NightBlogger

A major flaw in the way the internet works could lead to millions of people being targeted by criminals and has prompted the “largest security update” in web history, according to a leading security researcher. The bug - described as “cache poisoning” - has led to some of the technology industry’s largest companies scrambling to come up with a solution before hackers discover how to exploit the flaw. Dan Kaminsky, an American internet security specialist who uncovered the bug, has been working with major technology companies including Microsoft and Cisco to issue software patches to prevent attacks from working. “This is the largest synchronised security update in the history of the internet. The severity of this bug is shown by the number of those who are on board with the patches,” Kaminsky said. More

TOKYO (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp plans to install solar panels on its next-generation Prius hybrid cars, becoming the first major automaker to use solar power for a vehicle, the Nikkei business daily reported on Monday. The paper said Toyota would equip solar panels on the roof of the high-end version of the Prius when it redesigns the gasoline-electric hybrid car early next year, and the power generated by the system would be used for the air conditioning. More

Video: To understand just how gloomy the state of the US economy is, watch this Video of The assistant Treasury Secretary, Phillip Swagel, on the US economy. Try as he might, he cannot hide his fear and gloom.

LATimes
U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. on Wednesday called for regulatory changes that would allow financial firms to fail without threatening broader market stability. The Treasury chief also proposed steps providing for the president to approve of any use of taxpayer funds to aid a financial company. In a speech in London on Wednesday, Paulson identified a legal gap that leaves unspecified how to deal with failures of companies that don’t take deposits, such as investment banks. Paulson’s proposals aim to tighten supervisors’ oversight of lenders and dealers while at the same time discourage companies from depending on a government rescue if their bets go wrong. His speech comes a week before a congressional hearing to debate a regulatory overhaul in the wake of the credit crisis that caused the near-bankruptcy of Bear Stearns Cos. More

Mainichi Daily News
The Ministry of Finance has approved cigarette vending machines that use face recognition technology to determine whether the purchaser is a minor or not. The vending machines, which determine a person’s approximate age from the size of their eyes and mouth and their bone structure, were developed by Kyoto Prefecture company Fujitaka Co., a major producer of vending machines. Vending machines designed to prevent minors from purchasing cigarettes were rolled out across Japan in July, but the taspo cards that are used as age identification have yet to become widespread. With face-recognition technology, users will be able to purchase cigarettes without a taspo card. There are already 5,000 such machines in operation across Japan.

CNN — A contract to build what is being called the nation’s first offshore field of wind turbines was announced Monday by a Delaware utility and a firm that will build the generators off the Atlantic coast. Using electricity generated by the wind, “Delmarva Power will be able to light about 50,000 homes a year, every year” for the duration of the 25-year contract, Lanard said, with first power expected by 2012. He said the project may help stabilize consumer energy costs, since the contract locks in the price Delmarva will pay per kilowatt-hour. Bluewater has previously established an offshore “energy park” operating off Denmark. More

It has caused the southeast millions in property and crop damage, but a researcher in Canada and colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture say the invasive kudzu vine could be an important new source of bioethanol. Their findings come at a time when experts are rethinking whether corn is best suited for ethanol production as a biofuel alternative to gasoline. The rise in ethanol demand has prompted concerns over food supply shortages, which in turn have contributed to considerable spikes in food prices worldwide.

The kudzu vine could ease the problem, said University of Toronto professor Rowan Sage, one of eight authors whose study was published recently in Biomass & Bioenergy. The plant is a fast-growing, woody vine that can grow up to 60 feet in one season. Its underground roots, around the diameter of an adult forearm, store plenty of starch essential for ethanol production. Kudzu exists mostly in the southeast but is native to China and Japan, where the starchy roots have long been used for cooking and thickening sauces. “You may have heard of it as ‘the plant that ate the South,’” said Sage, who teaches botany and ecology. “It takes over fields, covers trees and houses and causes a lot of economic damage.” More

Man’s ingenuity at work: harness our power of creativity to destroy our fellow man. Our species doesn’t deserve to survive.

