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Michigan researchers have built a prototype of a new auto motor that does away with pistons, crankshafts and valves, replacing the old internal combustion engine with a disc-shaped shock wave generator. It could slash the weight of hybrid cars and reduce auto emissions by 90 percent. The generator is about the size of a saucepot, and would replace the 1,000-pound power train in most cars — no transmission, cooling system, emissions regulation or fluids needed. Norbert Müller and colleagues at Michigan State University showed off the new motor prototype at a meeting with the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects...

Judge lets Sony spy on Geohot visitors in PS3 suit George Hotz faced another setback in his defense against Sony's anti-jailbreaking lawsuit late Thursday after a judge granted Sony a potentially controversial amount of information access. It now has permission to get the IP addresses, accounts and other details of anyone who has visited either his main Geohot site or his PS3 jailbreak Blogger site between January 2009 and the modern day. Sony made clear that the access wouldn't be limited to those who downloaded the jailbreak code.The company had already received permission to track as much information as possible...

Researchers at Chalmers in Sweden have shown that a surface emitting laser – a cheaper and more energy-efficient type of laser for fiber optics than conventional lasers – can deliver error-free data at a record speed of 40 Gbit/s. The break-through could lead to faster Internet traffic, computers and mobile phones. Today's commercial lasers can send up to 10 Gb of data per second (Gbit/s) through optical fibers. This applies to both conventional lasers and to surface emitting lasers. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have managed to increase the speed of the surface emitting laser four times, and see...

What is it with companies thinking they can get around the Clean Air Act? Earlier this year, the second-largest refinery in the U.S. was fined $5.3 million (and required to upgrade pollution control systems for $700 million) for CAA violations. Before that, companies like Pep Boys, Cummins and Mercedes (among others) were all forced to pay fines for selling products that are just plain dirtier than they should be. Today, the EPA announced that PowerTrain is the latest to be hit with a CAA-violation fine. The company settled the case and will now have to pay $2 million because, between...

If you've got a working Gmail account, you might want to back it up every so often -- as many as 500,000 Gmail users lost access to their inboxes this morn, and some of them are reporting (via Twitter and support forums) that years worth of messages, attachments and Google Chat logs had vanished by the time they were finally able to log on.

A WHOPPING 77 PER CENT less power is needed for Toshiba's 40nm scale CMOS flip-flop circuit compared to earlier flip-flops, the Japanese company claims.

Once America had allies. Now it has Facebook friends. Google News turns up more than 5,000 news reports including the search terms "Facebook", "Egypt" and "revolution". The same soap-bubble of global youth culture that gave us the Internet stock bubble in the 1990s has returned, this time as the solution to the problems of the Arab world. With the last bubble, people got poor. This time people will get killed. As a reality check: the search terms "Egypt", "revolution" and "genital mutilation" turn up just seven stories in Google News (including a previous essay by this writer). Many Egyptian women...

It's a move that reeks of extreme confidence, bordering on the reckless. Google is so certain its Chrome browser is unhackable it has promised to award £12,500 ($20,000) and a notebook to the first person who proves them wrong. The company laid down the gauntlet ahead of the fifth annual Pwn2Own hacking competition next month.

Computer engineers at North Carolina State University have developed hardware that allows programs to operate more efficiently by significantly boosting the speed at which the "cores" on a computer chip communicate with each other. The core, or central processing unit, is the brain of a computer chip; most chips currently contain between four and eight cores. In order to perform a task more quickly using multiple cores on a single chip, those cores need to communicate with each other. But there are no direct ways for cores to communicate. Instead, one core sends data to memory and another core retrieves...

Verizon has filed an appeal against the FCC's newly enacted net neutrality regulation, arguing that the agency has no authority to regulate bits on the Internet. Though Verizon practically co-drafted the FCC’s new Net Neutrality regulation, it now plans to sue the agency for overstepping its bounds. The broadband and mobile operator argues that the FCC doesn’t actually have the authority to require Internet service providers to regulate how traffic flows on their networks. “We are deeply concerned by the FCC’s assertion of broad authority for sweeping new regulation of broadband networks and the Internet itself,” said Michael E. Glover,...

I'll leave it as link-only because I'm unaware of their sharing policies.

AUGUSTA, Ga. -- Georgia authorities are investigating the discovery of six loaded shotguns aimed at a food plot that were rigged to be fired through a network of Web-controlled cameras. The Augusta Chronicle reported the guns were discovered last fall on Georgia Power Company right of way in rural south Georgia. The set up was discovered by a utility contractor and it was reported to the U.S. Office of Homeland Security. The newspaper reported that a bulletin circulated by the Office of Homeland Security said it appeared that the rig was only intended for illegal hunting in an area known...

The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal. Over the past two years, according to intelligence and military experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role — as a critical testing ground in a joint American and Israeli effort to undermine Iran’s efforts to make a bomb of its own.

WASHINGTON -- Israel has tested a computer worm believed to have sabotaged Iran's nuclear centrifuges and slowed its ability to develop an atomic weapon, The New York Times reported Saturday. In what the Times described as a joint Israeli-U.S. effort to undermine Iran's nuclear ambitions, it said the tests of the destructive Stuxnet worm had occurred over the past two years at the heavily guarded Dimona complex in the Negev desert.

When will the mockery of the Catholic Church cease? Not anytime soon it seems. Penance – the new free iPhone application that allows users to anonymously “confess” their sins to other users, and to give “absolution,” makes a mockery not only of the Church and the Sacrament of Reconciliation, but also of the Church’s structure. By “confessing” and “absolving,” users are able to accrue “horns” or “halos.” The more notable “confessors” are ranked with titles such as “Saints” to “Bishops,” “Cardinals,” and “Holy Father/Mother of the Church.” The highest ranking users are allowed to issue week-long edicts to those below...

In a groundbreaking achievement that could help scientists "build" new biological systems, Princeton University scientists have constructed for the first time artificial proteins that enable the growth of living cells. The team of researchers created genetic sequences never before seen in nature, and the scientists showed that they can produce substances that sustain life in cells almost as readily as proteins produced by nature's own toolkit.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A Japanese scientist who "likes alcohol very much" has discovered that soaking samples of material in hot party drinks for 24 hours turns them into superconductors at ambient temperature. The scientist, Dr. Yoshihiko Takano of the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan, made the discovery after a party, soaking samples of a potential superconductor in hot alcoholic drinks before testing them next day for superconductivity. The commercial alcoholic beverages, especially wine, were much more effective than either water or pure alcohol.

Government agencies around the world make billions of bits of raw data available to the public each day, but this data is often in difficult formats or so widely spread around the Web it is virtually unusable to the public and scientists who seek to use this valuable information in their research. Computer scientists within the Tetherless World Research Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed an application to help solve the problem. A collaboration with scientific publisher Elsevier, the application utilizes the U.S. government data warehouse, Data.gov, to provide scientists with easy and direct access to government data sets...

IDG News Service - Authorities in the U.S. and Germany have raided Internet Service Providers in hopes of tracking down the hackers who launched distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against Web sites such as Visa.com, PayPal.com, and Mastercard.com earlier this month. In documents posted Wednesday to the Smoking Gun Web site, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation describes the complex path its investigation has taken as it has searched for the computers that served as a central meeting point for the attacks.

Another mammoth Microsoft security update will fix the final bug that allowed the Stuxnet d. But as news that Stuxnet r problem in Iran, Congress n warned that it could be a cyber warfare. update has 17 bull