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Seagate Technology this week introduced a hard drive that it claims is the fastest hard drive available in a 2.5 inch form factor. Meanwhile ProStor Systems Inc. announced a new high-capacity removable disk drive as a replacement for tape media for workstations and servers in small and midsize markets. The Seagate Savvio 15K drive is a 15,000rpm serial attached SCSI drive (SAS). It is designed for use in both rack-mounted servers and blade servers. The Savvio drive is 70% smaller than other 15K drives on the market and has 30% less power consumption, the company said. The drive has a...

Research in Britain is in danger of being overtaken by the efforts of scientists from countries such as China, South Korea and India, many of whom were educated in UK universities, a report says. Unless collaboration with these "innovation hotspots" is increased, Britain will be sidelined, according to The Atlas of Ideas, launched today at a conference attended by leading figures in science and politics. Demos, a think tank, says in the report that Britain must "wake up" to developments in Asian innovation and promote global, collaborative app-roaches. "UK higher education has survived on a diet of China, India and...

Robot mother helps South Koreans prepare for birth Thu Jan 4, 2007 12:21 PM ET SEOUL, Jan 4 (Reuters Life!) - With South Korea's birth rate at its lowest ever, medical students are resorting to robots to practice bringing babies into the world. Kyunghee University Medical Center in Seoul is the first institution in South Korea to use Noelle, a life-sized robot, and her "newborn" to give obstetric students experience. "With this simulator training tool, we can conduct not only normal deliveries, but also complicated deliveries such as breech births, Caesarean deliveries," Professor Jung Eui told Reuters Television. "Students can...

In 2000 Plastic Logic, a Cambridge-based start-up company, announced it was attempting to commercialise a form of plastic electronics that had developed from research at the laboratory. By using a cheap and simple set of processing operations to build up layers of circuitry on plastic “substrates” – the material on which circuits are formed – rather than silicon wafers used in conventional microchips, the developments promised to slash the cost of making semiconductors. What has given the science behind the company more substance is today’s announcement that Plastic Logic has attracted $100m (£51m) of investment that will fund a plant...

People say that if you play Microsoft CD's backwards, you hear satanic things, but that's nothing, because if you play them forwards, they install Windows. - Unknown There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't. - Unknown If at first you don't succeed; call it version 1.0 - T-Shirt Microsoft: "You've got questions. We've got dancing paperclips." - Unknown 1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d - tee shirt My pokemon bring all the nerds to the yard, and they're like you wanna trade cards? Darn right,...

It's been one of those years when technology came on in leaps and bounds. Around the world, thousands of pointy-headed scientists and product designers beavered away in high-security laboratories, investing time, money and effort to create... more silly USB gadgets. Yes, 2006 has been the year when gadgets got a bit ridiculous. And it wasn't just USB devices either. Here's Tech Digest's (http://techdigest.tv) pick of the year's gadgets that got us chuckling, frightened, or just scratching our heads in bafflement. 1. Gupi the robot guinea pig Complete with his animatronic carrot and 30 different sounds (most of which are presumably...

(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Amid all the post-election noise, Democrats haven't been subtle about their top priorities once they take control of Congress: boost minimum wage, reform Medicare, rescind the 2001 tax cuts, and clean up "the swamp" of Washington lobbying. With such a teeming legislative plate, the tech industry might be feeling like table scraps right about now. It shouldn't. The 110th Congress could be the most technology-friendly in history. Here's why: Yes, Nancy Pelosi, the presumptive new Speaker of the House, hails from one of the most liberal parts of the country, San Francisco. But she also represents...

It was the narrowest of Republican margins in the U.S. Senate that doomed a crucial vote on Net neutrality earlier this year. By an 11-11 tie, a GOP-dominated committee failed in June to approve rules requiring that all Internet traffic be treated the same no matter what its "source" or "destination" might be. A similar measure also failed in the House of Representatives. But now that this week's elections have switched control of the House back to the Democrats--and they appear to have seized the Senate as well--the outlook for technology-related legislation has changed dramatically overnight....

Operation infiltration update UPDATE Submitted by staff on Sat, 11/04/2006 - 8:48pm. [UPDATE] We're fully staffed for phase II You can Sign up for the GOP 72 hour program here, and become a GOTV double agent. Before you do however, send me an email, and I'll give you your mission profile. Some field reports coming in indicate day 1 was a big success - more on that Monday

DURHAM - Robert Henn began making changes as soon as he walked through the door at Liquidia Technologies. Three months after he signed on as chief technology officer, the Durham company is holding fewer meetings and brainstorming more. In the time it used to take to perfect one experiment, the scientists now perform several. "No experiment is a failure," said Luke Roush, Liquidia's director of business development. As a result of that attitude, prototypes are now made in three to four days, rather than a month. And Henn, a chemist, is often in the laboratory, working alongside the nine scientists...

