There is no engine in this bus built by some students from the Eindhoven University of Technology. The bus is 100% green, is powered by its 32 passengers and can get up to 20 kilometers per hour.
The bus delivers a maximum torque of 2000 Newton meters, which far exceeds the 400 Newton meters from the new Porsche 911 Carrera S.
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Microsoft has just been awarded patent number 6754472 which covers a way to transmit both power and data through the human body. The approach would support the networking of various peripheral devices such as batteries, PDAs, keyboards & displays, via electrodes attached to the skin. No word yet on the body’s bandwidth performance. I wonder what would happen if you were to shake hands with another ‘networked’ person.
Presumably, connectivity would require the use of some sort of conductive electrode gel similar to that used for ECGs and EMGs…sounds somewhat inconvenient. A larger concern, however, would be the effect of these electric currents on the body. Aside from heat buildup due to internal resistance in the body, the applied current has a potential to disrupt the tiny electrical signals used by nerve cells found in the brain, heart and muscles.
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Matsushita claims that its new EMIT Suimin System creates a room environment that leads to “quality sleep”. The system has been under development for several years, has 42 patents pending, and offers the sleeper control over various environmental factors such as light, bedding, ventilation, video and audio.
In addition to staging the operation of the lights and A/V equipment so as to induce sleep, the controller also regulates temperature, oxygen enrichment, angle of the bed, and delivery of specialized audio/video content via the internet.
A follow-on product will incorporate biosensing and biofeedback for further sleep management.
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All tv’s and color displays today are based on the familiar Red-Green-Blue technology, where all colors are generated by exiting one or more of those 3 picture elements that correspond to the 3 primary colors..
Genoa Color has moved beyond this by adding three more near-primary colors such as yellow, cyan and magenta (YCM). Genoa claims that “the television picture ..(will have)..truer, more vibrant color and brighter image, looks more like cinema than video.
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M-systems’ just-announced T5 DiskOnKey USB flash drive seems to offer unusually good performance. At a speed of 23 MB per second for read and 15MB/s write it appears to be about 1.5x better than comparable flash drives, and about 3x better than the flash drives that were reviewed here just a little while ago. 
Interesting article over at PC Review regarding advice on how to recover from a hdd failure. Includes techniques I’d never heard of, such as-
>Place the hard drive upside down in the drive cage
>Put the hard drive in the freezer overnight
The article states that many, if not most, hdd problems are due to a corrupt Master Boot Record, and that the SCANDISK and CHKDSK tools can sometimes/often correct such errors.
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Intel has unveiled a surfboard with built-in tablet computer. It allows surfers to review surfing conditions, make travel arrangements, check email and send images from the built-in camera to a wireless access point on shore.
Not much other information is available regarding cost or availability, but it apparently has a solar-powered battery recharger. The shock and vibration isolation for the hdd must be phenomenal.
There’s a joke in there somewhere regarding surfing while surfing.
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Ars Technica has an excellent review of 8 different USB 2.0 Hi-Speed Flash drives at this link.
They compare the Fujifilm USB2, Iomega Mini, Mushkin Flashkin, PNY Attache, Transcend JetFlash2A, SanDisk Cruzer Mini, Verbatim Store ‘n’ Go, and the SimpleTech Bonzai Xpress, for features, accessories, extras, construction, software and performance.
The best of the group are the SimpleTech Bonzai Xpress and the Transcend JetFlash2A, at about $60 and $40 respectively.
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didtheyreadit is a new subscription-based service that informs the sender (of an email message) of the time, approximate location and duration of the recipient’s viewing of each message the subscriber sent. For a fee of about $50 a year a subscriber can know for sure that his email did get through and was actually viewed by the sendee. The service is similar to ReturnReceipt.com and others, that offer clandestine tracking of email usage.
The service is based on embedded HTML code called web bugs, which are transparent gif graphics sometimes as small as 1×1 pixels. When the ‘bugged’ email message is opened, the email client connects to the internet to download the graphic. The email address is then sent to the server, which logs the information.
Web bugs can be detected by some spyware programs, but can always be found by reading the HTML source code. Yahoo! labels their version of web bugs as “web beacons”; their policy on the subject is here. For the brave, a demo of web bugs can be found at this location.
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The Swedish Navy is conducting sea trials of its new Visby corvette. The Visby is interesting in that seems to be the first plastic warship. The ship represents a new generation of stealth using materials designed to provide a very small radar cross-section. The hull material is a sandwich construction comprising a PVC core with a carbon fibre and vinyl laminate, which provides high strength, low weight, as well as low radar and magnetic signature.
What is also interesting is that the vessel’s combat management system, called 9LV Mk 3, uses the Windows NT operating system.
My only comment is that I’m not sure that I would be willing to go on patrol in a plastic boat, let alone one that uses a six-year-old operating system.
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