Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Plonk Reactor: Age Liquor 20 Years in 6 Days?
April 13th, 2015Via: Wired: The whiskey renaissance has the world clamoring for well-aged hooch, but the so-called brown spirits—whiskey, brandy, rum—have one widely-publicized problem. It takes time, and lots of it, to make them. Or at least to make them taste good. The booze industry has been looking for shortcuts to the aging process virtually since its […]
The Economics of Grid Defection
April 13th, 2015Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand. — I am Jack’s smirking revenge. Via: Rocky Mountain Institute: Distributed electricity generation, especially solar PV, is rapidly spreading and getting much cheaper. Distributed electricity storage is doing the same, thanks largely to mass production of batteries for electric vehicles. Solar power is already starting to […]
Google Gets Into Battery Arms Race
April 12th, 2015Via: Wall Street Journal: Google Inc. has joined the search for better batteries to power its expansion into consumer electronics and other hardware. In late 2012, a team led by former Apple Inc. battery expert Dr. Ramesh Bhardwaj began testing batteries developed by others for use in Google devices. About a year later, the group […]
Amazon Gets Green Light from U.S. Regulators for New Drone Tests
April 11th, 2015Via: Reuters: Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) has won approval from U.S. federal regulators to test a delivery drone outdoors, less than a month after the e-commerce powerhouse blasted regulators for being slow to approve commercial drone testing. The Federal Aviation Administration had earlier given the green light to an Amazon prototype drone in March, but the […]
Facebook Claims ‘A Bug’ Made it Track Nonusers
April 11th, 2015Mmm hmm. Via: The Hill: Facebook researchers have found “a bug” that caused it to track people, even if they had never visited its website, the social media giant acknowledged this week. The bug caused the company to place cookies — a common way to track people’s browsing habits on the Web — on “some” […]
Baltimore Police Used Stingray Systems to Track Cellphones in Thousands of Cases
April 9th, 2015Via: Baltimore Sun: The Baltimore Police Department has used an invasive and controversial cellphone tracking device thousands of times in recent years while following instructions from the FBI to withhold information about it from prosecutors and judges, a detective revealed in court testimony Wednesday. The testimony shows for the first time how frequently city police […]
Indian Police to Use Pepper-Spraying Drones on Unruly Protesters
April 9th, 2015Via: AFP: Police in a northern Indian city said Tuesday they have a new weapon for controlling unruly protesters in the world’s largest democracy: pepper-spraying drones. Yashasvi Yadav, police chief of Lucknow, said his officers have successfully test-flown the newly purchased drones with a view to better crowd control. “The results were brilliant. We have […]
Battery Prices Dropping Faster Than Predicted
April 9th, 2015Via: Bloomberg: The most important piece of news on the energy front isn’t the plunge in oil prices, but the progress that is being made in battery technology. A new study in Nature Climate Change, by Bjorn Nykvist and Mans Nilsson of the Stockholm Environment Institute, shows that electric vehicle batteries have been getting cheaper […]
Michigan Micro Mote: The World’s Smallest Computer
April 9th, 2015Via: University of Michigan: The Michigan Micro Mote constitutes the first complete, operational computer system measuring as small as two millimeters across. “To be “complete,” a computer system must have an input of data, the ability to process that data – meaning process and store it, make decisions about what to do next – and […]
U.S. Aerospace Command Moving Comms Gear Back to Cold War Bunker
April 8th, 2015Via: AFP: The US military command that scans North America’s skies for enemy missiles and aircraft plans to move its communications gear to a Cold War-era mountain bunker, officers said. The shift to the Cheyenne Mountain base in Colorado is designed to safeguard the command’s sensitive sensors and servers from a potential electromagnetic pulse (EMP) […]
