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should you buy and give the $99 MIPS-Ingenic Ainol NOVO Basic 7 tablet to your mother, NO! Could you give it to a teenage gamer, yes, if they could live with the lack of applications. Would you give it to an employee at say a restaurant to use with a POS (point of sale) application like Viewtouch? Gene Mosher, Viewtouch’s president, said a $99 tablet will pay for itself in just over a month with less work for the wait staff. Jay Lemmons from Technology at Work said: "Don’t get buried in some manufacturers proprietary technology be that hardware, software,...

Clinical Context Few topics in the field of preventive medicine are contentious as prostate cancer screening. Widespread screening for prostate cancer has had a remarkable effect on the epidemiology of this tumor, as demonstrated in a study by Welch and Albertsen published in the October 7, 2009, issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Their study found that the introduction of routine prostate cancer screening led to approximately 1.3 million more men being diagnosed with prostate cancer in the United States alone. Men younger than 60 years accounted for most of this surge in cases. The authors estimated...

Researchers from the National University of Singapore's Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Initiative (NUSNNI) have created what they claim is the world's first energy-storage membrane. Not only is the material soft and foldable, but it doesn't incorporate liquid electrolytes that can spill out if it's damaged, it's more cost-effective than capacitors or traditional batteries, and it's reportedly capable of storing more energy. The membrane is made from a polystyrene-based polymer, which is sandwiched between two metal plates. When charged by those plates, it can store the energy at a rate of 0.2 farads per square centimeter - standard capacitors, by contrast, can...

Ruggedized fuel cell power source enables persistent surveillance on small-footprint, low-cost system 13:24 GMT, September 5, 2011 Small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) provide valuable intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities for units at the infantry company level and below, allowing over-the-next-hill imagery or short-term monitoring of convoys as an example. State-of-the-art battery power for these small UASs, however, has limited the duration of missions to about two hours. “A small unmanned aircraft system with long-endurance capability could give the military the ability to do with a small craft what has previously been doable only with larger airframes. This has potential...

Editorial: tablets aren't the 'third device' I'd hoped for... from a productivity standpoint, anyway By Darren Murph posted Aug 21st 2011 12:06PM Editorial Hang tight just a second -- let me preface all of this with a quick reminder that I'm speaking on a personal level, and I'm absolutely certain that slates have a place in this world somewhere. We could go back and forth for hours with use-case scenarios (and the same could be done with cars, time machines or your luxury good of choice), but this isn't about proving that a tablet can do one or two things;...

I don't like it. Not one iota. But frankly, it doesn't much matter -- Apple's officially done with the optical drive, and there's no evidence more strikingly clear than the mid 2011 refresh of its Mac mini. Last year, that bantam box arrived with a $699 price tag, pep in its step and a personality that could charm even the most hardened desktop owner. This year, a $599 model showed up on my doorstep promising the same, but instead it delivered a noticeable drop in actual functionality. Pundits have argued that you could tether a USB SuperDrive to the new...

If you've been thinking about buying a one piece Mini DisplayPort-to-HDMI cable to bring vids from your Macbook to an HDTV, you may want to get it now. According to a report from TechRadar, the group behind HDMI has decided they don't meet the requirements and cannot be tested or licensed for compatibility. Their sin? Not having a male HDMI plug on each end as required by the spec, which only allows for dongles featuring an all-female pairing of Mini DisplayPort and HDMI to get the job done. We've contacted the group to find out exactly what's going on, but...

Researchers at MIT reckon they've struck oil. In fact, you're looking at what they call "Cambridge crude" -- a substance that could halve the weight and cost of EV batteries and make them quicker to charge too. The black goo is packed with a high concentration of energy in the form of particles suspended in a liquid electrolyte. When separated by a filter, these particles function as mobile electrodes that can be pumped into and around a system before the energy is released. So instead of waiting up to 20 hours to juice your Nissan Leaf, you could potentially just...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Efficiency is a problem with today’s solar panels; they only collect about 20 percent of available light. Now, a University of Missouri engineer has developed a flexible solar sheet that captures more than 90 percent of available light, and he plans to make prototypes available to consumers within the next five years. Patrick Pinhero, an associate professor in the MU Chemical Engineering Department, is developing a flexible solar sheet that captures more than 90 percent of available light. Today’s solar panels only collect 20 percent of available light. Patrick Pinhero, an associate professor in the MU Chemical...

Watch out, parents -- if you live in one of a handful of states, your prodigious student-of-the-month may be bringing home something a bit heftier than a tacky bumper sticker. We're looking at the Brainchild Kineo, a 7-inch, 800MHz Android tablet, locked down for education-only use. No unauthorized web browsing, no personal email, and no Angry Birds. Running a specialized version of Eclair, the Kineo allows educators to limit student access to curriculum related apps, websites, or fetters exclusively -- negating the tablet's potential of becoming more distraction than learning tool. Paired with Brainchild's standards-based Acheiver software, the Kineo may...