Times Online
British forces in Afghanistan have used one of the world’s most deadly and controversial missiles to fight the Taliban. Apache attack helicopters have fired the thermobaric weapons against fighters in buildings and caves, to create a pressure wave which sucks the air out of victims, shreds their internal organs and crushes their bodies. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has admitted to the use of the weapons, condemned by human rights groups as “brutal”, on several occasions, including against a cave complex.

Thermobaric weapons, or vacuum bombs, were first combat-tested by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s and their use by Russia against civilians in Chechnya in the 1990s was condemned worldwide. The weapons are so controversial that MoD weapons and legal experts spent 18 months debating whether British troops could use them without breaking international law. More

WIRED
To you or me, a monorail is a way to get around an airport, or a theme park. To a group of Israeli and German engineers, [German engineers? From the same country that brought them the ovens] it’s a high-tech defense, scanning for intruders.

Linceus GmbH is looking to turn miniature monorail cars into camera-equipped sentries, zipping around at nearly 50 miles per hour. And unlike human guards, Defense News’ Barbara Opall-Rome reports, these rail-riding robo-watchers are “impervious to bad weather; operate around the clock; and come equipped with dazzling spotlights, high-decibel acoustics and other nonlethal means of warn­ing the unwitting.” A demonstration at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport is planned for next week.

The sentries are outfitted with a thermal and standard camera; laser pointer and laser rangefinder are optional. “Video, voice and oth­er data are broadcast through em­bedded cable on the rail, which also provides the electricity powering the rider’s engine and onboard sub­systems,” Opall-Rome adds. More

The Mars Phoenix Lander has found ice on the surface of the Red Planet, triumphant NASA scientists said, a key discovery for the spacecraft as it searches for water and signs of life on Earth’s closet planetary neighbour. The proof came in a series of pictures sent back by Phoenix of a trench it dug with its robotic arm at the arctic circle of Mars, showing dice-sized chunks of white material that are seen to melt away over the course of several days.

“It is with great pride and a lot of joy today that I announce we’ve found the proof we’ve been seeking that this really is water ice and not some other material,” mission principal investigator Peter Smith, of the University of Arizona, said at a press conference. The presence of water on Mars is crucial because it is a key to the question of whether life, even in the form of mere microbes, exists or has has ever existed on Mars. On Earth, water is a necessary ingredient for life. More

Willard Payne
Israel has continued to make preparations to confront the growing threat from Tehran by forming an Iran Command within the Israel Air Force (IAF). Debka reported last month [that] recently retired chief of the IAF; Brigadier General Eliezer Shkedy stated Israel should take action against Iran even if it means acting alone.

Though I will be personally surprised if the IAF will have to time with the major threats on Israel’s border with Hamas-Hezbollah-Lebanon-Syria, the IAF may be able to conduct a few missions even though Iran’s most important installations are underground and nuclear bomb proof. A few raids could really boost public morale and some important bases above ground could still be hit, missile and air bases. More

Called the Penetrator, scientists hope to fire four of these space-faring projectiles into the Moon from spacecraft in close orbit to the lunar surface. Once deployed, they are designed to bury themselves deep into the Moon’s crust.

These projectiles aren’t loaded with explosives, instead they are packed full of scientific equipment. The thought is that by burying these probes deep under the Moon’s surface, scientists will be able to uncover hereto unknown secrets about the Moon’s composition. More

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera would make a great backyard telescope for viewing Mars, and we can also use it at Mars to view other planets. This is an image of Earth and the moon, acquired on October 3, 2007, by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

On the day this image was taken, the Japanese Kayuga (Selene) spacecraft was en route from the Earth to the moon, and has since returned spectacular images and movies. On the Earth image we can make out the west coast outline of South America at lower right, although the clouds are the dominant features. These clouds are so bright, compared with the moon, that they are saturated in the HiRISE images. More

Think we don’t live in an Orwellian world? Check this out
Photo Credit
USA TODAY
Body-scanning machines that show images of people underneath their clothing are being installed in 10 of the nation’s busiest airports in one of the biggest public uses of security devices that reveal intimate body parts. The scanners bounce harmless “millimeter waves” off passengers who are selected to stand inside a portal with arms raised after clearing the metal detector. A TSA screener in a nearby room views the black-and-white image [I wonder what they’re doing while they watch] and looks for objects on a screen that are shaded differently from the body. Finding a suspicious object, a screener radios a colleague at the checkpoint to search the passenger.

