Category: Sci/Tech

Is there a carbon nanotube TV in your future? Maybe. As you may recall, a company called Applied Nanotube showed off a rather low-res (we’re talkin’ 280 x 200) proof-of-concept nanotube TV last year. Now the company has announced a letter of intent deal with a Taiwanese TV maker to create commercial sets based on Applied’s tech.

Carbon nanotube TV tech is similar in concept to CRT (cathode ray), with the carbon tubes shooting electrons at the screen, but here, the sets can be LCD-thin and the energy consumption is significantly less. Nanotube tech also does not experience the image ghosting found on larger LCD and plasma displays.

A spokesbot for the company said that trials of the sets could begin as early as later this year and that commercial production could be underway in two.

Full story on CNet.

In the latest issue on Make (Vol. 5), I did a profile of Rocketman, a mad inventor from Minnesota, who’s created all sorts of crazy flying and racing contraptions, most of which run on hydrogen peroxide rocket engines.

Now meet RocketBELT Man, an equally crazed Gyro Gearloose from Mexico. He runs something he calls Tecnología Aeroespacial Mexicana. Like Ky Michealson (Rocketman), Juan Manuel Lozano Gallegos (Rocketbelt Man) seems obsessed with slapping a hyrdogen peroxide motor on just about anything that’ll move or fly. The only thing he has that Rocketman doesn’t is an H₂O₂-powered helicopter belt (tho it hasn’t actually been built yet).

Read an article about Juan Lozano on the Popular Science website.

You may have seen this on MakeZine already, but if not (and you’re interested in learning more about electronic circuit design), check out these enlightening “Web Lectures” by CompSci prof Bob Brown. The very clearly written short articles cover simple electronic circuit design, logic gates, and digital logic basics. The coolest thing about these is Prof Brown’s use of JavaScript to create interactive figures that you can switch on/off to see how the circuit or logic gate functions. This is a very easy and visual way of understanding how logic functions in circuit designs and how Boolean logic works.

Apple’s lawyers have gotten all DMCA on the OSx86 Project, a gaggle o’ geek that’s been working on porting Mac OS X to Intel-based PCs. The project’s forums have gone dark as the hosts figure out what info runs afowl of Apple’s IP. Sounds like somebody’s legal team needs to go hunting with the VP.

BTW: On the OSx86 Project’s blog page, on Tuesday, a hacker sent a secret message from Apple he had discovered encrypted within the innards of OS X:

Your karma check for today:
There once was a user that whined
his existing OS was so blind,
he’d do better to pirate
an OS that ran great
but found his hardware declined.
Please don’t steal Mac OS!
Really, that’s way uncool.
(C) Apple Computer, Inc.

Apple, we think our karma ran over your dogma.

[Via Computer World]

Jamie, Adam, Grant, and others in the MythBusters posse are interviewed at Starwars.com. The piece is supposed to be about busting the “myths” of Star Wars (Can you drive an opentopped Podracer at 900 mph? Can you fall 50′ into a snowbank? Can you survive a freezing night inside a dead animal’s carcass?) This interview part of the piece is surprisingly lame, but the rest of it, about the MythBusters’s work at ILM and their work on the show, is worth the read.

Popular Mechanics has a piece entitled “15 Tech Concepts You’ll Need To Know In 2006.” We like these sorts of “on my radar” articles that try and keep readers informed of emerging technologies and sciences that will likely have an impact in the near future. We plan on doing more of these here at Street Tech in the year ahead. This wouldn’t be OUR fifteen to watch, but it’s still a decent list.

You likely already know about Seti@Home and Folding@Home, but did you know that you’ll soon have the opportunity to rummage through intersellar dirt at home, thanks to UC Berkeley’s Stardust@Home project?

When the Stardust spacecraft returns to Earth later this week (Sunday), its dust-bag will be filled with what it vaccumed out of the tail of comet Wild 2. While bringing this material back home is exciting enough, the spacecraft will also have a few grains of interstellar dust in its hoppers. And that’s where Stardust@Home comes in. Scientists only expect to find 45 or so grains of such dust in the craft’s collectors, creating a needle in a haystack scenario. So they decided to use the distributed eyeballs of the Internet to help speed the search. They’ve created a Virtual Microscope which will allow volunteer researchers to digitally scan the aerogel tiles where the submicroscopic grains have been trapped. Scientists hope that by finding and studying this interstellar dust, they can learn more about the internal processes of the supernova, flaring red giants, and neutron stars that would likely produce such dust.

Thanks, Alberto!

Jamie and Adam of Mystbusters are interviewed by Slashdots readers here. And NO, there are no Kari Byron questions.

Information Week has a preview/review of the forthcoming Internet Explorer 7. It offers tabs (gee, what an innovation), an RSS feature like Firefox’s Live Bookmarks, and a new “security feature” that’s rather troubling. The new browser contains a “Phishing Filter” which scans site content and determines whether it’s “suspicious” or not. It looks for clues that you could have landed on a phishing (scam) site and alerts you to the danger. Trouble is, in the IW tests, it branded sites as “suspicious” that were completely legit — like one of the reviewer’s own websites! To get your website off of Redmond’s blacklist, you have to fill out a form of information and send it to them, for EVERY suspicious page on the site. Microsoft assures us that this’ll all be just peachy and keen before the new browser ships.

Oh, and they’ve nixed the traditional File, Edit, View, etc. menu bar (as the default, anyway — you can turn it back on, if you can find the preference for it).

There just aren’t enough clue-by-fours in the world to whack a lick of sense into these people.

AutoPilot (in beta) is an awesome-looking program for Windows which automatically transfers, converts, and stores TV shows on your PC (from your TiVo). To use it, you need a Series 2 TiVo and TiVoToGo running over a home network. The conversion feature offers a number of popular formats, including support for video iPod, Palm, and PSP. The program is being developed so that third party plug-ins can be used to offer additional functionality.

[Via Lifehacker]