• Germany to extend life of nuclear reactors

    Germany said on Monday that it would extend the life of the country’s 17 nuclear reactors by twelve years on average — the lives of older plants will be extended by eight years and those of newer ones by fourteen years; Chancellor Angela Merkel’s predecessor Gerhard Schroeder had decided to mothball the reactors by around 2020, but Merkel said the extension was necessary to allow more time for renewable energy to become cost effective

  • India's spending on homeland security to double by 2020

    India currently accounts for 3.4 percent of expenditures in the global homeland security market, but during the next ten years India’s share of the market will nearly double, to 6 percent, driven by rapid GDP growth, growing terrorism problems, and the need to modernize antiquated police equipment

  • Technical problems grounds homemade Danish space rocket

    The launch of the first homemade rocket into space failed Sunday owing to technical difficulties; the two Danish inventors who used private funds to develop the 9-meter, 1.6-ton prototype hope to send a person into space within three or four years, which would make Denmark only the fourth nation to do so

  • Laser-powered, ground-charged UAV stays aloft for hours

    A UAV is only as good as its power source: if the drone cannot stay over target for long periods of time and must return to base to refuel, this not only adds to the costs of operating the drone but it also degrade its intelligence gathering capabilities; Seattle-based company demonstrates that it can use a laser beam to charge the UAV’s photovoltaic cells, generating enough power to keep the drone in the air for hours; the company has bigger plans for extending flight duration of military craft — and much more: in the longer term, it envisions lasers powering remote ground-based sensors, delivering power to forward military bases, or supplying emergency power during disasters

  • ITU chief supports governments' need to access BlackBerry communications

    In an interview with AP, ITU head Hamadoun Toure said RIM should provide law enforcement access to customer data; Toure characterized the governments’ needs as “genuine” concerns that cannot be ignored

  • Small thorium reactors could lead to fossil-fuel-free world within five years

    An argument is made that nuclear reactors which use thorium as an accelerator (hence the technical name: Accelerator Driven Thorium Reactors, or ADTR) could lead to fossil-fuel-free world within five years; thorium is an abundant mineral deposit, with 3 to 5 times more thorium in the world than uranium; more importantly, virtually all of the thorium mined can be used as fuel compared to only 0.7 percent of the uranium recovered in its natural state, this means, in energy terms, that one ton of thorium mined is equivalent to 200 tons of uranium mined, which is equivalent to 3.5 million tons of mined coal; ADTRs also enjoy proliferation resistance advantages compared to other reactor systems

  • Cisco buys Arch Rock, beefing up smart-grid business

    Cisco is beefing up its smart-grid and data center businesses by acquiring San Francisco-based Arch Rock, a maker of a system for collecting information from mesh networks of IP-based wireless sensors, routers, and servers; On Wednesday, Cisco announced a deal with meter maker Itron to develop communications products that use the Internet Protocol, rather than proprietary protocols for sending information from meters back to utilities

  • Seafood stewardship questionable: experts

    The world’s most established fisheries certifier — the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) — is failing on its promises as rapidly as it gains prominence, according the world’s leading fisheries experts; “The MSC is supposed to be a solution, but a lot of what they do has turned against biology in favor of bureaucracy,” says one expert

  • Illegal immigration to the U.S. dropped sharply since 2007

    Between March 2000 and March 2005, 850,000 illegal immigrants entered the United States annually; between March 2007 and March 2009, the number dropped to 300,000 annually; the flow of Mexicans, who represent 60 percent of all illegal immigrants in the United States, plummeted to 150,000 annually during the 2007-9 period, compared with the annual average of 500,000 during the 2000-5 period; experts say that the slowing economy and bleak job market for low-skill workers, not tighter border security, have played the biggest role in the drop in illegal entrants

  • Identifying faces in a crowd in real-time

    U.K. company develops a face recognition technology that can recognize individual faces in a crowd — and do so in seconds, even when they are moving, at a wide angle, or in poor light; the system captures and analyzes images and compares them to a database, and alerts security personnel if a match is made

  • U.S. nuclear power plants bolster defenses against cyberattacks

    The threat to digital systems at the U.S. nuclear power plants is considerable — especially for new nuclear power facilities that would be built in the United States and throughout the world, as control rooms would employ digital systems to operate the plants; these state-of-the-art instruments and systems make them targets for hackers

  • Need for digital security spurs growth of cyber security field

    The growing need for digital security has made the shortage of cyber security professionals in the United States even more apparent, and the U.S. government is now engaged in a campaign to train, hire, and retain thousands of cyber professionals; the private sector is doing its share, too: Raytheon initiated the MathMovesU program in 2005, to inspire middle school students to consider math, science, and engineering education and careers; Raytheon awards more than $2 million annually in scholarships and grants to students, teachers, and schools nationwide

  • Chinese government funds research based on stolen U.S. trade secrets

    Chinese national, Kexue Huang, charged with economic espionage involving theft of trade secrets from Dow AgroSciences, a leading U.S. agricultural company; Huang published an article without Dow’s authorization through Hunan Normal University (HNU) in China, which contained Dow trade secrets; the article was based on work supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), an agency of the Chinese government

  • Carnegie Mellon launches robotics start-up

    Carnegie Robotics LLC will partner with Carnegie Mellon to manufacture robotic components and systems; startup to create products based on technology from CMU’s National Robotics Engineering Center

  • India gives BlackBerry reprieve, saying Google, Skype are next

    BlackBerry users in India have received a 60-day reprieve: RIM has offered the Indian government a solution to interception issue (the Indian government wants to have the ability to intercept BlackBerry communications), and the government says it will examine the offer during the next two months; the government also said that services offered by Google and Skype are next, but unlike BlackBerry, Skype and Google Talk are both encrypted end-to-end, so intercepting communications is extremely difficult