In today's DC Examiner, Olbermann Watch blogger Bob Cox sounds the alarm against what he (correctly) perceives as the conservative movement's failure to sufficiently become involved in creating the next generation of the internet. Now that the web has become a commodity, most conservatives have given up trying to be technology leaders, effectively allowing the left to create and control all of the major "web 2.0" resources like Technorati, Wikipedia, YouTube, and others. The failure of the Dean campaign has led too many conservatives to dismiss technology leadership as an overhyped part of a political campaign. But that's only half...

There's no doubt about it: foreign technology can whet your appetite. Super-lightweight laptops from Japan, feature-packed smartphones from Europe, and shiny, gotta-get-it devices designed in India, South Korea, and Taiwan are but a few of the items that currently reside on tech's cutting edge. But chances are you will never see those gadgets on store shelves here in the U.S. A trip to the typical U.S. electronics store suggests many Americans would gladly shell out some extra cash for high-end lightweight products. Smaller, lighter, and more-expensive laptops are occupying an ever-increasing amount of shelf space. Even if a larger percentage...

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--The airport of tomorrow might have virtual intelligence agents that check your bags, "smart dust" sensor networks that vet passengers heading through security and commuter pilots who fly the plane from a home office.That is, if Dave Evans' vision is to be believed. As chief technologist for Cisco Systems' Internet Business Solutions Group Innovations Team, Evans set the stage Tuesday for technology innovations that will help shape the future of airport travel here at the opening of the FAA/NASA/Industry Airport Planning Workshop. "This is a great time to innovate," Evans said as he delivered the keynote speech at...

Ainge targeted for grid stardom at very early age Tuesday, September 12, 2006 The Hillsboro Argus Stardom was predicted for Erik Ainge even before he touched a football. And at one point, there was consideration for Ainge to achieve his prep feats at another high school rather than Glencoe. A sports scientist named Jonathan P. Niednagel got the ball rolling when he told Ainge's parents that Erik had the realistic potential to be a National Football League star quarterback. Erik Ainge was a frail 10-year-old fifth grader when the story began, and Niednagel was working for Danny Ainge and...

Nintendo announced last night that the highly anticipated Wii will be released in the U.S. on November 19th at a launch price of $250. The Wii will be released just days after Sony plans to release the PS3. While Sony has said they will have a limited number of PS3's available for the holiday season, Nintendo assures they will have "far more available than their competitor". Link

If you had to choose between your PC, TV set or mobile phone, which one would you pick? That was one of the questions researcher Forrester posed to almost 4800 households in the US and, although the TV set still ruled the roost in most homes, the study showed that it was no longer the top gadget of choice among the young and prosperous. Forrester found that less than 20 per cent of the gen Y group (aged 18-26) ranked TVs top compared with the 37 per cent who rated their PCs as the most important. A further 27 per...

Magnetic resonance imaging no longer requires a roomful of equipment – including superconducting magnets that must be cooled to extreme temperatures. A multidisciplinary team from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and the University of California, Berkeley, both in the US, developed a highly sensitive laser detector that produces magnetic resonance images at room temperature using low-power, off-the-shelf magnets. MRI works by measuring minute magnetic signals from atomic nuclei whose "spins" have been aligned using external magnetic fields. As different atoms react differently, this provides a unique way to image tissue inside the human body or analyse many other materials....

The software giant thinks it can make robotic engineering easier with a set of standards: its own of course Microsoft believes the demand for consumer, research, and military robots will grow significantly--and it wants to own the market. At the annual RoboBusiness conference this past June, the software giant released the first "community technical preview" of Microsoft Robotics Studio (MSRS). Now, in its second preview version, MSRS is both a product and the lynchpin of a new educational push: the Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE). Founded by Microsoft Research, Georgia Tech, and Bryn Mawr College, the computer science...

In a surprise move, Linspire is now offering its CNR ("Click 'N Run") software service at no charge to its Linspire and Freespire Linux distribution customers. In addition, the company will soon be open-sourcing the CNR Client. CNR, previously a fee-based service offered at annual subscription rates of $20 for basic and $50 for premium ("Gold") access to new programs, had been the San Diego-based company main source of income. Now, however, according to CEO Kevin Carmony, Linspire is doing well enough from selling its higher-end products and services that it can afford to offer its basic CNR service free...

Zurich, Switzerland, (SPX) Aug 23, 2006 Scientists have unveiled a new technology that could lead to video displays that faithfully reproduce a fuller range of colors than current models, giving such a life-like viewing experience that it could be hard to go back to your old TV. The invention, based on fine-tuning light using microscopic artificial muscles, could turn into competitively priced consumer products in eight years, the scientists say. In ordinary displays such as TV tubes, flat-screen LCDs, or plasma screens, each pixel is composed of three light-emitting elements, one for each of the fundamental colors red, green, and...