• End-of-world anti-Hadron Collider case thrown out on appeal

    Walter L Wagner, a cantankerous botanist from Hawaii, has been waging a battle against the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for more than two years now, claiming that the continuing operation of the powerful particle accelerator risks bringing about doomsday by creating a large black hole which would swallow Earth; he sued to have the LHC operation stopped, but a court says that Wagner is basing his motion on “speculative fear of future harm,” and that such fear “does not constitute an injury in fact sufficient to confer standing”; moreover, “— the alleged injury, destruction of the earth, is in no way attributable to the U.S. government’s failure to draft an environmental impact statement”

  • Unmanned copter to deliver supplies to troops in forward positions

    The U.S. military will award Lockheed Martin a contract to build an unmanned helicopter which will deliver supplies to forward-positioned troops; in trials earlier this year, a prototype has shown that it can shift 3,000lb of cargo across 150 nautical miles in two flights within six hours — all without any input from ground operators other than specifying the destination and route

  • Unmanned helicopter enters restricted airspace after losing communication

    An MQ-8 Fire Scout lost communication with its operators and flew into restricted airspace around Washington, D.C.; typically during a lost communications event, an autonomous vehicle is preprogrammed based on its last waypoint to conduct certain activities, take a holding pattern, and wait for operators to reconnect; the Pentagon says: “We found a software anomaly that allowed aircraft not to follow its preprogrammed flight procedures”

  • New Florida museum is glass-covered hurricane-proof fortress

    The new Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg is designed to withstand category 5 hurricanes; the roof is 12-inch thick solid concrete; the walls are even thicker, at eighteen inches; the glass, which makes up big sections of the outside of the museum, can hold up to a category 3 hurricane; if that glass breaks, letting rain, wind, and debris into the facility, the art will still be safe: storm doors will shield the galleries on the third floor, and the vault, which is on the second floor (all of the art is placed on the second and third floors, above the 30-foot storm surge of a category 5 storm)

  • Elevated super bus to solve Beijing's traffic woes

    Beijing and Mexico City vie for the title of the city with the worst traffic jams in the world; Beijing is now looking at an elevated “super bus” as a possible solution; the bus travels on rails and straddles two lanes of traffic, allowing cars to drive under its passenger compartment, which holds up to 1,400 people

  • University's homeland security program comes with job guarantee

    Misericordia University is introducing a new bachelor of arts degree program in Government, Law, and National Security; the program comes with a job guarantee;: if graduates of the program do not find a job or gain admission to a graduate school within six months of finishing the program, the school will pay for internships in their field of choice

  • "Smart Potty": medical check ups, automatic seat-lowering

    Japanese “intelligent” toilets offer users an array of functions — heated seats, water jets with pressure and temperature controls, hot-air bottom dryers, perfume bursts, ambient background music, and noise-masking audio effects for the easily embarrassed; the latest model also offers instant health check-up every time a user answers the call of nature

  • China's Three Gorges Dam's showing cracks

    The Three Gorges Dam is China’s largest construction project since the Great Wall; the dam was hailed as an engineering feat that could withstand the worst flood in 100 years, but this year’s torrential rains have severely tested its capacity to control the surging Yangtze

  • Humans will be extinct in 100 years: Fenner

    Eminent Australian scientist Frank Fenner, who helped to wipe out smallpox, says humans will probably be extinct within 100 years because of overpopulation, environmental destruction, and climate change; he said he believes the situation is irreversible, and it is too late because the effects we have had on Earth since industrialization

  • Mankind must abandon earth or face extinction: Hawking

    Stephen Hawking says mankind’s only chance of long-term survival lies in colonizing space, as humans drain Earth of resources and face a terrifying array of new threats

  • Explore the geometry of cleaning up the Gulf coast

    Fueled by oxygen, naturally occurring bacteria can slowly destroy blobs and slicks of crude oil without the use of additional chemicals; Virginia Tech researchers hope to determine whether the shape of crude oil remnant — be it a flat syrupy sheet or a tar ball — can affect deterioration rates

  • New computer chip computes probabilities, not logic

    A new type of chip has been unveiled that uses probability inputs and outputs instead of the conventional 1’s and 0’s used in logic chips today; crunching probabilities is much more applicable to many computing task performed today rather than binary logic

  • Testing rayguns

    Technologies for using laser energy to destroy threats at a distance — these weapons known as directed energy weapons — have been in development for many years; before these weapons can be used in the field, the lasers must be tested and evaluated at test ranges, and the power and energy distribution of the high-energy laser beam must be accurately measured on a target board, with high spatial and temporal resolution

  • Tracking algorithms for multiple targets win Australia's prestigious Eureka Prize

    A University of Western Australia team — including two borthers who are professors at the school — have won the Eureka Prizes, Australia’s “science Oscars,” for a tracking system that has revolutionized the surveillance and monitoring of potential threats in the vast air, sea, and land space of Australia — and of other countries

  • DARPA looking for VTOL UAV to plant covert spy devices

    The Pentagon is looking for a VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) UAV/UASs - or V-Bat - which will autonomously plant such surveillance devices as remote cameras/bugs, communications relays, marker beacons, small battery powered ground-crawler, or inside-buildings flying robots