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A unique system that can produce Hydrogen inside a car using common metals such as Magnesium and Aluminum was developed by an Israeli company. The system solves all of the obstacles associated with the manufacturing, transporting and storing of hydrogen to be used in cars. When it becomes commercial in a few years time, the system will be incorporated into cars that will cost about the same as existing conventional cars to run, and will be completely emission free. As President Bush urges Americans to cut back on the use of oil in wake of the recent surge in prices,...

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio (AFPN) -- Engineers here are testing a new kind of transparent armor -- stronger and lighter than traditional materials -- that could stop armor-piercing weapons from penetrating vehicle windows. The Air Force Research Laboratory's materials and manufacturing directorate is testing aluminum oxynitride -- ALONtm -- as a replacement for the traditional multi-layered glass transparencies now used in existing ground and air armored vehicles. The test are being done in conjunction with the Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Md., and University of Dayton Research Institute, Ohio. ALONtm is a ceramic compound with a high...

Babelfish translation from German: Domestic researchers developed a plasma propulsion, which is to revolutionize space travel. The idea is 20 years old and comes from Manfred Hettmer, president Austrian Mars Society: With the help of one on "Alfven waves" of based plasma propulsion the thrust of a rocket can be drastically reduced increased, at the same time the fuel consumption, so the idea. And actually, according to tests the plasma propulsion leads to a fuel saving of approximately 90 per cent - and that is not little thing: "with satellites the fuel up to 50 per cent of the weight...

Fleas use it to perform leaps that would make Olympic high jumpers green with envy. Bees use it to flap their wings without tiring. Now Australian scientists have achieved a world first by copying resilin, the "rubber" insects employ to accomplish such athletic feats. Future versions of the material could be used to make resilient spare parts, including spinal discs and artificial arteries. Chris Elvin, from CSIRO Livestock Industries in Brisbane, spent four years reproducing nature's "near perfect rubber". Dr Elvin said yesterday: "Nature had a couple of hundred million years of evolution do it. All insects have it. It...

San Diego, CA and Tokyo, Japan, September 26, 2005 -- In a demonstration that could foretell the future of videoconferencing, scientific visualization and digital cinema deployment, scientists from around the world meeting at iGrid 2005 in San Diego were treated to the world's first real-time, international transmission of super high-definition (SHD) 4K digital video. 4K images have roughly 4,000 horizontal pixels - offering approximately four times the resolution of the most widely-used HD television format, and 24 times that of a standard broadcast TV signal. The 4K transmission linked the University of California, San Diego and Keio University in Tokyo...

The combined efforts of researchers from Durham University, Imperial College, London and the University of Sheffield have fructified. Till now the basic computer is usually made by using semiconductor electronics. The researchers have gone ahead and have successfully created a computer by using magnetic microchips rather than semiconductor electronics. This development evidently offers a potentially economical and simpler way of computing for the future, which could also be put to new and useful purposes. This research follows the team’s groundbreaking first step in 2002 at Durham, when they managed to create a basic computer operation or ‘logic gate’ using a...

Broadband providers and Internet phone services have until spring 2007 to follow a new and complex set of rules designed to make it easier for police to seek wiretaps, federal regulators have ruled. It's clear from the Federal Communications Commission's 59-page decision (click for PDF), released late Friday evening, that any voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, provider linking with the public telephone network must be wiretap-ready. That list would include companies such as Vonage, SkypeOut and Packet 8. But what remains uncertain is what the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) ruling means for companies, universities, nonprofits--and even...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- A research team, led by UC Riverside's Ludwig Bartels, is the first to design a molecule that can move in a straight line on a flat surface. It achieves this by closely mimicking human walking. The "nano-walker" offers a new approach for storing large amounts of information on a tiny chip and demonstrates that concepts from the world we live in can be duplicated at the nanometer scale -- the scale of atoms and molecules. The molecule -- 9,10-dithioanthracene or "DTA" -- has two linkers that act as feet. Obtaining its energy from heat supplied to it,...

By examining how proteins have evolved, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have discovered a set of simple "rules" that nature appears to use to design proteins, rules the scientists have now employed to create artificial proteins that look and function just like their natural counterparts. In two papers appearing in the Sept. 22 issue of the journal Nature, Dr. Rama Ranganathan, associate professor of pharmacology, and his colleagues detail a new method for creating artificial proteins based only on information they derived from analyzing certain characteristics that individual natural proteins have in common with each other. "The goal of our...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Chemists who have trouble predicting how some large, complex biological molecules will react with others may soon have a solution from the world of computational quantum physics, say Purdue University researchers. Using powerful supercomputers to analyze the interplay of the dozens of electrons that whirl in clouds about these molecules, a team of physicists led by Purdue's Jorge H. Rodriguez has found that the quantum property of electrons called "spin" needs to be considered to obtain a complete and fundamental picture of how many biochemical reactions take place. In particular, a class of metal-based proteins that...

