Future Technologies

For Take a Tour:  Scroll Mouse on Below 3D image, you can even navigate camera by click and dragging right or left: It's a guided tour -- from about 150 million miles away. A stunning panoramic image from the Curiosity rover offers an incredibly detailed look at the dusty, lonely landscape of the red planet. And thanks to NASA's computer science geniuses, you can take a guided tour of the rocky landscape from your couch.  Here's how to get the most of it.  First click in the Photosynth player and drag the image left or right for a 360-degree look at your desolate surroundings (remember to keep your eyes open for  the Martian rat ). Then click the double rectangle in the bottom center of the image to take the panoramic image full-screen for the full mind-blowing experience. Now click the links at the right side of the screen for some highlights of the spots Curiosity has already investigated, as well as the sites yet ...

Apple   has filed a patent application that describes a handheld device with a case made entirely out of glass. Such a case could be formed from a "hollow glass tube" or two pieces of glass bonded together. The material would be radio transparent, and the device could be hermetically sealed and thus water resistant. The  iPhone  4 and 4S aren't really that far from this idea, their case consisting of two pieces of glass and a steel frame. Some problems immediately come to mind. While the glass material used in modern smartphones is quite tough, a smartphone made entirely out of glass could easily be damaged in a fall. Furthermore, the iPhone is chock-full of sensors, some of which might have problems functioning in a (transparent) glass enclosure - though Apple's application addresses this problem by suggesting some parts of the glass case can be made opaque. And the upsides? Well, Apple names a few in its patent application: "Some of the reasons ...

They’re in front of every office worker 9 hours a day, and miniaturized versions are always in our pockets: Computers and the microelectronics inside them are an inescapable part of modern life. Check out the latest developments on Technology Update this month, starting with some of the world’s speediest supercomputers and novel cooling systems that double energy efficiency. Then, get the inside scoop on a new kind of memory device that could hold the key to unlocking truly intelligent artificial life. And get a glimpse of two new processors that challenge the dominant architectures, and offer nearly unmatched performance. source: http://rt.com/shows/technology-update/next-gen-computer-tech-443/

The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem.  There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity—jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month’s income.  Solving these problems isn’t simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we’re unveiling our latest  moonshot  from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access We believe that it might actually be possible to build a ring of balloons, flying around the globe on the stratospheric winds, that provides Internet access to the earth below. It’s very early days, but we’ve built a system that uses balloons, carr...

This is interesting. You can log into your Facebook account using three passwords – one is the main password that you created and the other passwords can be constructed by toggling the case of characters that form your original password. For example, if your Facebook password is  operati@nGeronimo! , you can convert the uppercase characters to lowercase (and vice-versa) and the toggled password string – OPERATI@NgERONIMO!  – will also get you into Facebook. There’s another variation as well. If the first character of your Facebook password is in small case, just change that character to upper case – like  Operati@nGeronimo ! -  and Facebook will gladly let you in. You may try these variations with your own password on the Facebook login screen available at facebook.com/login.php . Multiple Facebook Logins You don’t just have multiple passwords on Facebook, you can log into Facebook using multiple usernames as well. The default username is the em...

The U.S. Army is finishing a series of independent tests on suit prototypes that soldiers could wear under their uniforms and help them carry combat loads that can often exceed 100 pounds. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — the lab the Pentagon depends on to develop next generation equipment — has spent two years working toward developing a suit that supplements a soldier’s muscles to help the soldier carry his gear and equipment over all types of terrain. Army officials had soldiers test out the prototypes while carrying a 61-pound load on a treadmill ( video below ). Scientists and engineers wanted to see if the prototypes could “reduce forces on the body, decrease fatigue, stabilize joints, and help soldiers maintain a natural gait under a heavy load,” according to a DARPA statement. The program is called Warrior Web and part of the military’s larger effort to lighten the load for troops and reduce the number of muscular and skeletal injuries that have ravag...

Microsoft has orchestrated the bust-up of another top-tier botnet operation. These bad guys – operators of the sprawling Citadel botnet -- make the fictional band of sophisticated thieves from the movie Ocean's 11 look like amateurs. Authorities estimate they've scored more than $500 million from banks in the United States and abroad by accessing online accounts and rerouting funds. The software giant and the FBI, working with law enforcement and tech officials from some 80 countries, knocked out 1,000 of 1,400 of the Citadel botnets. A botnet is a collection of hundreds to thousands of infected PCs that respond to commands routed through a command-and-control server, which is also an infected PC. The bad guys running Citadel commanded as many as 5 million infected PCs, making Citadel one of the biggest botnet operations. Botnets are the engins that drive cybercrime. They fuel spam, denial of service attacks and cyberespionage. And they are used in big operations,...