The TSA says it protects privacy by blurring passengers’ faces and deleting images right after viewing. Yet the images are detailed, clearly showing a person’s gender. “You can actually see the sweat on someone’s back,” Schear said.

Stepping into the 9-foot-tall glass booth, Eileen Reardon of Baltimore looked startled when an electronic glass door slid around the outside of the machine to create the image of her body. “Some of this stuff seems a little crazy,” Reardon said, “but in this day and age, you have to go along with it.” More

“…but in this day and age, you have to go along with it”. There you have it. That sizes up the limp-brained walking dead mindset that permeates America and the rest of the world. Willing slaves in a dumbed-down sound bite, REAL Matrix world that we’re all slowly acquiescing to.

Realize that our thoughts emit electromagnetic fields and attract or repel others. Our thoughts also draw events to us that occur in our lives. Now you can see what those magnetic fields look like.

Scientists from NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory excitedly describe their discoveries. Natural magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic, ever-changing geometries as scientists from NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory excitedly describe their discoveries. The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic, ever-changing geometries.

All action takes place around NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries. Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers’ produced by fleeting electrons. Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world? More

Jessica Dolcourt
Demanding a better-than-average processor, a 1024×768 screen resolution, a boatload of RAM, and a strong video card just to take part, it’s hard to believe that Second Life, the virtual world developed by Linden Lab (download for Windows and Mac), could ever survive on a mobile phone.

Yet on Tuesday, Vollee, a 3G streaming services provider, has begun offering the free open beta version of Second Life for 40 3G and Wi-Fi-enabled cell phones with more handset compatibility coming soon. That means you, iPhone. More

Facebook, the burgeoning social network, abruptly withdrew its support for Google’s Friend Connect, meaning that none of Facebook’s tens of millions of members could sign in to Web sites using Google’s new service. In the common social networks, people communicate, organize and socialize largely within sites — such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn — but not outside of them. This model, referred to in geek parlance as the “walled garden,” ensures that social networking sites get immense traffic and screen time from members, and the revenue that comes with that.

Many in the industry are proposing a different model, however, in which every Web site will have a social aspect. In this scenario, there will be no need for a person to confine socializing to MySpace or Facebook. People could tap into their information — contacts and pictures — as they roam the Web. The social networking sites would function more like a utility, storing a person’s contacts, photographs and other tidbits. More

Photo Savannah Grandfather
Warmongering on the planet isn’t good enough for mankind. Let’s extend our warring nature to outerspace. There’s no hope for our species.

The United States and other Western nations have criticised China’s efforts to build a presence in space, especially a test in January 2007 when it shot down one of its own aged satellites.

But in a book issued by the state-run China Arms Control and Disarmament Association, two People’s Liberation Army (PLA) experts said Washington’s bid for enduring security domination in outer space was pressing Beijing and other powers into competition, even confrontation.

“Strategic confrontation in outer space is difficult to avoid. The development of outer space forces shows signs that a space arms race to seize the commanding heights is emerging,” wrote Wu Tianfu of the Second Artillery Corps Command College. The Corps controls China’s nuclear arsenal. “We can say that weaponisation of outer space… is already unstoppable.” More

Net Neutrality: Every significant Internet provider around the globe is currently in talks with access and content providers to transform the internet into a television-like medium: no more freedom, you pay for a small commercial package of sites you can visit and you’ll have to pay for separate subscriptions for every site that’s not in the package.

Erick Schonfeld
TechCrunch
Is a picture worth a thousand clicks? You’ve heard of contextual ads triggered by keywords on a Web page. Now, get ready for contextual ads triggered by images on the page. Visual-shopping search engine Like.com is running ads on Facebook that appear to match objects in profile photos.

Notice the ad by Like.com in the lower left for aviator sunglasses in the screen shot shown here, sent to us by TechCrunch reader Luke Bearden? Yup, those look eerily similar to the aviator sunglasses Bearden is wearing in his Facebook photo. Well, at least we know that Like.com’s technology works. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence. More

Photo by uriba
cnet.com
They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by–their gender, approximate age, and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database. Behind the technology are small start-ups that say they are not storing actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. [Yeah, right.]