HOUSTON (Sept. 16, 2005) - Researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston have found that human fat cells produce a protein that is linked to both inflammation and an increased risk of heart disease and stroke. They say the discovery, reported in Journal of the American College of Cardiology, goes a long way to explain why people who are overweight generally have higher levels of the molecule, known as C-reactive protein (CRP), which is now used diagnostically to predict future cardiovascular events. And they also report...

In a world where "supersize" has entered the lexicon, there are some things getting smaller, like cell phones and laptops. Dartmouth researchers have contributed to the miniaturizing trend by creating the world's smallest untethered, controllable robot. Their extremely tiny machine is about as wide as a strand of human hair, and half the length of the period at the end of this sentence. About 200 of these could march in a line across the top of a plain M&M. The researchers, led by Bruce Donald, the Joan P. and Edward J. Foley Jr. 1933 Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth,...

WASHINGTON, June 14. - (INS) The U. S. supreme court today upheld the constitutional right of children in public schools to refuse to salute the American flag. Reversing its 1940 judgment, the court held, 6 to 3, that it is unconstitutional and a violation of the bill of rights for public schools to expel pupils who renounce allegiance to the symbolic banner of the United States. "Symbolism is a primitive but effective way of communicating ideas," the court stated. "The use of an emblem or flag to symbolize some system, idea, institution, or personality, is a short cut from mind...

What exactly makes a stem cell a stem cell? The question may seem simplistic, but while we know a great deal of what stem cells can do, we don't yet understand the molecular processes that afford them such unique attributes. Now, researchers at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research working with human embryonic stem cells have uncovered the process responsible for the single-most tantalizing characteristic of these cells: their ability to become just about any type of cell in the body, a trait known as pluripotency. "This is precisely what makes these stem cells so interesting from a therapeutic perspective," says...

Police are investigating reports that the bank account details of 1,000 UK customers, held by Indian call centres, were sold to an undercover reporter. The Sun claims one of its journalists bought personal details including passwords, addresses and passport data from a Delhi IT worker for £4.25 each. But, in a BBC interview, the worker named by the paper denied the claims. India's top software body said India was a "trustworthy" location and would treat the claims "extremely seriously". The National Association of Software and Service Companies said it would work with authorities in the UK and India to ensure...

Gene Healy is senior editor at the Cato Institute and editor of the new book Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything. WASHINGTON - Drug warriors in Congress are considering a bill that would send parents to jail for at least three years if they learn of drug activity near their children and fail to report it to authorities within 24 hours. One wonders if this a good idea, especially in areas such as Baltimore, where intimidation and murder of government witnesses are common. But when it comes to the criminal law, Congress rarely pauses for reflection anymore....

The Broadcast Flag was Hollywood's plan to point its remote control at your digital TV. It was a set of bits in the DTV standard that let broadcasters meddle with what could be done with publicly available broadcast video - even if those restrictions stomped on your fair use rights. The courts struck down the original FCC proposal. Now, the lobbyists have turned to Congress. Rumor has it that a senator will introduce an amendment on Tuesday in the Senate Commerce, Justice, and Science sub-committee to reintroduce the flag. On Thursday, it goes to a full committee vote. If your...

A major breakthrough in stem cell research -- a new tool that could allow scientists to harvest stem cells ethically - was announced recently at the Institute of Physics' conference Physics 2005 in Warwick (Tuesday 12th April). Professor Josef Käs and Dr Jochen Guck from the University of Leipzig have developed a procedure that can extract and isolate embryo-quality stem cells from adult blood for the first time. This new technique could unlock the stem cell revolution and stimulate a boom in medical research using stem cells. Stem cells are cells which have not yet differentiated into specialised tissues such...

While most Americans were riveted to the hotly contested Democratic National Primary in June of 2004 and the national media speculated on Howard Dean or John Kerry, the Commissioner of the U.S. Social Security Administration (Jo Anne Barnhart) and her Mexican counterpart concluded the U.S.-Mexican Totalization Agreement. This agreement had to be in place prior to the administration's second term and it's all-out offensive for Social Security reform. What would be the potential effects of this totalization agreement with Mexico, should the president choose to move it forward? Unauthorized illegal aliens working in the U.S. could qualify for Social Security...

Chip-scale refrigerators capable of reaching temperatures as low as 100 milliKelvin have been used to cool bulk objects for the first time, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report. The solid-state refrigerators have applications such as cooling cryogenic sensors in highly sensitive instruments for semiconductor defect analysis and astronomical research. The work is featured in the April 25, 2005, issue of Applied Physics Letters.* The NIST-designed refrigerators, each 25 by 15 micrometers, are sandwiches of a normal metal, an insulator and a superconducting metal. When a voltage is applied across the sandwich, the hottest electrons "tunnel"...