RayTomes writes "The Obama administration has provided a loan guarantee of $737 million to construct the first large-scale solar power plant that stores energy and provides electricity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week." This solar power project, a heliostat rather than a photovoltaic system, with a molten salt system to store power as heat for times when the sun isn't shining, will be constructed in Nevada and, says the article, is expected to create "600 construction jobs and 45 permanent positions."

primesuspect writes "Today AMD released two new workstation GPUs: The FirePro V5900 and V7900, aimed at the mid- and high-end workstation card market."

Barence writes "A survey of PC Pro readers suggests PC makers are out of touch when it comes to glossy vs matte screens. Almost three quarters of those surveyed said they preferred matte screens despite laptop makers moving almost exclusively to glossy screens. ... Why is the industry hell-bent on not giving customers what they want?"

An anonymous reader writes "Matlab now comes with GPU native support in the 2010b version. This means loads of Matlab commands can be parallelized onto the GPU without having to re-code things in C++ or Fortran using CUDA. Pretty sweet for the HPC community."

dosh8er writes "This is pretty cool. Other than the reels, lamp, and lens, Friedemann Wachsmuth built this fascinating (and useful) Super-8 video projector from what appears to be common Lego Technic parts."

mdsolar writes "Energy minister Doris Leuthard is set to propose Switzerland gradually exits nuclear power, two Swiss newspapers reported on Sunday, citing sources close to the government. The multi-party Swiss government was expected to make an announcement on nuclear policy on Wednesday and may recommend an exit. Switzerland's five nuclear reactors generate about 40 percent of the country's electricity."

Gibbs-Duhem writes "The LeafLabs Maple, an ARM device designed to be pin compatible with the Arduino, and with a strikingly similar and familiar development environment, has reached a new milestone — being carried by SparkFun. By swapping the popular 'avr-gcc' compiler with CodeSourcery's 'arm-non-eabi-gcc,' LeafLabs manages to provide a nearly identical programming experience to Arduino despite targeting a completely different architecture. Also, while some Arduino shields are incompatible due to certain capabilities being allocated to different pins, several of them are currently supported and there are more to come."

cylonlover writes "In a move that gives cautious hope to the millions of people suffering some form of paralysis, a team of researchers from UCLA, Caltech and the University of Louisville has given a man rendered paralyzed from the chest down after a hit-and-run accident in 2006 the ability to stand and take his first tentative steps in four years. The team used a stimulating electrode array implanted into the man's body to provide continual direct electrical stimulation to the lower part of the spinal cord that controls movement of the hips, knees, ankles and toes, to mimic the signals the brain usually sends to initiate movement (abstract)."

An anonymous reader writes "After more than a year of development we are pleased to announce stable version 3.0.1 [download via torrent] of the popular media center platform XBMC for the 1st generation XBOX — now called XBMC4XBOX. A huge amount of work has been put into this, and it features numerous additions and improvements over the last release. For those that want a cheap functional media center with some old hardware they might have lying around, this is a superb option."

MojoKid writes "NVIDIA recently decided to give the public a look at their massive investment in hardware emulation technologies. Hardware emulators are specialized systems that can be programmed to emulate any specific architecture. In NVIDIA's case, a standard x86 system is connected to a powerful hardware emulator that's been pre-programmed to emulate a GeForce GPU that's still under design. The testbed generates the code in question and sends it over to the emulator, which then executes and returns the output. The emulators are massive machines that can be connected together and scaled for capacity and performance. NVIDIA's Indus emulator can emulate up to two billion gates and in their entire facility, the company can emulate up to 4 billion total."

An anonymous reader writes "Intel, speaking out of turn and damaging its intimate relationship with Microsoft, has revealed that legacy x86-compiled software will not work on the ARM version of Windows 8. Microsoft has promised that the Office suite will be available on Windows 8 ARM, but beyond that, nothing. While this means there won't be many compatible apps at launch, it also means this will be the first full-bodied version of Windows that won't (initially) be susceptible to viruses and malware..."

