

DeviceGuru writes to note that "Robonaut 2 (aka R2), the first humanoid robot to become a permanent resident of the International Space Station (ISS), was awakened from stasis this week after six months in orbit. R2s first words? 'Those electrons feel GOOD!' The success of R2's activation on the ISS paves the way for putting R2 through its first movements in orbit on Sept. 1, when R2 will be sent commands for moving its arms and hands. Assuming these and other tests proceed without a hitch, R2 will start assisting the ISS crew with simple tasks in 2012. Coffee? Tea? Cigarettes?"

An anonymous reader writes "An anonymous robot operator at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant has kept a blog describing in candid detail his day-to-day life at the crippled facility, including robot training exercises and actual radiation-survey and clean-up missions. The blog was recently deleted, but some copies existed around the web and IEEE Spectrum has translated and published portions of it in English. The blog shows that although the operators use remote-controlled robots, they have to work in areas of high radiation, using protective gear and shielded trucks. They also rely on a great deal of improvisation, and there have been a few incidents that put the robot missions at risk."

Joining the posted submitter club, suasfan22 writes with a bit in Wired about the use of a drone by Libyan Rebels. From the article: "The Libyan revolutionaries are more of a band of enthusiastic amateurs than experienced soldiers. But it turns out the rebels have the kind of weaponry usually possessed by advanced militaries: their very own drone. Aeryon Labs, a Canadian defense firm, revealed on Tuesday that it had quietly provided the rebel forces with a teeny, tiny surveillance drone, called the Aeryon Scout. Small enough to fit into a backpack, the three-pound, four-rotor robot gave Libyan forces eyes in the sky independent of the Predators, Fire Scout surveillance copters and manned spy planes that NATO flew overhead. Don't worry, it's not armed."