Free Republic

Understanding energy system inertia and momentum is key to judging whether a rapid transition toward any type of energy is feasible. I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United States. Beginning this moment, this Nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977 — never. From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move...

By this point, there is absolutely no question that the method of cooking foods at precise low-temperatures in vacuum-sealed pouches (commonly referred to as "sous-vide") has revolutionized fine-dining kitchens around the world. There is not a Michelin-starred chef who would part easily with their Polyscience circulators. But the question of when this technique will trickle down to home users—and it certainly is a question of when, and not if—remains to be answered. The Sous-Vide Supreme, introduced last winter, and of which I am a big fan, is certainly a big step in the right direction. But at $450, for most...

Exactly two years ago, in November 2010, the Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn assured reporters that his auto alliance would sell half a million electric vehicles a year by the end of 2013. In 2011, it sold just short of 10,000 electrics, but in April 2012 Ghosn still claimed that the 2012 sales would double to 20,000. On November 15, he had to give up and admit that, after selling less than 7,000 vehicles, the 2012 target cannot be reached. That is just the latest in a less than electrifying saga of modern electric vehicles (this qualification is needed because...

Homeland Security to deploy underwater drones that mimic tuna fish With even gossip magazines being (falsely) accused of wanting to deploy aerial drones, it seems like the only place you might be able to escape robotic scrutiny would be somewhere far off at sea. Turns out: not true. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has funded a new underwater robot that can find you even in your underwater lair. The BIOSwimmer was developed by Boston Engineering Corporation's Advanced Systems Group (ASG) as an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) modeled after the shape and swimming mechanics of a tuna fish. According to...

A recent case, Hernandez v. Northside Independent School District et al., highlights the privacy concerns that technology can bring to the modern classroom. In order to register attendance for each student when the bell rings, one magnet school has given all of its students radio frequency identification device (RFID) chipped identification cards. These cards track student movements throughout the building–excluding the bathrooms, of course. One student, Andrea Hernandez, objected to her tagging on religious grounds, citing the Book of Revelation. She could have been expelled for refusing to wear her assigned RFID badge. Instead, according to Jim Forsyth with WOAI...

A new study released on Thursday finds teachers are concerned that the amount and types of electronic media that children interact with at home may be harming their performance in the classroom.Common Sense Media, a think tank focused on children’s media use, polled 685 public and private elementary and high school classroom teachers on how children’s increasing use of television, video games, texting, social networking, music and other forms of media is affecting their performance in school.The study found that 71% of teachers polled said students’ media use hurts their attention spans in school, while 59% said students’ use of...

The ethanol mandate continues to do more harm than good — inflicting environmental damage, raising food prices, and distorting energy markets. Two recent developments warrant a reexamination of the fuel ethanol issue.First, on August 20, 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a call for comments on suspending the renewable fuel standard (RFS), sometimes known as the ethanol mandate:EPA is seeking comment on letters requesting a waiver of the renewable fuel standard and matters relevant to EPA’s consideration of those requests. Governors of the states of Arkansas and North Carolina submitted separate requests for a waiver. Section 211(o)(7)(A) of the...

Scientists in the Advanced Materials and Nanosystems directorate at the Lockheed Martin Space Systems Advanced Technology Center (ATC) in Palo Alto have developed a revolutionary nanotechnology copper-based electrical interconnect material, or solder, that can be processed around 200 °C. Once fully optimized, the CuantumFuse solder material is expected to produce joints with up to 10 times the electrical and thermal conductivity compared to tin-based materials currently in use. Applications in military and commercial systems are currently under consideration. "We are enormously excited about our CuantumFuse breakthrough, and are very pleased with the progress we're making to bring it to full...

Daniel Yergin, a well known and recognized expert in the oil industry often states that most of the problems involved in producing more oil today are 'above ground and not below ground'. To a great extent he is right, but I am sure that he would also agree that there is a lot of oil trapped in global oil fields and today's oil recovery technology has not been successful in recovering a significant portion of remaining original-oil-in-place. A significant percentage (an average of 65%) of discovered oil resources remain trapped and cannot be recovered using conventional methods and processes -...

President Barack Obama has put $5 billion in taxpayer money behind his goal of having 1 million electric cars on U.S. roads by 2015. The Republican presidential ticket says it’s money wasted on “losers.” Whether the technology itself is a loser or consumers are merely slow to adapt to new things, car buyers so far haven’t embraced electric vehicles in numbers close to Obama’s goal. Electric-vehicle sales since 2011 totaled fewer than 50,000 through September, just 5 percent of the president’s target. “The reality is: that business model isn’t there yet,” said Brett Smith, co-director of manufacturing, engineering and technology...

