Barence writes "Last year, PC Pro welcomed a DIY-style hard-disk destroyer into its Labs to wreak havoc on some unsuspecting platters. Now the technology has moved on, with the Ideal 0101 — a device that pierces disks with between 2.5 and 3 tons of force. 'It's not the quick cut-and-shut process you'd assume it is,' says PC Pro's reviewer. 'Instead, the 0101 seems to enjoy its particular method of torture.The punch emerges from the side of the bay, slowing piercing its way through metal, silicon and glass, before retreating once the disk is destroyed.'" I attached a video clip.

nanoflower followed up on a recent story about the unpredictable future of data storage. That story talked about Western Digital buying Hitachi, leaving just 4 players. Now: "Yet another hard drive company is going by the wayside, as Seagate is buying the Samsung HDD unit. Seagate is buying the unit for $1.375 billion (half in stock, half in cash)."

RedEaredSlider writes "Tokyo Electric Power Co. unveiled its plan for dealing with the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. TEPCO said the radiation levels should drop over the next three months. It will take about six months for the reactors to achieve 'cold shutdown' in which the temperature of the water inside the reactor is less than 100 degrees Celsius (212 F). The current plan for cooling the reactors will mean injecting nitrogen into the reactor pressure vessel. All four damaged reactors experienced hydrogen explosions when water, heated by nuclear fuel, turned to steam and reacted with the zirconium alloy cladding of the fuel rods. Hydrogen, when exposed to oxygen, combusts. Nitrogen is an inert gas, so TEPCO hopes that it will prevent further explosions."

jfruhlinger writes "When it comes to food scarcity in the developing world, one of the major problems is production capacity: land that could be arable using modern techniques goes underutilized because locals don't have the ability to build or buy equipment. A group calling itself Open Source Ecology is trying to solve that problem. They've developed a set of open source hardware specs for 50 different industrial machines, which they're calling the Global Village Construction Set."

Zothecula writes "In an effort to understand how animals move elegantly and in turn provide robots with the same ability, researchers at the University of Bielefeld's Center of Excellence 'Cognitive Interaction Technology' (CITEC) have developed the hexapod walking robot called HECTOR (Hexapod Cognitive autonomously Operating Robot). Designed within CITEC's multi-disciplinary Mulero project, the robot possesses the scaled up morphology of a stick insect and will be used as a test bed in various departments and projects at the University."

An anonymous reader submitted a link to a bit of a rant on GPL issues connected to D-Link and Boxee. They spend quite a bit of time explaining "Tivoization is a dangerous attempt to curtail users' freedom: the right to modify your software will become meaningless if none of your computers let you do it. GPLv3 stops tivoization by requiring the distributor to provide you with whatever information or data is necessary to install modified software on the device."

itwbennett writes "Claiming revenge for an 'illegitimate firing,' someone has posted screenshots and other data, apparently showing that he was able to break into a 200 megawatt wind turbine system owned by NextEra Energy Resources, a subsidiary of Florida Power & Light. In an e-mail interview, Bgr R said he's a former employee who discovered a vulnerability in the company's Cisco security management software that he then used to hack into the SCADA systems used to control the turbines. His motive was to embarrass the company, he said."

swandives writes "For the first time, a pair of remote controlled robots have entered a reactor building at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power hopes the iRobot Packbots will be able to provide data on the current condition inside the buildings, although the company hasn't yet released any information on what they found inside."

bizwriter writes "Most online backup is about keeping the latest and greatest version of what resides on a device, whether a PC, tablet, or smartphone. Three recent patent filings suggest that Apple has a super version of backup on its mind. Someone would be able to go into an application (like iTunes or the App Store), find what material was available at a previous time, and recover any or all of what once was there without having to use a separate recovery program."

dstates writes "As a mostly happy new iPad owner, I love having lots of apps, but I have got to ask, where is the universal set of gestures for navigation? Pinch and open mostly mean zoom out and in, but sometimes you tap to open, sometimes double tap. Sometimes right swipe is back, sometimes there is a back button, sometimes you just have to go to home and navigate back down. Reminds me of the early days of GUIs when every application had its own menu set with different top-level menus and different placement of various functions. Made life chaos for users. We have been there, done that, and gestures are much worse. At least with a menu, you had a printed tag you could read. Gestures are all magic handshakes until you know them. Seems like the tablet community should not have to learn the value of consistency all over again." What gestures would you like to see made standard in touch-based interfaces?