The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon.

The goal, these companies say, is to tailor a digital display to the person standing in front of it–to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white woman, for example, and a different one to a teenage Asian boy. More

sfgate.com
Elated scientists probing the arctic surface of Mars with their newly-landed Phoenix spacecraft said Saturday they are convinced they have found a bright and shiny layer of real ice only inches beneath the Martian soil and directly under the body of the lander itself.

“It’s the consensus of all of us that we have found ice,” said Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson as he talked to reporters in a conference call only six days after Phoenix landed safely from Earth. “It’s shiny and smooth — it’s absolutely astounding!” But Smith did add a note of scientific caution: “It’s not impossible that it’s something else,” he conceded, “but our leading interpretation is ice. We are looking at an extended table of ice.”

And it turns out that Phoenix itself made the epochal discovery, for it was the exhaust from the lander’s twelve retrorockets — firing during the last few seconds of the spacecraft’s touchdown last Sunday -that blew a mere three to six inches inches of Martian topsoil away and uncovered the patch of ice near one of the lander’s three legs. The camera on the lander’s robotic arm snapped images of the flat gleaming slab. Smith added that the newly discovered ice is not the kind of solid carbon dioxide -we call it dry ice — that covers the Martian polar cap, Smith said. More

zdnet.com
It’s official, even a pothead can social engineer Network Solutions. In an in-depth interview with the hijackers, featuring some screenshots showing they had access to the complete portfolio of over 200 domain names controlled by Comcast, the details of how they did it, and why they did it are now coming straight from the source of the attack:

The hackers say the attack began Tuesday, when the pair used a combination of social engineering and a technical hack to get into Comcast’s domain management console at Network Solutions. They declined to detail their technique, but said it relied on a flaw at the Virginia-based domain registrar. Network Solutions spokeswoman Susan Wade disputes the hackers’ account. “We now know that it was nothing on our end,” she says. “There was no breach in our system or social engineering situation on our end.”

However they got in, the intrusion gave the pair control of over 200 domain names owned by Comcast. They changed the contact information for one of them, Comcast.net, to Defiant’s e-mail address; for the street address, they used the “Dildo Room” at “69 Dick Tard Lane.” Comcast, they said, noticed the administrative transfer and wrested back control, forcing the hackers to repeat the exploit to regain ownership of the domain. Then, they say, they contacted Comcast’s original technical contact at his home number to tell him what they’d done.

More

Clip of “Recount”


Brad Friedman
Retelling of Florida’s 2000 Election Debacle Condenses 36 Days of Aborted Democracy into 2 Hours of Taut, Heartbreaking Political Suspense

…And Yet, the Lessons Continue to be Ignored…

“Laura Dern, in our opinion, actually underplayed the role of walking caricature, FL SoS Katherine Harris, who’s seen awaking into her dream role as the ultimate GOP power broker able to hand the “victory” to Bush in Florida, while advised by the ever-present Republican lobbyist J.M. “Mac the Knife” Stipanovich (Bruce McGill), who somehow was able to obtain direct access to the inner-sanctum office of the SoS/Co-chair of Bush’s Florida campaign.

That Dern actually underplayed the role — despite having brought so much camp, the only thing missing was a tent, a sleeping bag and a flashlight — is a point made strikingly clear during the film’s closing credits as shots of the actual historical players, just portrayed in the film, flash by in dreadful reminder that what we just saw was, sadly, all too real. The actual Harris, far more camped-out and tramped-out then anyone could possibly play “credibly”, is seen, on horseback, celebrating her rich post-Election theft reward as a new U.S. Congresswoman (only to fall in disgrace just one Congressional session later), out-camping Dern hands down and breasts up”.

Read more

Photo sskennel
Paul Rogat Loeb
Look at Mrs. Clinton’s math. She leads only if you give her 328,000 votes for the Michigan primary election, while giving Mr. Obama zero for not being on the ballot. But you also have to ignore the caucuses of Iowa, Nevada, Maine and my state of Washington - where a record quarter-million people turned out to participate. Our votes don’t count under Mrs. Clinton’s math.