Launched in 2008, Bleacher Report meteorically rose to become one of the nation's most popular websites, and one of the three most-visited sports sites. Its dramatic success came via valuing site growth and pageviews over any semblance of journalistic "quality" or even readability.The site quickly earned a rep for expertly employing the Google search engine to inundate the web with horrible, lowest-common-denominator crap.The site's deft use of search engine optimization (SEO) — the tweaking of content and coding to increase online visibility — propelled its unpaid, amateur writers' fare to the top of Google's search engine results, placing it on...

To paraphrase 15th Century Dutch Philosopher Erasmus’ well-known characterization of women -- "technology, can't live with it, can't live without it." Ever since the debacle that was the vote counting in Florida a dozen years ago, virtually every jurisdiction in the country has moved away from some form of manual voting machine to embrace the technology of electronic voting ("e-voting" for short). Yet, as states and local elections offices have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to institute e-voting, little attention has been paid the potential dangers inherent in this form of vote counting. Indeed, even as many Republican voters...

Looks like Camden, New Jersey is ready for a Robocop police force I have seen the future of law enforcement, and recent news suggests that it could be coming to New Jersey. First of all, we are closer to having Robocops than ever. Over at C|Net, Tim Hornyak reports on a new project to deploy remote-controlled robotic police: Researchers at Florida International University's Discovery Lab are working with a member of the U.S. Navy Reserves to build telepresence robots that could patrol while being controlled by disabled police officers and military vets. In a sense, they would be hybrid man-machine...

Lorie Miller bends over her grandparents' grave in north Philadelphia. She holds a two-inch brass square she's going to attach next to the headstone's names and dates. Printed onto that square is a QR code — that square digital bar code you can scan with a smartphone. Miller peels off the back of her square to expose the adhesive and pushes it into place. The headstone, which otherwise looks the same as many others around it, has just jumped into the modern age. Miller hopes other grieving families will do the same. She and her husband, Rick, are launching a...

First of all, I apologize for posting a vanity, but I have a serious question for the technology buffs on FRee Republic. Has anyone here had any experience with the scanner and OCR conversion software called NeatDesk? I am considering buying one of these digital filing devices, to clear the clutter, but I don't know how difficult it will be to actually produce reports for taxes, etc. from this device. How does it find dates, titles, and other data points from a scanned document, especially when they are all so different and the info is found in different places on...

Two Japanese researchers won the spoof Ig Nobel acoustic prize for developing the SpeechJammer, a device that confuses and stifles a person speaking by sending the speaker a delayed recording of their own voice. "One scenario is that you can use this in a meeting room where chairs have buttons to stop excessive speaking," Kazutaka Kurihara, researcher at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, told Kyodo News ahead of the Harvard ceremony, adding that the device could make such meetings more "fair."

A pioneering team from IBM in Zurich has published single-molecule images so detailed that the type of atomic bonds between their atoms can be discerned. The same team took the first-ever single-molecule image in 2009 and more recently published images of a molecule shaped like the Olympic rings. The new work opens up the prospect of studying imperfections in the "wonder material" graphene or plotting where electrons go during chemical reactions. The images are published in Science. The team, which included French and Spanish collaborators, used a variant of a technique called atomic force microscopy, or AFM. AFM uses a...

Small is big for Murata: The Japanese electronics maker has developed the world's tiniest version of a component known as the capacitor. And that's potentially big business. Capacitors, which store electric energy, are used in the dozens, even in the hundreds, in just about every type of gadget—smartphones, laptops, parts for hybrid cars, medical equipment and digital cameras. Smaller componentry allows for other innovations and improvements from thinner devices to longer battery life. The latest capacitor, measuring just 0.25 millimeter by 0.125 millimeter, is as tiny as the period at the end of this sentence. Murata Manufacturing Co.'s focus on...

In Rogers Arkansas, Walmart recently asked employees and their friends with iPhones to test out a new self scan-and-go app. It's one of a few mobile initiatives Walmart is working on that could one day replace or aid its many cashiers.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has issued an alert warning that hackers could exploit code in Siemens-owned technology to attack power plants and other national critical infrastructure. Security researcher Justin Clarke exposed the flaw at a Los Angeles conference last week, claiming he discovered a way of spying on encrypted traffic in hardware owned by a Siemens subsidiary, RuggedCom. The DHS advisory noted: "An attacker may use the key to create malicious communication to a RuggedCom network device." DHS added that the government department was in contact with RuggedCom and the researcher in order to identify the flaw and...