Pilot plant, anyone?

Rainforest Fungus Naturally Synthesizes Diesel | Wired Science from Wired.com

A fungus that lives inside trees in the Patagonian rain forest naturally makes a mix of hydrocarbons that bears a striking resemblance to diesel, biologists announced today. And the fungus can grow on cellulose, a major component of tree trunks, blades of grass and stalks that is the most abundant carbon-based plant material on Earth.

“When we looked at the gas analysis, I was flabbergasted,” said Gary Strobel, a plant scientist at Montana State University, and the lead author of a paper in Microbiology describing the find. “We were looking at the essence of diesel fuel.”

Even if something like this isn’t feasible for industrial production, where you have to account to feedstock transportation, distribution, capital costs of building a fermenter, blah blah blah, it could be very nice on a local level. Just bury a pot in the compost bin out back, and come back to a full gas tank every now and then.

The right kind of electric truck

Yee-hah! Ford demos electric pick-up truck | Register Hardware

The project is a collaboration between Ford and British company PML-Flightlink and is powered by PML’s Hi-Pa Drive system, which puts a 100+ bhp electric motor in each wheel. The whole thing is driven by a 40kWh battery pack that sits under the chassis, and includes a generator to recapture and convert kinetic energy during braking.
…

Each 30kg motor also delivers 150lb-ft of torque from idle making it more powerful than the planet-bashing 320bhp 5.4l V8 version of the pick-up it’s based on. Yee-hah.

I know a lot of tradespeople who might be interested in something like this. There’s always power for recharging at a jobsite, and almost never more than 100 miles of travel a day. And it’s deductible…

If only they weren’t $300K a pop

Another 180 ‘hover & stare’ ducted fan bots for US forces • The Register

The little petrol-powered hoverbots are just over a foot across and weigh only 17 pounds, small enough to be carried in a backpack. They can stay up for 40 minutes, cruise at 45 mph and climb to 7,000 feet or more - all while streaming live video back to the operator. The latest feature is a gimbaled (pan-tilt) camera - with earlier MAVs the operator had to turn the vehicle to look in different directions.

But I’m sure that includes great service and warranty…

Just when you thought it was safe to blog

Fake site punts Trojanised WordPress • The Register

The fake Wordpresz.org site offered up what purports to be version 2.6.4 of the open source blogging tool. In reality all but one of the files are identical to the latest pukka (2.6.3) version of WordPress.

The crucial difference comes in the form of a Trojanised version of pluggable.php, according to Sophos virus researcher Paul Baccas. Sophos detects the malicious code as WPHack-A Trojan.

“The new PHP contains call backs to the Fake WordPress site and looks to be stealing credentials,” Baccas reports.

One is, of course, shocked, shocked to learn that the registrar is EstDomains…

Sometimes I think registrars should be on the hook when they take money to register domains that could pretty much only be used for fraud. For example, what was register.com thinking when they took money for “yahoomarketingadui.com” with all contact information anonymized? Did they really imagine someone wouldn’t use it for phishing email?

Yeah, I know. Horizon-spanning herd of horses, barn door.

Beria would be proud

Judge Opens First Habeas Corpus Hearing on Guantánamo Detainees - NYTimes.com

But after opening statements that did not detail the evidence, the judge, Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court here, closed the courtroom, saying the evidence was classified. The government says the six men whose cases are being heard were planning to go to Afghanistan to fight the United States and that one of them was a member of Al Qaeda.

“The discussion of these issues will have to take place in a closed courtroom outside the presence of the public and the detainees,” Judge Leon said. The hearing is expected to last a week.

If the men testify, that “will also have to be behind closed doors because of the sensitivity of whatever it is they might say,” he said.

In addition, the detainees’ lawyers have not been permitted to discuss the classified evidence with their clients, six Algerian former residents of Bosnia who have been held since 2002.

This is the judge who initially ruled (wrongly) that the defendants had no habeas rights; now he’s making a mockery of the hearings. Whichever way he rules, it’s bound to be appealed, and meanwhile a bunch of guys who may be bad guys but against whom the government has long since dropped its original charges will sit in a very unpleasant jail, quite possibly for longer than they would have been sentenced in the first place.

Maybe I’m naive, but I would have thought that under normal law, when the original charges were dropped, that would be the end of it. If investigators found new charges they could re-arrest them, but this idea of keeping people in jail until you find a charge that you think might stick at some trial to be held in the ever-more-indefinite future is really kinda weird.

