Code breakthrough delivers safer computing

Computer researchers at UNSW and NICTA have achieved a breakthrough in software which will deliver significant increases in security and reliability and has the potential to be a major commercialisation success.

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Computer scientists successfully boot one million Linux kernels as virtual machines

Sandia National Laboratories computer scientists Ron Minnich (foreground) and Don Rudish (background) have successfully run more than a million Linux kernels as virtual machines, an achievement that will allow cybersecurity researchers to more effectively observe behavior found in malicious botnets. They utilized Sandia's powerful Thunderbird supercomputing cluster for the demonstration.

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The Challenge of Making Real 'Surrogate' Skin

The new movie "Surrogates," starring Bruce Willis, depicts a world in which people live through "surries", highly realistic humanoid robots. But without realistic skin, robots will never have that humanlike personal touch, and will not have the degree of social acceptance that robots would need to have to share the world with the rest of us.

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DARPA Wants Space Cleaning Ideas

James Hollopeter of GIT Satellite has a plan for getting rid of orbiting junk. He wants to launch rocket-loads of water into space to create a liquid wall for debris to slam into, so the pieces can slow down and eventually drop out of orbit.

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Missile-tracking satellites launched on demo flight

A United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket roared to life and thundered away from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Friday, successfully boosting a pair of experimental missile-tracking satellites into orbit for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.

With its roots in the old "Star Wars" program, the goal of the $1.5 billion Space Tracking and Surveillance System mission is to demonstrate the ability to detect and track enemy missiles from launch, through the so-called mid-course phase of flight to atmospheric entry, providing more accurate targeting data for interceptors.

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Intel's Moblin 2.1 to compete with Windows

At this week's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, the chipmaker debuted a beta version of its Moblin 2.1 open-source operating system targeted to run on a variety of devices, including smartphones, Netbooks, nettops, Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), and in-car systems.

Moblin 2.1 will compete with other open-source operating systems like Google's Android and bump up against Microsoft in the burgeoning nettop arena.

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The World's First Laser Microphone

David Schwartz, who laid the foundation for MP3 with his undergraduate and graduate work in the ’80s, has another big idea: a microphone that uses lasers and smoke to detect the minute variations in air pressure the rest of us call “sound.”

His invention appears to be the world’s first laser microphone, and it works by streaming smoke across a laser beam aimed at a “very, very fast and sensitive” photocell designed for fiber-optic networks. The photocell converts variations in the beam into electrical signal that carries the audio signal.

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iRex Announces e-Reader with Barnes & Noble Catalog, Verizon 3G

Barnes and Noble first tipped their hand in July, when they announed their new e-book store and its 700,000 titles would be made available on the iPhone and BlackBerry platforms. Then in August, the bookseller announced a partnership with e-reader maker iRex, in addition to love for Plastic Logic and their devices. And today (drumroll, please) the company officially announced the iRex DR800SG reader, the first e-book reader with access to the Barnes and Noble catalog.

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Micron awarded stimulus funding for LED lighting project

Micron Technology (Boise, ID) announced it will get $5 million from the federal stimulus package to advance a program to produce light-emitting diode (LED) lighting technology.

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OPTICALLY PUMPED SEMICONDUCTOR LASERS: Green OPSLs poised to enter scientific pump-laser market

Optically pumped semiconductor lasers (OPSLs) have been optimized for an increasing number of applications based on continuous-wave (CW) visible and, most recently, UV laser light. Specific applications include bioinstrumentation at 488 and 355 nm with less than 0.5 W output power, multiwatt portable forensic and lightshow systems at 460, 532, and 577 nm, and multiwatt 532 and 577 nm lasers for ophthalmology. All these applications have benefited from OPSL technology because of features that include wavelength flexibility and power scalability, among others, in a compact package.

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GE: Solar business is our 'next wind'

General Electric plans to give its solar business a charge in two years with the introduction of panels with the same solar cell material used by industry cost leader First Solar.

In 2011, the energy giant expects to produce solar panels made with cadmium telluride, a thin-film solar cell material, said Michael Idelchik, vice president of advanced technologies at GE Global Research at the EmTech conference here on Wednesday.

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Natick Brainstorms Future Soldier

Outfitted with blast-resistant armor, an external skeleton that provides super-human strength and the ability to command drones with a wave of the hand, the U.S. Army’s Natick Soldier Systems Center’s vision of the future is forward-looking and ambitious.

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USAF To Run 'Best Value' Tanker Race, Use Fixed-Price Contract

Senior Pentagon officials said Sept. 24 they will select the proposal that offers the "best value" in the soon-to-be relaunched KC-X aerial tanker competition, which they said will culminate with a fixed-price contract in summer 2010.

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