Last updated: 9/4/2010 1:54:17 AM GMT

Thorium--an alternative to Uranium
Posted on August 31, 2010
April 13 (Bloomberg) -- Seth Grae, chief executive officer of Lightbridge Corp., talks with Bloomberg's Margaret Brennan about the use of thorium as an alternative to uranium for powering nuclear reactors. 
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    • Google Gmail calls: calling time on the telephone?
    Posted on August 30, 2010
    Google’s latest move is to integrate phone calls into email – Matt Warman says the days of everyone having several phone numbers could be numbered
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    Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium
    Posted on August 29, 2010
    If Barack Obama were to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.
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    Google chief: My fears for Generation Facebook
    Posted on August 18, 2010
    Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, has issued a stark warning over the amount of personal data people leave on the internet and suggested that many of them will be forced one day to change their names in order to escape their cyber past.
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    20 new ideas in science
    Posted on August 17, 2010
    Today’s most cutting-edge scientific thinking: from switching off ageing to “enhancing” our babies; understanding consciousness to finding dark matter. You read it here first.
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    • Portugal Gives Itself a Clean-Energy Makeover
    Posted on August 10, 2010
    LISBON — Five years ago, the leaders of this sun-scorched, wind-swept nation made a bet: To reduce Portugal’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, they embarked on an array of ambitious renewable energy projects — primarily harnessing the country’s wind and hydropower, but also its sunlight and ocean waves. Today, Lisbon’s trendy bars, Porto’s factories and the Algarve’s glamorous resorts are powered substantially by clean energy. Nearly 45 percent of the electricity in Portugal’s grid will come from renewable sources this year,up from 17 percent just five years ago.
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    Google and Verizon's vision for open internet
    Posted on August 10, 2010
    Google and Verizon have joined forces to present their vision of an open internet after closed-door meetings held by regulators stalled. Both champion strict enforcement of a transparent and open wireline broadband service but suggest loopholes for wireless.
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    • Has the internet just sold its soul?
    Posted on August 6, 2010
    Google stood accused last night of betraying the founding principles of the internet, as it readied a deal that will abandon key parts of its support for "net neutrality", which has guaranteed equal access to the worldwide web since its inception. 
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    • Web attack knows where you live
    Posted on August 4, 2010
    One visit to a booby-trapped website could direct attackers to a person's home, a security expert has shown. The attack, thought up by hacker Samy Kamkar, exploits shortcomings in many routers to find out a key identification number. "Privacy is dead, people. I'm sorry."
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    On the Web's Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only
    Posted on August 4, 2010
    You may not know a company called [x+1] Inc., but it may well know a lot about you. A Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy has found that the analytical skill of data handlers like [x+1] is transforming the Internet into a place where people are becoming anonymous in name only. The findings offer an early glimpse of a new, personalized Internet where sites have the ability to adjust many things—look, content, prices—based on the kind of person they think you are.
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    Google and CIA invest in 'future' of web monitoring
    Posted on July 30, 2010
    The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future. The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
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    • 'Broken promises' on fast broadband as most homes receive less than half the speed they pay for
    Posted on July 27, 2010
    Most homes receive less than half the broadband speed they are paying for, an official study has revealed. Firms such as BT, Sky, TalkTalk and O2 are advertising broadband speeds of 'up to' 20 or even 24 megabits per second, or mbps. However, a study by the regulator Ofcom found that almost two-thirds of customers tempted by these promises are only getting 8mbps or less.    
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    India unveils the $35 (£23) 'iPad'
    Posted on July 23, 2010
    While the prototype device looks like an iPad, it's just a fourteenth of the cost. The basic touch-screen tablet could be in production by 2011. The tablet can be used for word processing, web browsing and videoconferencing. It has a solar power option too – important for India's energy-starved hinterlands – though that add-on costs extra.
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    • Researchers create world's first robotic legs
    Posted on July 16, 2010
    Two Britons living in New Zealand have built a pair of bionic legs that allow paraplegics to walk again. The invention, resembling a film prop from the Hollywood sci-fi drama Robocop, has been unveiled seven years after the pair first sketched the concept on the back of a beermat.
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    • Zephyr solar plane set for record endurance flight
    Posted on July 14, 2010
    A UK unmanned solar-powered plane will attempt to set a remarkable new endurance record in the coming days. The Zephyr vehicle will launch from a military range in the US and try to fly non-stop, day and night, for two weeks. Developed by the British defence and research company QinetiQ, the project has already flown continuous missions up to 83 hours.
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    • Education: the virtual teaching assistant
    Posted on July 13, 2010
    BANGALORE, India — Not far from the magnificent snow peaks of the Himalayas, Anita Bakshi stares at the computer screen in her home at Kalimpong. She is correcting and grading college assignments. But here's the catch, her students are not Indian. They attend the University of Houston in Texas, thousands of miles away in another hemisphere.
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    Martha Lane Fox plan to get all Britons online
    Posted on July 12, 2010
    UK digital champion Martha Lane Fox has announced plans to get everybody of working age in Britain online by the end of the current Parliament.
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    YouTube bids for screen dominance
    Posted on July 9, 2010
    The world's biggest video site wants to dominate every screen where content can be viewed and created. But, can YouTube make the jump to rule the roost in the living room?
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    Australia postpones web filter plan
    Posted on July 9, 2010
    The Australian government has postponed its plans to introduce a national internet filter that has been criticised as web censorship.
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    • Solar-Powered Plane Flies for 26 Hours
    Posted on July 8, 2010
    PARIS — Slender as a stick insect, a solar-powered experimental airplane with a huge wing span completed its first test flight of more than 24 hours on Thursday, powered overnight by energy collected from the sun during a day aloft over Switzerland. 
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    • Ed Vaizey's praise for digital radio stops short of switch-off date
    Posted on July 8, 2010
    Culture minister backs 2015 'target' for switchover, with new action plan, but warns change cannot be imposed
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    Discovery paves way for blood test to predict Alzheimer's disease
    Posted on July 6, 2010
    A simple blood test to predict Alzheimer's disease up to 10 years before symptoms appear could be developed after researchers found high levels of a protein can be an early sign of the condition.
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    Fighting wars by remote control
    Posted on July 5, 2010
    When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, it was only using a handful of "unmanned aerial systems" - otherwise known as "drones". Today the US has ground, aerial, marine and stationary robots in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen - one robot can even operate an M-16 rifle and a rocket launcher.
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    • Grindr: a new sexual revolution?
    Posted on July 4, 2010
    Grindr is a free phone app which lets gay men instantly pinpoint each other using GPS technology. It has already transformed the sex lives of 700,000 men around the world. But could it work in the straight market? And would it mean the end of monogamy?
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    Eyeborg: Canadian Rob Spence replaces eye with video camera
    Posted on July 4, 2010
    Rob Spence, a Toronto-based film-maker, lost his right eye in a shooting accident on his grandfather's farm when he was a teenager. Now 36, he decided some years ago to build a miniature camera that could be fitted inside his false eye. A prototype was completed last year, and was named by Time magazine as one of the best inventions of 2009. He calls himself "the Eyeborg guy".
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