Tech : Science World Report

May 14, 2012 09:10 AM EDT

Sonic Boom Heads for a Thump

NASA's aeronautical innovators are one step closer to confidently crafting a viable commercial airliner that can fly faster than the speed of sound, yet produce a sonic boom that is quiet enough not to bother anyone on the ground below.

May 14, 2012 08:51 AM EDT

New Nanostructure for Batteries Keeps Going and Going ...

For more than a decade, scientists have tried to improve lithium-based batteries by replacing the graphite in one terminal with silicon, which can store 10 times more charge. But after just a few charge/discharge cycles, the silicon structure would crack and crumble, rendering the battery useless.

May 12, 2012 04:07 PM EDT

Wireless Carriers Eye Solutions to Spectrum Crunch

Top U.S. mobile operators are turning to a new type of equipment known as small cells to boost network capacity in the face of a shortage of wireless spectrum.

May 12, 2012 08:38 AM EDT

Navigating the Shopping Center

A smartphone with GPS functionality is a delightful tool. It guides its owner safely and with certainty through the streets of an unfamiliar city. But after arriving at the destination, all too often the orientation is gone, because as soon as you enter a building, you lose contact with the GPS sate...

May 11, 2012 03:46 PM EDT

Mojave Desert Tests Prepare for NASA Mars Roving

Team members of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission took a test rover to Dumont Dunes in California's Mojave Desert this week to improve knowledge of the best way to operate a similar rover, Curiosity, currently flying to Mars for an August landing.

May 11, 2012 03:02 PM EDT

'Game-powered Machine Learning' Opens Door to Google for Music

Can a computer be taught to automatically label every song on the Internet using sets of examples provided by unpaid music fans? University of California, San Diego engineers have found that the answer is yes, and the results are as accurate as using paid music experts to provide the examples, savin...

May 11, 2012 11:02 AM EDT

Naiad: Incremental, Iterative Computation for Big Data

Big data is pretty popular at the moment. Systems such as MapReduce, Hadoop, Dryad, and DryadLINQ have made writing and executing ad hoc big-data analyses easy. Still, there are several programming patterns such systems don't support especially well.

May 11, 2012 08:24 AM EDT

Microsoft Redesigns Bing, Plays up Facebook Link

Microsoft Corp unveiled a new design on Thursday for its second-ranked Bing search engine, introducing elements from Facebook and other social networks, as it tries to claw market share from leader Google Inc.

May 11, 2012 08:14 AM EDT

Facebook's IPO already Oversubscribed: Source

Facebook Inc's record initial public offering is already oversubscribed, a source familiar with the share listing said, days after the world's largest social network embarked on a cross-country roadshow to drum up investor enthusiasm.

May 10, 2012 05:02 PM EDT

First Instrument for the JWST is Completed and Handed over to NASA

First instrument for the JWST is completed and handed over to NASA After more than ten years of work by more than 200 engineers, the Mid InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), a camera so sensitive it could see a candle on one of Jupiter's moons, has been declared ready for delivery by the European Space Agenc...

May 10, 2012 04:25 PM EDT

Smart Phones Are Changing Real World Privacy Settings

With endless applications, high-speed wireless Internet access, and free messaging services, smart phones have revolutionized the way we communicate. But at what cost? According to researchers at Tel Aviv University, the smart phone is challenging traditional conceptions of privacy, especially in th...

May 10, 2012 01:34 PM EDT

NTU Scientist Catches World's Attention with Laser Technology Invention

A scientist from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Professor Liu Ai Qun, has developed an innovative device that can identify and detect contaminants in treated water, such as water-borne bacteria, in just one hour, down from the current two days.