Content and news by Geek Girl

Ok I realize this is not technically ‘tech’ but the science of tech is still of interest.

Every year, DISCOVER digs through reams of newspapers and gigabytes of Web sites to find the 100 most important and interesting science stories of the year. Here is the latest installment, chronicling everything from alien planets (#45) to “yeti” crabs (#86).

While I don’t necessarily agree with the number one ranking story’s placement, I will concede there are quite a few amazing stories on that list. We’ve come a long way, baby!

Discover’s Top 100 Science Stories of 2006

USB drives are pretty ambiguous these days and you can get them in some pretty big capacities. In fact, they’re so cheap that you can get a gigabyte of storage for $15, and two for as low as $25. Once you get past the 4 GB mark though, prices sky rocket and the selection becomes pathetic. To solve this, a pretty simple and cool solution was concocted: have thumb drives connect together, forming little snakes of thumb drives. This is definitely one of those “why didn’t I think of that and patent it then sell it for millions” inventions.

The lovely little picture pretty much explains it all. You stick the male connector of one USB drive into the female connector of another, and then the first USB drive has more capacity, that of the newly added one. So, conceivably you could get one uber-geeky USB drive. Maybe a chain of 10 or so 2 GB sticks, of course, it won’t exactly be pocketable anymore, but it’s cool nonetheless. Not to mention, all of them are bright and vibrant colors, the kind of color that make you smile. And, they’re bendable! Colorful + linkable + bendy = awesome.

Via Coolest Gadgets

Sadly, this is just a concept design at this point, but I’m sure it won’t stay a concept for long. Some company will hopefully buy the rights to this idea, and implement it in their next line of USB drives

Both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Windows dominate their respective markets, and it is not surprising that the decision to update to the current release of Internet Explorer 7.0 and/or Windows Vista is fraught with uncertainty. Primary in the minds of IT security professionals is the question of vulnerabilities that may be present in these two groundbreaking products.

To help assuage this uncertainty, iDefense Labs is pleased to announce the Q1, 2007 quarterly challenge. iDefense will pay $8,000 for each submitted vulnerability that allows an attacker to remotely exploit and execute arbitrary code on either of these two products. Only the first submission for a given vulnerability will qualify for the award, and iDefense will award no more than six payments of $8,000. If more than six submissions qualify, the earliest six submissions (based on submission date and time) will receive the award. The iDefense Team at VeriSign will be responsible for making the final determination of whether or not a submission qualifies for the award.

Take the Challenge!

The National Conference for Media Reform is for anyone who is concerned about the state of our media and committed to working for change. This energizing weekend presents ideas and strategies for winning the fight for better media and connects
you with thousands of media reformers from across the nation.

The conference kicks off on Friday, January 12, 2007 in Memphis, Tennessee. You can register on-site in Memphis at the Cook Convention Center, Ballroom Level, Thursday 5 to 8 p.m. and all day Friday and Saturday.

If you can’t make it to Memphis, stay tuned to this site for live video streams of the plenaries and keynote session as well as the Friday night concert and rally.

William Shatner revealed to SCI FI Wire that the upcoming 11th Star Trek movie will indeed, as rumored, deal with the early years of Capt. James T. Kirk and Spock—and that he will definitely appear in the movie if director J.J. Abrams can find a place to use him. Shatner, who originated the role of Kirk in the original Trek series and several subsequent films, said in an interview that he was invited to meet with Abrams (Mission: Impossible III), who is also co-writing the movie.

Earlier this week Sony proudly announced that the company had won a Technology and Engineering Emmy Award for their motion sensitive SIXAXIS PS3 wireless game controller. Gamers were dumbfounded, since it’s the Nintendo Wii controller that first made strides in innovative motion sensitivity, and it’s debated that the SIXAXIS’s less sexy motion sensitivity was included as a late development cycle rush job in response (at the cost of force-feedback).

