An anonymous reader writes "Thorium, an abundant and radioactive rare earth mineral, could be used in conjunction with a laser and mini turbines to easily produce enough electricity to power a vehicle. When thorium is heated, it generates further heat surges, allowing it to be coupled with mini turbines to produce steam that can then be used to generate electricity. Combining a laser, radioactive material, and mini-turbines might sound like a complicated alternative solution to filling your gas tank, but there's one feature that sells it as a great alternative solution: 1 gram of thorium produces the equivalent energy of 7,500 gallons of gasoline."

wiredmikey writes "A recent survey which included responses from 800 engineers and developers that work on embedded devices revealed that 24% of respondents knew of security problems in their company's products that had not been disclosed to the public before the devices were shipped. But just what that means in terms of attitudes towards security may be more complex than it seems. Additionally, just 41% said their company has 'allocated sufficient time and money to secure' its device products against hacks and attacks. Despite this, 64 percent felt that when engineers call attention to potential security problems, 'those problems are addressed before the device is released.' So, what exactly does this illustrate about the state of security in the development process? The answer, some say, is a jumbled collage of business pressures, bug prioritization and varying attention to security."

baxpace writes with a link describing a way to test your own security systems for vulnerabilities using Kinect-interpreted natural gestures in tandem with the Metasploit Framework and the Blender game engine, writing: "The idea is to hack into your own systems while in a 3D, first person shooter style environment that interfaces with the Kinect sensor. The game engine was built using Blender and looks to be one of the most pleasing ways of uncovering your own systems' architectural/networking vulnerabilities."

mikejuk writes "While Google makes headlines with its driverless car and even manages to lobby Nevada to legalize driverless cars on the public road — China quietly pushes ahead on its own. A driverless car navigated 286km of expressway all on its own. Using nothing but a pair of video cameras and laser rangefinders, i.e. no GPS, it managed to arrive safely even through fog. The computer vision based approach means that at the moment it can only drive during daylight hours. Google might need to speed up ..."

crookedvulture writes "SATA-IO has devised a couple of new storage interfaces optimized for solid-state drives. To serve high-performance SSDs that are fast approaching the 6Gbps ceiling imposed by the current Serial ATA specification, the SATA Express standard will meld the Serial ATA software stack with PCI Express to offer up to 16Gbps of bandwidth. SATA Express isn't expected to be completed until the end of the year, but the new uSSD standard looks to be ready for prime time. Designed for tablets and ultraportables, uSSD sticks with current 6Gbps speeds but ditches traditional Serial ATA connectors, allowing SSD controller chips to be soldered directly to motherboards. SanDisk already has a 128GB uSSD primed for ultrabooks."

An anonymous reader writes "After quadrupling the number of government datacenters over his first three years, Obama's Administration is reversing course and closing the most recently opened datacenters. With one datacenter reportedly the size of three football fields, my question is what happens to all those recently purchased servers? Will the government hold a server fire sale? Count me in!"

fangmcgee writes "By now, with films like Iron Man, its sequel, and Avatar, Hollywood has made us thoroughly familiar with the idea of the robotic exoskeleton. Less well known, however, is that researchers are actually building robotic exoskeletons like the ones envisioned by Hollywood and the comic book visionaries from whom Hollywood pilfers its most lucrative ideas. Among the developers of real-life Iron Man suits (of which there are many, the world over) is a group called Raytheon Sarcos. And as IEEE Spectrum reports in this month's issue, its impressive second-generation exoskeleton robotics suit, dubbed the XOS 2, is nearing production."

An anonymous reader writes "At SIGGRAPH 2011, a team of researchers from MIT presented a clever method for measuring microscopic surface structure using a rubber sensor, a camera, and a set of lights. This technology could have applications to industrial inspection, dermatology, and even forensic ballistics."

MrSeb writes "Do you have a few old, dusty beige-box computers kicking around that you'd like to turn into money? Or perhaps you'd just like to get rid of them, but you lack the means to dispose of them properly? Well, if you're in the US you're in luck: Apple will now provide postage-paid packaging to allow you to recycle your old laptop or desktop PC and its monitor for free, and if it's worth anything, you'll even get an Apple Gift Card in return. In addition, your old iPhone or iPad can now be returned for an Apple Gift Card, too."

mahiskali writes "New documents pertaining to the ever-hyped and much-delayed Motorola Droid Bionic have surfaced on the FCC website. Perusing through the documents, I noticed a very interesting feature: an inductive charging coil (click 'Internal Photos'), built into the battery door housing. It seems Motorola may have some tricks up its sleeve yet--but will it be enough to beat out the competition (read: Samsung Galaxy S2, iPhone 5)?"

Blacklaw writes "The group behind the USB 3.0 specification has announced a tweak which could lead to impressive new devices, including large-format displays, printers, and even laptops that are powered entirely from a USB port."

An anonymous reader writes "Those giant touch screens used by CNN anchors look slick, but have to be several feet thick to make room for the cameras that track the touches. Perceptive Pixel, which makes the screens, has now figured out a way to use capacitive touch (like on an iPhone or tablet screen) at a larger scale, and says giant touch panels with 82-inch screens but just six inches deep will appeal to many businesses."