Why not just cloak with a wall?

the physics arXiv blog » Blog Archive » Cloaking objects at a distance

Cloaking a region of space is relatively straightforward but cloaking an object in that space is another matter. Lai and co say the trick is to work out the optical properties of the object and then embed the “complementary image” within the cloaking material. So a plane wave would be bent by the object but then bent back into a plane as it passes through the cloaking material.
Et voila: cloaking at a distance. And in a way that doesn’t leave the cloaked object blind.

Okay, I’ve made my cloaking material out of unobtanium and embedded a wavelength-accurate complementary image of the thing to be cloaked (which had better not move or flex), and now any light that passes directly from the cloaked object to an observer on the other side of the cloak won’t show the object. Hurrah! Oh, and the cloaked object will see an oddly-distorted view of the observer (because the light gets fritzed on the way from the observer to it) but won’t be completely blind in that direction.

Now let’s say the observer moves, or there are a bunch of observers. I have to build another block of unobtanium with another perfect complementary image of the thing to be cloaked at each angle from which an observer is going to look. In the areas where an observer’s field of view passes through cloaking material on the front and back, I’m going to need a wavelength-perfect image of the far-side unobtainium embedded so that the observer doesn’t just see the cloak. Oh, and vice versa. I’m sure there’s an analytical technique for creating two pieces of unobtanium, each containing a complementary image of each other and a third object without going into an infinite regress, but I don’t ever want to find out how it works.

Then, when we’re done, the object to be cloaked will be surrounded with a wall of incredibly distorting material, through which it can see only by apply equally complicated distorting lenses, which in turn will alter its image…

Not a high-value target at all

New no-advertising domain will deter some cybersquatters • The Register

Phone numbers, web addresses and email addresses are then delivered to whatever device looked up the domain name in the first place. If it is a computer, the information will be delivered in a standard web page. If it is a phone or a BlackBerry, the system will recognise that and deliver it in a format suitable for those machines, Hayward said.

Telnic has also developed software which will integrate .tel listings into the contacts systems of PCs and smart phones. Those changes to contacts software will mean that if someone changes their phone number in their .tel listing it will automatically be changed in contacts’ Outlook software or on their iPhone.

As usual, trademark holders get first crack (for an inflated price) and then whoever wants to can pay $15 a year to tell people that the number for their local pizza parlor is a premium phone-sex line.

(The automatic bit for this is particularly nice, since no one checks the number they’re dialing when they call someone already in their phone book.)

What took them so long?

Ssds: SanDisk’s New Flash File System Improves SSD Write Speeds by 100 Times

To maximize random write performance, SanDisk developed the ExtremeFFS flash file management system. This operates on a page-based algorithm, which means there is no fixed coupling between physical and logical location. When a sector of data is written, the SSD puts it where it is most convenient and efficient. The result is an improvement in random write performance – by up to 100 times – as well as in overall endurance.

What this sounds like is using a mostly-random-access device (which a SSD is, as opposed to a spinning disk, where access time depends enormously on physical layout) like a — gasp — mostly-random-access device.

It’s funny, because the code for managing spinning disks works very hard to disguise the essentially serial access nature of the devices — buffering, optimization so that data that are likely to get read or written together will be stored on nearby tracks, so on and so forth. Now Sandisk is writing a whole bunch of code to hide the essentially random-access nature of SSDs from the code that tries to hide the serial nature of spinning disks. (There’s a chance they’re cutting out the middleware, but I’m not betting on it.)

“My uncle has a barn…”

Led: Beautiful LED Kinetic Sculpture Is Powered by Solar

These simple Mobile Lights by Kyouei Design hang from the ceiling from fishing line to create a glowing kinetic sculpture with the size and shape of your choosing. Each piece is equipped with an LED, solar panel and AA battery backup, absorbing light during the day and emitting it at night. But what’s more impressive is that the Mobile Lights can actually be purchased.

Pick up three for about $200….pricing that easily puts that first demo installation into the heavy thousands.

But at $70 a pop it ain’t gonna happen. Oh, wait. I can get solar-powered LED lawn lights for a fraction of that price, and some pretty tubing to put them in, and hey presto.

Micro-webcam?

USB Microscope with 2GB Online Storage | GeekAlerts

Plug it in and it brings an image up on your computer screen of whatever the slick looking microscope is pointing at - you won’t even have to strain your neck peering into a dusty eyepiece, it’s all there on your monitor in full colour and with up to 200x magnification.

As if this wasn’t enough, the manufacturers have also included a program that gives you up to 2GB of online space, so that you can share your scary close-up photos and access them on any computer. It’s a window into a whole new world.

Windows only, of course, the so-and-so’s. But I still kinda want one.