Someone decided to ask the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences what the hell was going on, and apparently Sony won no such honor. The award Sony received was actually for their dual shock analog controller, released years ago. Sony took most of today to address the award hallucination as people debated whether the company was just confused, or was intentionally misleading the public in order to re-inflate what has been a difficult launch cycle for their PS3 game system. Ultimately the company issued a brief statement that blamed the mixup on “miscommunication between the two organizations.”

Via Techdirt

Matías aka matonga the developer of WinExpose has announced on the AquaSoft forums that he will discontinue developing WinExposé. However, he will soon publish the latest version, plus the source code, probably under the GPL.

WinExposé is a clone of Mac OS X’s Exposé, but for Microsoft Windows. You can view this extremely useful app at the WinExposé site.

The 110th Congress tipped its hand late Tuesday as to which way it is leaning with the reintroduction of a bill that would bar telecommunications carriers from charging commercial tolls on the Internet, in effect making Net neutrality the law in the United States.

It will be the second go-around for the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2007, which was introduced in bipartisan fashion by Senators Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), among others.

The bill, which was introduced in committee in May last year, will reignite last year’s very divisive Net neutrality debate, but this time supporters of the bill believe they have the upper hand since this Congress, unlike the last one, is controlled by Democrats.

The bill also follows another Internet-related bill introduced Monday in the House of Representatives by Chris Smith (R-New Jersey). The legislation reignites a debate that started last year. It blocks U.S. companies from cooperating with repressive regimes.

New Scientist Tech tells us that a cheap self-assembly device capable of fabricating 3D objects has been developed by US researchers. They hope the machine could kick start a revolution in home fabrication – or “rapid prototyping” – just as early computer kits sparked an explosion in home computing.

Rapid prototyping machines are already used by designers, engineers and scientists to create one-off mechanical parts and models. These create objects by depositing layer upon layer of liquid or powdered material.

These machines typically cost from $20,000 to $1.5 million, says Hod Lipson from Cornell University, US, who launched the Fab@Home project with PhD student Evan Malone in October 2006.

The standard version of their Freeform fabricator – or “fabber” – is about the size of a microwave oven and can be assembled for around $2400 (£1200). It can generate 3D objects from plastic and various other materials. Full documentation on how to build and operate the machine, along with all the software required, are available on the Fab@Home website, and all designs, documents and software have been released for free.

Google Earth is now on its fourth incarnation. Seeing 3D terrain and buildings is one of the coolest features of Google Earth. They’ve added higher-quality terrain data for many mountainous regions, as well as support for “textured” 3D buildings–meaning bricks look like real bricks, glass looks like real glass, and overall, the world looks more like the real world. It’s just one more step on the path of creating a life-like 3D model of the whole planet.

Download Google Earth 4 now

The Vanishing Point is a puzzle challenge spanning the globe with prizes that take you beyond it, including a trip to see the ultimate vista.

Each week, twelve puzzles are posted along with footage of spectacular real world events around the globe. Every puzzle has a piece hidden in a live event. You have to find puzzle pieces disguised in the real world to complete each challenge.

Why? you ask? The Grand Prize is a TRIP TO SPACE….how can you possible not want to go there!?!

Register and Play at Vanishing Point

When I first saw this statement: “The trick is to shrink a coaxial cable by a factor of 10,000 so the diameter is smaller than the wavelength of visible light.” my first thought was, “Oh, is that all?”

Seriously, the article over at New Scientist Tech is certainly interesting with reference to carbon nanotube technology you can assume this isn’t exactly available at your tech store today, but soonâ„¢ !

Wired News tells us that while it took two years and the software costs $100, Mac-owning TiVo users can finally move recorded shows onto their Mac or iPod.

In a joint release on Monday morning, TiVo and Roxio announced that Toast Titanium 8, available immediately, includes full TiVoToGo functionality. The announcement comes two years after the software was released for Windows and nearly as long since TiVo first promised it would be made available to Mac users.

From DailyTech: ASUS introduces the world’s first external graphics card for notebook users!

ASUS today introduced a dedicated external graphics card for laptops — the XG Station. The XG Station is an external graphics card that allows laptop users to enjoy high end graphics performance while plugged in. As the XG Station is an external graphics it can be unplugged when portability is needed.