Fnord666 writes with a CMU press release. From the article: "Traditional motion capture techniques use cameras to meticulously record the movements of actors inside studios, enabling those movements to be translated into digital models. But by turning the cameras around — mounting almost two dozen, outward-facing cameras on the actors themselves — scientists at Disney Research Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University have shown that motion capture can occur almost anywhere — in natural environments, over large areas, and outdoors."

Stoobalou writes with an interview in Thinq with a few folks from ARM on their plans for the future of embedded graphics. From the article: "'If you're looking at the visual experience that we can deliver on a mobile, in terms of the capabilities of the devices that are on the market today, increasingly it is visually outstanding — but we need to do more maths, because we have an increasing screen resolution and we have increasing content complexity, and we have to do it all in pretty low power. So, if we look at where we were a few years ago, if you take the benchmarks of a VGA display and typical low-res content — all of a sudden, by the time you get to a 4K screen and some of the complexity of tesselated stuff you see in DX11 today, you're talking about a 500x increase in performance.' ... 'We're still maintaining that 1W power envelope within your mobile device, yet being expected to deliver 500 times the performance,' Hickman added. That's a major undertaking, but one which the next generation of Mali processors will work towards.' All of the graphics development in the embedded world is nice, but it is disheartening to see the lack of source code for all of the new mobile GPUs.

An anonymous reader writes "Last week, as the result of a straw poll on Facebook, Village Instruments agreed to begin development of an external Thunderbolt-connected graphics card enclosure. Village Instruments already has experience with its ExpressCard-connected ViDock graphics card chassis, which provides extra GPU juice for Windows and Mac laptops, and the Thunderbolt version is expected to be the same kind of thing — but faster. The only problem is, Thunderbolt is only 4x PCIe 2.0, so you won't be using this to connect modern, desktop-class GPUs to your laptop — and more importantly you need to carry around a second monitor to actually use a ViDock. So why not just buy a proper gaming laptop?"

An anonymous reader writes "IBM has terminated its contract with NCSA for the petascale Blue Waters system that was expected to go online in the next year. The reason stated was that NCSA found IBM's technology 'was more complex and required significantly increased financial and technical support by IBM beyond its original expectations.' The IT community is now wondering if NCSA will be renting out space in the new data center that is being built to house Blue Waters or if they will go with another vendor."

CWmike writes "Start-up Millenniata and LG plan to soon release a new optical disc and read/write player that will store movies, photos or any other data forever. The data can be accessed using any current DVD or Blu-ray player. The M-Disc can be dipped in liquid nitrogen and then boiling water without harming it. It also has a Defense Department study (PDF) backing up the resiliency of its product compared with other leading optical disc competitors. The company would not disclose what material is used to produce the optical discs, referring to it only as a 'natural' substance that is 'stone-like.' Like DVDs and Blu-ray discs, the M-Disc platters are made up of multiple layers of material. But there is no reflective, or die, layer. Instead, during the recording process a laser 'etches' pits onto the substrate material."

siliconbits writes "AMD has quietly released a new range of memory products and recycled the Radeon brand, which moves from graphics processing units to memory modules. According to the product page, AMD Radeon for systems are 'ideally' suited for the company's APU and CPU solutions and have been 'tested to the highest industry standards on AMD platforms.' Three different categories are currently on offer, roughly matching AMD's APU/CPU product categories; Entertainment, Ultra Pro and Enterprise. Oddly enough, the company is offering only 2GB modules with data rates at 1333.33MT/s and 1600MT/s, with 9-9-9 and 11-11-11 timings for the first two product ranges respectively."

MojoKid writes "Earlier this year, Intel unveiled its plan to redefine the concept of a PC around an ultra thin-and-light chassis reminiscent of the Macbook Air and with a standard CPU TDP of just 15W. Intel has unveiled the reference specs for ultra-notebook products they're calling 'Ultrabooks.' The cheaper ultra-notebook model will be 21mm thick with a BOM (bill of materials) between $475-650. A second, thinner model (18mm thick) will have a BOM between $493-710. Unlike netbooks, Ultrabooks will target the full range of consumer notebooks with screen sizes ranging from 11-17 inches. Reports are surfacing that the new systems will eschew the use of module-based components in favor of directly soldering certain components to the motherboard. Other findings indicated that Intel and its partners have researched alternatives to an aluminum-based chassis with materials like fiberglass expected to dominate the segment."

Hugh Pickens writes "Three large explosions from the sun over the past few days have prompted U.S. government scientists to caution users of satellite, telecommunications and electric equipment to prepare for possible disruptions over the next few days that could affect communications and GPS satellites, leave thousands without power for weeks to months, and might even produce an aurora visible as far south as Minnesota and Wisconsin. 'The concern is if the electric grid lost a number of transformers during a single storm, replacing them would be difficult and time-consuming,' says Rich Lordan, senior technical executive for power delivery and utilization at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). The largest solar storm in recorded history was in 1859, when communications infrastructure was limited to telegraphs. Some telegraph operators reported electric shocks, papers caught fire, and the Northern Lights appeared as far south as Cuba and Hawaii. The first of the three solar explosions from the sun already passed the Earth on Thursday with little impact and the second is passing the Earth now and 'seems to be stronger.' "We'll have to see what happens over the next few days," says space weather scientist Joseph Kunches. '[The third storm] could exacerbate the disturbance in the Earth's magnetic field caused by the second (storm) or do nothing at all.'"