A nonprofit called Common Crawl is now using its own Web crawler and making a giant copy of the Web that it makes accessible to anyone.
The organization offers up over five billion Web pages, available for free so that researchers and entrepreneurs can try things otherwise possible only for those with access to resources on the scale of Google’s, MIT Technology Review reports.… read more
Know people who are changing the world? Encourage them to apply for The Tech Awards 2013, a program of the Tech Museum, San Jose, CA.
Categories: Environment, Education, Young Innovator (under 27), Health, Economic Development.
Benefit: cash prizes of $75,000 and $25,000 awarded in each category; access to mentors, funders, media, former laureates.
Deadline: May 1, 2013
An unmanned vehicle designed by Military Transportation University of the PLA (MTU) recently won top prize in the fourth Future Challenge, a contest for intelligent vehicles, China.org.cn reports.
The vehicle, a third-generation prototype named “Fierce Lion 3,” completed a 114-kilometer journey within 85 minutes, with a top speed of 105 kilometers per hour, making itself China’s first unmanned vehicle to pass a freeway test.
Third party… read more
The European Commission has selected the two research proposals it will fund to the tune of half-a-billion euros ($650 million U.S.) each, after a two-year, high-profile contest, Nature News reports.
The Human Brain Project, led by neuroscientist Henry Markram at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, plans to simulate the human brain in a supercomputer. (See “Brain in… read more
By carefully controlling the shape of water droplets with an ultraviolet laser, a team of researchers from Australia and France has found a way to coax silica (silicon dioxide) nanoparticles to self-assemble into highly uniform silica wires, hair-like slivers of silica.
Such silica microwires could enable applications and technology not currently possible with comparatively bulky optical fiber.
The international team describes the research in a paper… read more
To honor Aaron Swartz, a contributor to the Open Government book, O’Reilly Media has posted the Open Government book files for free for anyone to download, read and share, says co-author Laurel Ruma on O’Reilly Radar.
The files are posted on the O’Reilly Media GitHub account as PDF, Mobi, and EPUB files for now here: github.com/oreillymedia/open_government.
DARPA’s planned Phoenix program is intended to develop and demonstrate technologies to cooperatively harvest and re-use valuable components from retired, nonworking satellites in geosynchronous orbit (GEO) at greatly reduced cost.
Today, when a communication satellite fails, it usually means the expensive prospect of having to launch a brand new replacement communication satellite. Many of the satellites that are obsolete or have failed still have usable antennas, solar… read more
At CES, Intel demoed its latest big idea — “perceptual computing,” MIT Technology Review reports.
With perceptual computing, Intel envisions a new kind of interface for devices that will let users switch fluently between keyboards, trackpads, touch screens, voice commands, and gestures — or use several modes of interaction at once.
Perceptual computing is Intel’s attempt to keep laptops relevant in a consumer-tech landscape… read more
For 25 years, Scottish science fiction writer Iain M. Banks, author of the Culture Series, has been writing about a utopian post-scarcity civilization managed by artificially intelligent drones known as Minds, and preoccupied by artificial intelligence, games, and interactions with other civilizations.
In the latest novel published in October, The Hydrogen Sonata, a civilization known as the Gzilt are making preparations to Sublime — in… read more
Northwestern Medicine researchers have developed a nanoparticle that attacks a cancerous lymphoma cell by mimicking HDL.(high-density lipoprotein) cholesterol, an essential nutrient for the cell.
The nanoparticle tricks the cell by blocking cholesterol from entering the cell. Deprived of an essential nutrient, the cell eventually dies.
The new study by C. Shad Thaxton, M.D., and Leo I. Gordon, M.D. shows that these… read more
A new finding by Harvard stem cell biologists turns one of the basics of neurobiology on its head — demonstrating that it is possible to turn one type of already differentiated (formed from a stem cell) neuron into another within the brain.
The discovery by Paola Arlotta and Caroline Rouaux indicates that “maybe the brain is not as immutable as we… read more
Cambridge University researchers have published a paper that they say proves that four-stranded “quadruple helix” DNA structures (G-quadruplexes) exist within the human genome.
They form in regions of DNA that are rich in the DNA building block guanine (G).
The findings mark the culmination of over 10 years investigation by scientists to show these complex structures in vivo (in living human cells) using computational… read more
Akamai, the Web optimization company whose servers deliver up to 30 percent of Web traffic, is setting its sights on creating a TV technology that can detect what a person is watching and stream secondary content to a smartphone or tablet in near real-time, MIT Technology Review reports.
The aim, the company says, is to take today’s fast-growing but chaotic landscape of TV “companion” apps… read more
In a SPIEGEL interview, synthetic biology expert and Harvard University professor of genetics George Church explains how DNA will become the building material of the future — one that can help create virus-resistant human beings and possibly bring back lost species like the Neanderthal.
In his new book, “Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves,” which he has also… read more