The XG Station connects to any notebook’s ExpressCard slot and provides a PCI Express x16 slot for graphics cards. Since ASUS has opted to equip the XG Station with a standard PCI Express x16 slot, the station can be equipped with any PCI Express based graphics card: AMD, NVIDIA or even Matrox. ASUS launched the default XG Station with an NVIDIA 7900GS powered graphics card.

The XG Station is powered externally. A separate power brick plugs directly into the adaptor. An integrated LCD display and control also grace the XG Station. The display is customizable and can display information such as frame rate, fan speed, GPU temperature and more while the control knob can change various settings of the XG Station such as the core and memory clocks.

Expect ASUS to release the XG Station in Q2’07 this year. Pricing of the XG Station is unknown at the moment.
The XG Station adaptor only interfaces with ExpressCard interfaces at the moment, but will work with with PCIe ExpressCard interfaces installed in a desktop PC.

“Cotropitorii” has been reviewed at Bytepress and is a single-player/MMOFPS, depending on how you choose to play it, developed by the Romanian studio, 2 Bad Design. It is a low-budget game, really low budget, but that, contrary to what’s expected of it, manages to get a relatively good mark.

Quoted from the review

“It’s a free game, a free MMOFPS, freely downloadable, that works “out-of-the-box”. Even if the game’s interface is in Romanian and partially English, all English-knowing gamers can make it through the interface and enter an already created LAN game, or maybe, create their own, without to much knowledge.

Wired News lets us know that flash-memory-aided hard drives and software that harnesses the full power of multi-core CPUs will make PCs speedier and more convenient in 2007.

Next-gen computers will boot up and load applications more quickly as speedy flash memory helps alleviate the bottleneck caused by the slower rotations of a traditional hard disk’s components.

Flash memory’s efficiency could also increase laptop battery life and shave time off the “very agonizing seconds” that pass as PCs awake from hibernation mode, said Mike Trainor, chief mobile technology evangelist for Intel. Such advances should increase demand for portable machines and further the demise of the desktop as the mainstream PC form factor.

Internet users are being urged to check that they have the latest version of Adobe’s Acrobat Reader software, a popular application used to view PDF (portable document format) files.

Security experts have warned that a plug-in for the application could allow hackers to see and edit the folders on a person’s hard drive. Users of Mozilla’s Firefox browser and people using versions of Internet Explorer previous to the latest version, IE7, are at risk.

“PDF files are trusted and very popular, making any significant PDF vulnerability a cause for concern” said Ken Dunham of security firm iDefense. There have been no reports of any hackers actively exploiting the flaw at the moment but according to Dunham, exploit code is available on the internet.

“One of the main websites hosting code for this vulnerability has been hammered with traffic all day, showing great interest in this new exploit” he was quoted as saying.

Internet users are advised to upgrade to version 8 of Acrobat Reader, which is available here.

In an effort to head off an impending format war between rival high-definition disc standards, according to New Scientist Tech, electronics firms will unveil dual-format discs and players at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, US.

Discs and players compatible with both Blu-ray (backed by Philips, Sony and Panasonic) and HD-DVD (supported by Toshiba, NEC, Microsoft, Warner and Universal) will debut at the show, which opens on 8 January.

South Korean electronics firm LG will offer a player featuring a dual standard disc reader, which can read both types of disc. Although prices have yet to be finalised, the dual-format player will initially be more expensive than single-format DVD devices.

Meanwhile, Warner Brothers plans to support both formats with a disc that works in either type of player. The studios new Total Hi-Def discs will have a Blu-ray movie on one side and the same film in HD-DVD format on the other.

Rwanda is the eighth developing country to join the One Laptop Per Child initiative aimed at giving away inexpensive computers to all young students.

If you enjoy hand writing more than typing, then the io2 pen was made for you. Though this is a product that’s been out for a while, we are taking a fresh look at it today to see if it stands the test of time. In the end, it still proves to be a quality product worthy of your consideration.