An anonymous reader writes "Robert Scoble has published fantastic photo tour of Facebook's new open source data center. This datacenter is the most energy efficient in the world. The Google and other datacenters are pushing back against new efficiency requirements for a while, and an open source competitor will only make things better for the rest of us."

holy_calamity writes "Technology Review takes a look at a competitor to FPGAs claimed to be significantly faster and cheaper. Startup Tabula recently picked up another $108m in funding and says their chips make it economic to ship products with reconfigurable hardware, enabling novel upgrade strategies that include hardware as well as software."

An anonymous reader tips a University of Michigan news release about the creation of what's being called an "optical battery" that could lead to the use of solar power without traditional solar cells (abstract). Quoting: "Light has electric and magnetic components. Until now, scientists thought the effects of the magnetic field were so weak that they could be ignored. What Rand and his colleagues found is that at the right intensity, when light is traveling through a material that does not conduct electricity, the light field can generate magnetic effects that are 100 million times stronger than previously expected. Under these circumstances, the magnetic effects develop strength equivalent to a strong electric effect. 'This could lead to a new kind of solar cell without semiconductors and without absorption to produce charge separation,' Rand said. 'In solar cells, the light goes into a material, gets absorbed and creates heat. Here, we expect to have a very low heat load. Instead of the light being absorbed, energy is stored in the magnetic moment. Intense magnetization can be induced by intense light and then it is ultimately capable of providing a capacitive power source.'"

coondoggie writes "The main idea behind saving energy in the high-tech world has been to buy newer, more energy efficient devices, but researchers say that may be the wrong way to look at the issue, since as much as 70% of the energy a typical laptop will consume during its life span is used in manufacturing the computer (abstract). More energy would be conserved by reducing power used in the manufacturing of computers, rather than reducing only the amount of energy required to operate them, say researchers from Arizona State University and Rochester Institute of Technology."

pcgfx805 writes "Game Informer has reportedly received word from 'multiple sources' that a new HD console from Nintendo will be debuting at this year's E3. They report on conflicting information regarding the power of the console compared to the other current-gen consoles, but go on to speculate that 'Either way it will offer competitive specifications.'" This year's E3 is scheduled for June 7-9.

Floodge writes "High School students at Explore Knowledge Academy in Las Vegas, Nevada have launched a near space photography balloon which took over 2000 pictures of Las Vegas, Henderson, Boulder City, Lake Mead, Hoover Dam, Grand Canyon, and much more! The 'space craft' was built from used and recycled components for under 60 dollars and was inspired by MIT students Project Icarus in 2009." Near-space photography via balloon isn't quite new any more, but price is a great frontier to explore. And I'm glad that there's a school called "Explore Knowledge Academy."

cylonlover writes "Google has chipped in a US$168 million investment in what will be the world's largest solar power tower plant. To be located on 3,600 acres of land in the Mojave Desert in southeastern California, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) will boast 173,000 heliostats that will concentrate the sun's rays onto a solar tower standing approximately 450 feet (137 m) tall. The plant commenced construction in October 2010 and is expected to generate 392 MW of solar energy following its projected completion in 2013."

mikejuk writes "Microsoft has given more information on the Kinect SDK to be released later in the year. It will include the body tracking software that is used by the Xbox version of the Kinect, allowing it to track up to two people at the same time and stay locked on to them even if they leave and re-enter the frame. In addition, they promise to allow the microphone array to be used with the PC's speech recognition API. So, not only will future Kinect projects be able to track you — they can listen to what you say."

Orome1 writes "Toshiba announced a family of self-encrypting hard disk drives engineered to automatically invalidate protected data when connected to an unknown host. Data invalidation attributes can be set for multiple data ranges, enabling targeted data in the drive to be rendered indecipherable by command, on power cycle, or on host authentication error."

PabloSandoval48 submitted a fairly lengthy story running on the EE Times about the A5 processor that powers the iPad 2. The story talks a bit about the A4 and A5, the IP issues surrounding the chip, and more. The real question now is what comes next.