Abstract The association is not clear-cut, according to an assessment of data from the Third National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey. Introduction Ultraviolet radiation has various deleterious effects but a positive influence on vitamin D metabolism. Dermatologists typically recommend that patients use sunscreen and take other precautions to prevent sunburn, nonmelanoma skin cancer, melanoma, and cutaneous photoaging. This practice is increasingly being scrutinized because much of the population is vitamin D deficient and because several healthful effects have been attributed to vitamin D, including a potential cancer-protection effect. To assess the association between baseline serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels (25[OH]D) and...

Listening to the news, it sounds like Libya is not going one way or the other and the administration has no plans on how we get out. At the same time, we are not invading any of the other countries, some of whom are more dangerous to our interest. It occurred to me that with western forces attacking a muslim country, the general poplulation in every other unstable country are going to direct their anger at us rather than their own dictator. Are our blundering moves actually directed at stabilizing these countries or is it going to be the unintended...

If you've ever wondered whether two-factor authentication systems actually boost security, things that spit out random numbers you have to enter in addition to a password, the answer is yes, yes they do. But, their effectiveness is of course dependent on the security of the systems that actually generate those funny numbers, and as of this morning those are looking a little less reliable. RSA, the security division of EMC and producer of the SecurID systems used by countless corporations (and the Department of Defense), has been hacked. Yesterday it sent out messages to its clients and posted an open...

Sprint promised us an "industry first" at its event today, and it certainly delivered: check out the Kyocera Echo, the first dual-screen Android phone. That's right, dual-screen -- that's two 3.5-inch 480 x 800 displays which can be unfolded and used as a single 4.7-inch 960 x 800 surface. The screens are connected by a slick sliding liquid-metal hinge that Kyocera's filed several patents on -- the phone can be closed and used like a regular single-screen phone, unfolded all the way, or propped up into the faux-laptop configuration shown above. Under the hood there's a 1GHz second-gen Snapdragon running...

Algae biodiesel has looked so promising (as in 100 times more fuel than corn or soy) that the U.S. Department of Energy gave $9 million to Cellana, a joint research venture between Shell Oil and HR Biopetroleum, specifically to look into the alternative energy source's prospects. It seems, however, that those prospects were no longer attractive to Shell, which has announced it will no longer pursue algae biodiesel, because it feels it doesn't have sufficient commercial viability. Partner HR Biopetroleum has stated it cannot continue the project on its own as Shell pursues other biofuel initiatives with other companies.

Turns out we were way off on this whole car of tomorrow business. According to BMW the car of tomorrow is a form-fitting suit with unflattering horizontal lines and ball-bearing shoes. Or, maybe it's a kind of bat winged jacket that attaches to a collapsible scooter... thing. That one's called Flymag, pictured above, which converts into a backpack and apparently makes you FOF when you sit on it. These concepts and more are courtesy of FDI, the International Design School in Barcelona, and are on display through the end of this month at Rambla de Catalunya. Go see them now...

Rahm Emanuel has tapped his super-agent brother Ari’s Hollywood money network big-time in his bid to become Chicago mayor, gobbling up five- and six-figure checks from the likes of Steven Spielberg, “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin, Dreamworks mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, and the Napster founder played by Justin Timberlake in “The Social Network.” But Emanuel’s stunning multi-million haul wasn’t limited to the bright lights of the sunset strip — it also included huge payouts from CEOs and hedge fund managers across from New York to Silicon Valley, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Donald Trump and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Emanuel’s shop...

Think of a traditional hybrid and you probably think of a Toyota Prius. Then, after you've woken from your nap, you probably envision some complex system of batteries and electric motors and gears to capture power when braking and spit it back out when accelerating. Chrysler is now looking to deploy a different way, a seemingly much simpler way that's all based on hydraulics. The vehicle is outfitted with a low-pressure reservoir of hydraulic fluid and a high-pressure chamber filled with nitrogen gas. When braking, pumps move the fluid into the nitrogen chamber to compress it and then, when accelerating,...

From its very first issue in 1953 to its latest incarnation, the full catalog of Playboy Magazine is coming to the iPad this March. And not only that, it'll be faithful to its original form by arriving to your Apple slate uncensored. Such is the word direct from the man responsible for that first copy, one Mr. Hugh Hefner. Anyone who's followed Apple's App Store rulings and Steve Jobs' forthright comments on the subject of keeping adult material off mobile devices will surely find this a bemusing, if not entirely inconsistent, decision. The details of how this slice of software...

It's rare that hot booze does anything more than get you drunk, and possibly make you sick, but according to Dr. Yoshihiko Takano, the drink you're sucking on could facilitate the levitation of a train. After a party for a colleague, the Japanese scientist found that FeTe0.8S0.2 (composed of iron, tellurium, and tellurium sulfide), when soaked in warm booze overnight, shows signs of increased superconductivity -- another in a long line of liquor-enhanced discoveries that could have far reaching effects on everything from consumer electronics to public transportation. Dr. Takano decided to test the material (known to become a superconductor...