Mrs. Clinton’s emphasis on popular vote totals also ignores that this isn’t how the party’s rules are set up, and that if they had been, Mr. Obama would have made time, after the Iowa victory that made voters take him seriously, to have visited California and New York more than he did, given the size of those states.

Every time Mrs. Clinton claims she has a popular majority, she’s shattering whatever cease-fire exists and making it that much more likely that her supporters will stay home in November. If she really wants a united party, she needs to stop, and the superdelegates need to hold her accountable.
More

Latest Images, Raw Images from Surface Stereo ImagerRaw, Image Mosaics
NASA’s Phoenix Spacecraft Commanded to Unstow Arm
05.28.08 — Scientists leading NASA’s Phoenix Mars mission from the University of Arizona in Tucson sent commands to unstow its robotic arm and take more images of its landing site early today.

NASA Mars Lander Prepares to Move Arm
05.27.08 — NASA’s Phoenix Lander is ready to begin moving its robotic arm, first unlatching its wrist and then flexing its elbow.

Mission Management
The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith at the University of Arizona, Tucson, with project management at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and development partnership at Lockheed Martin, Denver. International contributions are provided by the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. More

NewScientist.com
IF YOU thought it was hard finding the email address that some other john.smith hasn’t already bagged, that’s nothing compared with the difficulty you’ll have getting an internet connection for your computer after 2011.

As of this month 85 per cent of the 4.3 billion available Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which identify devices connected to the net, are already in use. Within three years they will all be used up, according to a report by the OECD. “The situation is critical for the future of the internet economy,” it says.

The report urges governments and businesses to upgrade from the current version, IPv4, to IPv6, which effectively has an unlimited number of IP addresses. IPv6 has been available for more than a decade but service providers have been slow to adopt it.

Phoenix:Downlink of Data3

Phoenix Mars Lander: Entry Descent Landing
Mars is a cold desert planet with no liquid water on its surface. But in the Martian arctic, water ice lurks just below ground level. Discoveries made by the Mars Odyssey Orbiter in 2002 show large amounts of subsurface water ice in the northern arctic plain. The Phoenix lander targets this circumpolar region using a robotic arm to dig through the protective top soil layer to the water ice below and ultimately, to bring both soil and water ice to the lander platform for sophisticated scientific analysis.

Photo http2007
Nasa Tv will be broadcasting live coverage of Mars Phoenix Lander on NASA TV from 3:00 PM to 9:30 p.m Eastern U.S. time including Mars Phoenix Lander (Briefing, Landing Coverage and most importantly First Downlink of Data).

NASA Television is now carried on an MPEG-2 digital signal accessed via satellite AMC-6, at 72 degrees west longitude, transponder 17C, 4040 MHz, vertical polarization. A Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) - compliant Integrated Receiver Decoder (IRD) with modulation of QPSK/DBV, data rate of 36.86 and FEC 3/4 is needed for reception. NASA TV Multichannel Broadcast includes: Public Services Channel (Channel 101); the Education Channel (Channel 102) and the Media Services Channel (Channel 103).
Read more
Click here for NASA TV

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The historically less-than-50 percent odds of success loomed heavily as NASA scientists readied for Sunday’s landing of the 420-million-dollar Phoenix spacecraft near Mars’s frigid north pole. “I’m a little nervous on the inside. … This is not an easy thing to do,” Phoenix scientist Peter Smith said Saturday of the landing due late the following day.

“There’s a lot of uncertainties left. … Mars is always there to throw those uncertainties at us,” added Doug McCuistion, Mars Exploration Program Director, of what NASA calls “the scariest seven minutes of the mission” — the period of hyper-deceleration and descent onto the Red Planet. Mission specialists were reviewing data to decide whether a course-correction maneuver would be needed eight hours ahead of touch-down to keep the Phoenix on track for landing in a relatively rock-free, flat region in the Mars arctic after its 679-million-kilometer (422-million-mile) journey from Earth. Read more

Rob Manning, chief engineer for JPL’s Mars Program, walks us through a simulation of the Mars Phoenix

