2008 January

Mirrors can dramatically enhance the loveliness of any room in a home. They magnify light, add to the decor, and even give the illusion of more space to a seemingly small room. Mirrors can be used as subtle accents to furnishings or as large ornaments. They add emphasis and luxury, while still performing functional duties. [...]

We declared 2008 the year of Solid State Storage, but what about your standard, run-of-the-mill hard drives? What’s going to happen in that part of the industry? In one word: nothing. That’s right, the ever-depressing industry is going to relax with normal hard drives and focus their entire attention on SSD units. It makes sense, [...]

Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes — visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and [...]

Have you ever been in an been in a situation where you had to pay bail to get someone out of jail or to release someone close to you who was arrested? You were also angry and upset at the person for allowing him or herself to get arrested in the first place. Well take [...]

Toshiba took a costly hit last week at CES when Time Warner took their partnership away from HD DVD to Blu-ray exclusively. This happened just when CES was about to take place, putting Toshiba in an awkward position. You see, Toshiba had invested a lot of capital promoting HD DVD at the world’s largest tradeshow, [...]

If you’re an actor angling for an Academy Award nomination on Tuesday, you better hope you didn’t leave the audience rolling in the aisles, suggests a new study from UCLA’s California Center for Population Research.
“The odds of being nominated for an Academy Award are so much greater for performers who appear in dramas that — [...]

Identity theft means that someone takes and uses your personal information without consent in order to commit fraud or other crimes. All someone needs to steal your identity is a small bit of information about you. Knowing how to identify risks and protect yourself is crucial in keeping your personal information safe.
You’ve heard the old [...]

The odometer of a low emission hybrid electric test vehicle today reached 100,000 miles as the car circled a track in the UK using the power of an advanced CSIRO battery system.
The UltraBattery combines a supercapacitor and a lead acid battery in a single unit, creating a hybrid car battery that lasts longer, costs less [...]

Beyond its role as the elixir of all life, water is a very unusual substance: Scientists have long marveled over counter-intuitive properties that set water apart from other solids and liquids commonly found in nature.
The simple fact that water expands when it freezes — an effect known to anyone whose plumbing has burst in winter [...]

Researchers at the Tenovus Centre for Cancer Research at Cardiff University have made a breakthrough in breast cancer treatment that could help save the lives of women who become resistant to breast cancer drugs such as tamoxifen.
While drugs such as tamoxifen have been a huge success in treating breast cancer, for a significant proportion of [...]

Tracking the location and availability of resources such as hospitals, transportation equipment, and water during an emergency situation can be life-saving.
A collaborative mapping tool developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is helping emergency management officials better coordinate event and incident planning - and real-time response.
GTRI has teamed with Atlanta-based company Emergency Visions to [...]

Computer programs may be the most accurate tool for studying acoustic communications amongst animals, according to Csaba Molnar from Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary and his research team. Their paper, published in Springer’s journal Animal Cognition this week, shows that a new piece of software is able to classify dog barks according to different situations [...]

Few things sting like a mosquito’s bite — especially if that bite carries a disease such as malaria, yellow fever, Dengue fever or West Nile virus. But if researchers from The University of Arizona in Tucson have their way, one day mosquito bites may prove deadly to the mosquitoes as well.
“Our goal is to turn [...]

You’ve got to be careful with the accelerator because hybrid school buses like to go.
Dan Taghon, the director of transportation for the Sigourney Community School District in southeast Iowa, said his district’s new hybrid bus has been running routes since Jan. 3. And Taghon, who drives the bus on one of the district’s six routes, [...]

As MESSENGER approached Mercury on January 14, 2008, the spacecraft’s Narrow-Angle Camera on the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) instrument captured this view of the planet’s rugged, cratered landscape illuminated obliquely by the Sun. The large, shadow-filled, double ringed crater to the upper right was glimpsed by Mariner 10 more than three decades ago and [...]

What if you could ask ANY question via your cell phone… and get ONE answer? What did that dream mean last night? What is the windshield wiper part number for a 2006 Ford Excursion? What is the cheapest flight out of Chicago O’Hare to get me to New York City TODAY? Now you can…
ChaCha has [...]

Drivers can’t pump algal fuel into their gas tanks yet, but Keith Cooksey said the idea holds promise. He felt that way 20 years ago. He feels that way today.
“We would be there now if people then hadn’t been so short-sighted,” Cooksey said.
Cooksey is one of many U.S. scientists who studied the feasibility of turning [...]

Probiotics, such as yoghurt drinks containing live bacteria, have a tangible effect on the metabolism, according to the results of a new study published today in the journal Molecular Systems Biology.
The research is the first to look in detail at how probiotics change the biochemistry of bugs known as gut microbes, which live in the [...]

Genetically modifying carrots to express increased levels of a gene that enables the transport of calcium across membranes of plant cells can make the vegetables a better source of calcium, said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and the Vegetable and Fruit Improvement Center at Texas A&M University in a report that appears [...]

Since we had a lot of time at CES this year thanks to lackluster exhibitors, we talked a lot about the future (like we wouldn’t normally). These days, music players are aplenty, but there’s nothing that’s truly disruptive about them. Even the cheapest (and we mean that with utmost respect) of the bunch can display [...]