Technology

Dutch firm Nexus Technology enters the market for laptop accessories with a new patented liquid cooling solution. The TDD-9000 is a soft black velvet blanket with inside a gel-like liquid. The patented liquid has unique heat dissipating characteristics and works completely passive and noiseless. "When you put the laptop cooling pad on your lap you will feel your lap turn colder within 10 seconds," says Michael van der Jagt, CEO of Nexus Technology. "The Taiwanese testing institute SGS Taiwan has done independent tests that support these claims. Their tests with a laptop of their choice show…

Over at Wired, read about gadgets losing their luster: When Arthur C. Clarke went to the great geosynchronous orbit in the sky last year, he left behind a huge legacy, not least of which was a quote oft cited by Silicon Valley visionaries and wannabes. "Any sufficiently advanced technology," the sci-fi master wrote in 1962, "is indistinguishable from magic." I thought of Clarke's observation recently while I was playing with a Flip MinoHD camcorder. It's a stripped-down device with a footprint smaller than an Altoids tin, yet it holds an hour of video (in high definition!) and even has 2X…

Part 7 of my series of comments on the New Scientist magazine series “Eight things you didn’t know about the internet” goes into the “carbon footprint” of the Internet: “Is the net hurting the environment?”, by Duncan Graham-Rowe. It’s easy to think that the Internet can only be helpful to the environment. If you’re shopping online, you’re not driving to the store in your car. If you’re reading things online, you’re not printing the material, using paper and having trees cut down for it. But all those servers, routers, and communication gateways take electricity to keep them running, and that…

Is "Multiplicity" your favorite movie?   Have you ever wished you could be in two places at once or create an evil twin (and name him Skippy)?   A research project called LifeLike is trying to bring that a little closer to reality. Project LifeLike is a collaboration between the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Intelligent Systems Laboratory (ISL) at the University of Central Florida and aims to create visualizations of people, or avatars, that are as realistic as possible. While their current results are far…

For the next installment in my series of comments on the New Scientist magazine series “Eight things you didn’t know about the internet”, we have two for one. Actually, not really: I’m going to skip part 5, “Is the net caught in the credit crunch?”, because I have nothing to say about it, and move right on to part 6, “Where are the net’s dark corners?”, by Ben Crystall. Here, we get into the discussions of malware and other Internet crime. There are plenty of places online that you would do well to steer clear of. A brief visit to some unsavoury websites, for instance, could leave your…

I remember distinctly lugging a backpack of textbooks across the frozen tundra of Michigan State University in January. On many occasions, the weight of the backpack was enough to send me skidding out of control on the ice. I hated dragging those books around, but my professors all told me that I had to have a copy of the textbook in class every day (still not really sure why on that one!). Electronic textbooks have been around for a while, and while the technology has improved immensely from the days of simple pdf files to the newer, more interactive, formats, all have required a computer to…

On to part 4 in my series of comments on the New Scientist magazine series “Eight things you didn’t know about the internet”: “Is there only one internet?”, by Ben Crystall. As with all the questions so far in this series, this one brings up a series of subordinate questions, the answers to which are not simple. The most basic of these is how one defines “the Internet”, and how one decides its boundaries. Mr Crystall starts with this: Probably — for now. The internet is a disparate mix of interconnected computers, many of them on large networks run by universities, businesses and so on. What…

In today's connected world, networking know-how can be a key resource in finding jobs and business opportunities, but a series of new studies by Dr. Yuval Kalish of the Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration at Tel Aviv University suggests that, in some cases, networking can do more harm than good. "If you're at the intersection of two previously unconnected niches of a network, you're occupying what I call a 'structural hole,'" says Dr. Kalish. Filling that space can lead to prestige, opportunities and power ― or it may have quite the opposite effect. "While it's been…

According to a Time magazine article, “The Male Minority,” women make up almost 60 percent of undergraduate students nationwide.   Science, technology and math are one of the few areas where men have superior numbers but the women are winning there too. The Spelman College robotics team, SpelBots, tied for first place in the RoboCup Japan 2009 Standard Platform League Nao League humanoid soccer championship on May 10, 2009, in Osaka, Japan. Invited by the RoboCup Japan organization to participate in its first-ever humanoid robot competition, SpelBots were the first all-woman team to vie…

Stephanie wrote about Tetris teaching us about self-assembly and solubility in this article. For a less academic but no less awesome Tetris-related enjoyment, check out the video below (or click this link). It comes with the following caption: "Our friends at Engadget Polska caught this video of a giant lightshow -- a nerdworks, if you will -- put on by a group of students at Wrocław University of Technology. This is not the first time we've seen such a display,nor is it a first for this particular group, who call themselves Projekt P.I.W.O. -- but it is one of the best (and longest). The ten…