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BRECKENRIDGE, Colo. — The already untidy mass of orbital debris that litters low Earth orbit nearly got nastier last month. A head-on collision was averted between a spent upper stage from a Chinese rocket and the European Space Agency's (ESA) huge Envisat Earth remote-sensing spacecraft. Space junk tracking information supplied by the U.S. military, as well as confirming German radar data, showed that the two space objects would speed by each other at a nail-biting distance of roughly 160 feet (50 meters). ESA's Envisat tips the scales at 8 tons, with China's discarded rocket body weighing some 3.8 tons. A...

Lawsuit: School Cyberspied on Student (Update) Bethany Stotts, February 19, 2010 A school district in suburban Philadelphia gave out MacBook laptops to “all high school students” which contained a security feature allowing the school to remotely activate the laptops’ webcams, Lower Merion School District Superintendent Dr. Christopher McGinley admitted yesterday. “The laptops do contain a security feature intended to track lost, stolen and missing laptops. This feature has been deactivated effective today,” states the district’s initial online response. A letter by Dr. McGinley posted later that evening gives more details: “…Laptops are a frequent target for theft in schools and...

U.S. communications regulators will unveil on March 17 a blueprint aimed at bringing fast affordable Internet access to more than 90 million Americans being held back by fees and technology. The Federal Communications Commission said Tuesday that the long-awaited National Broadband Plan will try to help connect 93 million Americans to high-speed Internet to find jobs, access educational and healthcare services, and reduce household energy costs. "In the 21st century, a digital divide is an opportunity divide," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement, highlighting that various roadblocks are stopping one-third of the United States from subscribing to broadband......

Glenn Beck has now supplanted Rush Limbaugh as the most influential broadcaster in America. He's the one the tea-party movement looks to. Beck wowed the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) crowd Feb 20 with his attack on progressivism, which he said must be "eradicated." "Progressivism is the cancer in America and it's eating our Constitution," Beck told the crowd. Now that Beck has given his marching orders, expect to hear all the Fox Puppets echoing him. The goal is to discredit "progressivism" as they did "liberalism." Beck fancies himself a historian; his patter is full of historical references that seem...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Nearly 15 months after the Defense Department banned the use of external computer flash drives, officials have agreed to allow limited use of the convenient high-tech storage devices. The approved flash drives will be included in kits that the military will soon begin to distribute, with the first priority being troops in Afghanistan and Iraq who need the devices to carry or transfer critical data. Vice Adm. Carl V. Mauney, deputy commander of U.S. Strategic Command, told reporters Friday that initially only dozens will be sent to the war zone, but eventually more kits will be created...

Lawsuit: School Cyberspied on Student Bethany Stotts, February 19, 2010 A school district in suburban Philadelphia gave out MacBook laptops to “all high school students” which contained a security feature allowing the school to remotely activate the laptops’ webcams, Lower Merion School District Superintendent Dr. Christopher McGinley admitted yesterday. “The laptops do contain a security feature intended to track lost, stolen and missing laptops. This feature has been deactivated effective today,” states the district’s initial online response. A letter by Dr. McGinley posted later that evening gives more details: “…Laptops are a frequent target for theft in schools and off...

WASHINGTON — Just as the worldwide shortage of a radioactive isotope used in millions of medical procedures is about to get worse, officials say a new source for the substance has emerged: a nuclear reactor in Poland. The isotope, technetium 99, is used to measure blood flow in the heart and to help diagnose bone and breast cancers. Almost two-thirds of the world’s supply comes from two reactors; one, in Ontario, has been shut for repairs for nine months and is not expected to reopen before April, and the other, in the Netherlands, will close for six months starting Friday....

GUANGZHOU, CHINA ---- China's investment in high-speed trains will push it into a leadership role in the industry, the vice president for policy and development at Amtrak said. With $100 billion of China's stimulus funding funneled into building tracks and trains, "the sheer volume of equipment that they will require and the technology that will have to be developed will simply catapult them into a leadership position," Amtrak executive Stephen Gardner said, The New York Times reported Friday. China will have 42 separate high speed train routes by 2012 with 5,000 miles of track that can accommodate 155 mph trains...

Like many Americans, you might deem the information below "yawnworthy." If, however, you're interested in ensuring that our nation's Departments of Defense and Homeland Security are equipped with the best possible tools to fight the War on Terror, you'll be interested in what happens in states like Washington where a push is being waged to keep the best tools out of the hands of the state's law enforcement professionals.

CUPERTINO, CALIF. (TheStreet) -- AppleNASDAQ" PRIMARY="NO"/> makes changing the batteries of new iPod models increasingly difficult by soldering them to the device's casing. Consumers would know this if they repaired such items instead of replacing them. Apple's obstacles to repair and ToyotaNYSE" PRIMARY="NO"/> and Ford'sNYSE" PRIMARY="NO"/> recent spate of recalls highlight the deteriorating relationship between the buying public and the products it owns. Though Kelley Blue Book and Edmund's say the value of troubled Toyotas dropped more than 4% since recalls were announced, some consumers see replacement as a more viable option than addressing complex electrical and mechanical problems they...