Wyvere writes "The folks over at Mac Mini Vault jailbroke an Apple TV, stuck lighttpd on it, and connected it up to the internet in the name of fun hacking. 'This project was a fun way to see how far we could take the A4 powered Apple TV. The Apple TV is running iOS 4.2.2 (obviously jailbroken) with lighttpd for a web server.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Are DOS game emulators like the highly-respectable DOSBox good enough now, or is there still no substitute for the real thing? Like a lot of Slashdotters I'm getting older and simplifying, which means tossing out old junk. Which means The Closet full of DOS era crap. And I'm hesitating — should I put aside things like the ISA SoundBlaster with gameport? Am I trashing things that some fellow geek somewhere truly needs to preserve the old games? Or can I now truck all this stuff down to recycling without a twinge of guilt? (Younger folk who didn't play DOOM at 320x200 should really resist commenting this time. Let the Mods keep them off our lawn.)"

An anonymous reader writes with word that Apple, as reported by Reuters, has proposed a smaller SIM card standard. Says the Orange executive quoted, "We were quite happy to see last week that Apple has submitted a new requirement to (European telecoms standards body) ETSI for a smaller SIM form factor -- smaller than the one that goes in iPhone 4 and iPad." Hard to believe that any phone designed for the human hand could be much limited by the size of the current micro-SIMs, but this is one race to the bottom I'm pleased with.

CWmike writes "After years of dominance in computer chips, Intel now is chasing the mobile chip market and trying to redefine its future. During Intel's financial analyst meeting Monday, CEO Paul Otellini announced that he is refocusing the company, moving its 'center' from PC processors to processors for the burgeoning mobile market. 'I think Intel recognizes that they absolutely have to get a win here,' said analyst Rob Enderle. 'All the activity is in mobile. A post-PC era would be a post-Intel era if they don't get a beachhead established.' Earlier this month, Intel made a move in this new direction when it unveiled its new 3D transistor technology that is expected to position the chip maker to grab a piece of the mushrooming tablet market."

digitaldc writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "Last year, Patrick, a 24-year-old Austrian, decided to have his dysfunctional hand amputated and replaced with a bionic hand. He lost the use of his left hand after being electrocuted at work. Here he demonstrates the extra movement his new bionic hand has given him, opening a bottle and tying his shoelaces, and tests a prototype hand which will give him additional wrist movement."

An anonymous reader writes "One group of Australian researchers have managed to teach robots to do something that, until now, was the reserve of humans and a few other animals: they've taught them how to invent and use spoken language. The robots, called LingoDroids, are introduced to each other. In order to share information, they need to communicate. Since they don't share a common language, they do the next best thing: they make one up. The LingoDroids invent words to describe areas on their maps, speak the word aloud to the other robot, and then find a way to connect the word and the place, the same way a human would point to themselves and speak their name to someone who doesn't speak their language."

fangmcgee writes "Printers which can produce three-dimensional objects have been available for years. However, at the Vienna University of Technology, a printing device has now been developed which is much smaller, lighter and cheaper than ordinary 3D-printers. With this kind of printer, everyone could produce small, tailor-made 3D-objects at home, using building plans from the internet — and this could save money for expensive custom-built spare parts."

necro81 writes "Researchers at the University of Missouri and the Idaho National Laboratory have demonstrated a new method of capturing solar power. Rather than using semiconductors to capture photons of sunlight, they fabricated small coiled antennae (several um square) that resonate with the wave nature of light. The antennae are tuned towards midrange infrared light (5-10 um), which is abundant on our cozy-warm Earth — even at night. They also demonstrated a way to imprint these coils on a substrate, like how CDs or vinyl records are produced, but could be scaled to roll-to-roll mass production. The usual caveat applies: it may be 5-10 years until this could hit the market."

joshuarrrr writes "Researchers in Switzerland have tested small turbines designed to fit inside a human artery, like an implantable hydroelectric generator. The turbines can draw about a milliwatt of power, which would be enough to run a pacemaker. The problem is that the turbines tended to create turbulence, which can cause blood to coagulate into clots. Competing systems avoid the turbulence but have trouble generating enough power."