Photo GISuser.com
Popsci.com
What does the past look like from 200 miles up? A new generation of archaeologists has found that the history of civilization may look far clearer from the top of the atmosphere than it does from the bottom of a dig. For Damian Evans and Bill Saturno, now surveying Lingapura from atop a crumbling 1,000-year-old tower, the mines don’t really matter. Evans and Saturno are among a growing group of archaeologists who use radar, satellite imagery and other advanced technologies to uncover the mysteries surrounding ancient civilizations. Read more

Yochi J. Dreazen
Wall Street Journal
With fuel prices soaring, the U.S. military, the country’s largest single consumer of oil, is turning into an alternative-fuels pioneer. In March, Air Force Capt. Rick Fournier flew a B-1 stealth bomber code-named Dark 33 across this sprawling proving ground, to confirm for the first time that a plane could break the sound barrier using synthetic jet fuel. A similar formula — a blend of half-synthetic and half-conventional petroleum — has been used in some South African commercial airliners for years, but never in a jet going so fast. Read more

Photo kokogiak
Lewis Smith
Timesonline
Hot springs capable of sustaining life once bubbled away on the surface of Mars, researchers say after Spirit, a robotic explorer vehicle, detected tell-tale deposits of silica on the surface of Mars. Jack Farmer, a professor of astrobiology at Arizona State University, said: “On Earth, hydrothermal deposits teem with life and the associated silica deposits typically contain fossil remains of microbes.”

But we don’t know if that’s the case here because the rovers don’t carry instruments that can detect microscopic life. What we can say is that this was once a habitable environment where liquid water and the energy needed for life were present.” The silica was in the Gusev Crater and would have been formed when volcanic stream or hot water burst through the surface. Nasa’s Phoenix probe is due to land on Mars on Sunday.

Lara Farrar
CNN
In all its optical brilliance and brass and wood, there stood the (see photo) Telectroscope: an 11.2-meter-(37 feet) long by 3.3-meter-(11 feet) tall dream of a device allowing people on one side of the Atlantic to look into its person-size lens and, in real time, see those on the other side via a recently completed tunnel running under the ocean. (Think 19th-century Webcam. Or maybe Victorian-age video phone.)

And all the credit goes to British artist Paul St. George. If he had not been rummaging through great-grandpa Alexander’s personal effects a few years ago, the Telectroscope might still exist only on paper, hidden away deep inside some old box. Read more

Photo James Gordon

Dave Demerjian
Wired
Researchers at the Engineering and Sciences Research Council are developing composite materials that “bleed” resin when stressed or damaged, effectively creating a “scab” that fixes the damage. It’s an innovation that could drastically improve air safety, foster the development of lighter aircraft and bring biomimicry to aviation.

“This project represents just the first step”, says Dr. Ian Bond, the aerospace professor leading the research. “We’re also developing systems where the healing agent isn’t contained in individual glass fibres but actually moves around as part of a fully integrated vascular network, just like the circulatory systems found in animals and plants. Read more

Ofri Ilani,
Haaretz Correspondent
Photosynthesis is nearly the sole source of energy for the creatures inhabiting our planet, include the two-legged variety. For billions of years, since the appearance of the first vegetable cell, plants and bacteria have converted sunlight into energy-rich compounds. That is how all petroleum and coal reserves were created. Unfortunately, about 200 years of post-Industrial Revolution activity has wiped out most of these, and today’s vegetation cannot take up the slack.

Photovoltaic cells made of silicon can convert solar energy to electricity, but due to their extremely high price, it costs four times more to generate power this way than with coal or petroleum. Now, researchers from Tel Aviv University (TAU) claim to have created a prototype of a photovoltaic cell by genetically engineering proteins that produce energy using photosynthesis. If successful, this would enable energy production on a commercial scale through the construction of “artificial leaves.” The cells would even appear green, because of the wavelength of the light that they collect. Read more

Photo azrainman

DANIEL COCHLIN
Mail Online
Plans for a robot that can crawl like a spider are ‘well developed’. British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield, helping to save thousands of lives.

Prototypes could be on the front line by the end of the year, scuttling into potential danger areas such as booby-trapped buildings or enemy hideouts to relay images back to troops safely positioned nearby.

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