The Government Is Monitoring Facebook And Twitter By Noel Sheppard Created 2009-12-14 11:59 "The government is increasingly monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers and political protesters." So ominously began an editorial [1] in Sunday's New York Times. Those with accounts at such websites should pay attention, for according to the Times, and other sources, Big Brother is watching you: The Wall Street Journal reported this summer that state revenue agents have been searching for tax scofflaws by mining information on MySpace and Facebook. In October, the F.B.I. searched the New York home of...

Software-designed cars don't always behave as expected in the real world. As Toyota dealers begin to repair sticky gas pedals on 2.3 million recalled vehicles, one question lingers: How did engineers miss the potential for friction in the pedal assembly--identified as the root cause of the problem--during the design process? One possible answer is that the simulation software widely used by automakers, aerospace companies and others to design and test products is only as smart as the humans who program it. To save money and speed development time, carmakers today design their vehicles virtually, using computer-aided design software, rather than...

We're all aware of the two mega-recalls of Toyota vehicles. The quick and easy explanation is that "cars are too complicated" and "cars have too many processors and too much software." Certainly, there is some truth to that (software-controlled cars creep me out), but the sticking-accelerator problem has nothing to do with electronics; it's a mechanical problem with a mechanical solution. But the real problem which designers of mass-market, high-volume products really face is the law of large numbers. When you have tens or hundreds of thousands of a product out in the market, some of its incredibly obscure and...

Air Force Office of Scientific Research and National Science Foundation-funded professor, Dr. Xiang Zhang has demonstrated at the University of California, Berkeley the world's smallest semiconductor laser, which may have applications to the Air Force in communications, computing and bio-hazard detection. The semiconductor, called a plasmon, can focus light the size of a single protein in a space that is smaller than half its wavelength while maintaining laser-like qualities that allow it to not dissipate over time. "Proposed almost seven years ago, researchers had been unable to demonstrate a working plasmonic laser until our experiment," said Zhang. "It is an...

Dr. Chunlei Guo and his team of Air Force Research Laboratory-funded researchers from the University of Rochester are using laser light technology that will help the military create new forms of metal that may guide, attract, and repel liquids and cool small electronic devices. The researchers discovered a way to transform a shiny piece of metal into one that is pitch black, not by paint, but by using incredibly intense bursts of laser light. Dr. Guo and his team have been working on creating technology that may enable the Air Force to create an additional kind of metal. The black...

To provide Australian armed forces with an integrated communications system, the Australian Defence Force contracted with Boeing Defence Australia, a subsidiary of US-based Boeing, to deploy an integrated HF communications system throughout the country, replacing the separate HF communications systems operated by each service. The A$628 million (US$547 million) system – called the Modernized High Frequency Communications System (MHFCS) – provides the ADF with a nation-wide secure command and control network for all of the armed forces. The project is divided into two phases [pdf] – the MHFCS core system and the final system. The core system was delivered in...

So why wasn't I surprised to read in an article that Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told members of the House Intelligence Committee yesterday he is tasking an elite U.S. interrogation unit -- an interagency group of top interrogators dubbed the "High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group" -- with conducting "scientific research" to find better ways of questioning top suspected terrorists when one already exists? Because Director Blair is either being kept in the dark about the existence of this non-polygraph technology or he's part of what appears to be a coordinated effort by individuals within the federal government to prevent...

America Must Innovate Or Die As China Scientist Lead The World In Research Growth Economics / Technology Feb 04, 2010 - 12:44 PM By: Gordon T Long US innovation is plummeting faster than our Financial Markets did during the 2008 financial crisis! The future of America is presently in peril, not just because of the “banksters’’ shadowy ways, but because of a sputtering Innovation Engine that has had the fuel “choked off’. It has now gone “critical” and can no longer be left to only the carping of the academic community. The chart to the right from the Financial Times:...

NASA and General Motors are working together to accelerate development of the next generation of robots and related technologies for use in the automotive and aerospace industries. Engineers and scientists from NASA and GM worked together through a Space Act Agreement at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston to build a new humanoid robot capable of working side by side with people. Using leading edge control, sensor and vision technologies, future robots could assist astronauts during hazardous space missions and help GM build safer cars and plants.

I've been shocked that no one is strongly challenging the idea that the new iPad is going to kill the Amazon Kindle. Reading books on a back lit LCD screen doesn't work. Try it on your laptop. I guarantee you will want to scratch your eyes out of your head in about 20 minutes. The beauty of the Kindle and other e-readers is the e-ink technology that really feels like reading a printed page.