Weekend Links

• Boffins: Ordinary Lightbulb can be made efficiently, cheaply ...and quickly (in one femtosecond).
• Laser-etched metal makes liquid flow uphill – Another interesting use for femtosecond lasers.
• Thin-film solar cells flex into the future
• FTC forces hive of scum and villainy ISP offline
• Landmark study: DRM truly does make pirates out of us all – And don't get me started on DVD region codes.
• Google to slip SVG into Internet Explorer – Neat trick, that. Beats the heck out of me how they'll do it, though.
• Remembering the true first portable computer – Self-portable, no-less. Just tell it where you want it to go.
• Homebrewed CPU Is a Beautiful Mess of Wires – Bravo!
• New Technique Promises Billion-Year Data Storage – Dependable storage is always useful, but in a billion years (or thirty) will any computer still support the necessary serial, parallel, SCSI, FireWire 400/800/…, USB 1/2/3/…, etc. interface? And how do you make a storage device recognizable as a storage device over the course of a billion years? Still, one problem at a time.
• Particles Larger Than Galaxies Fill the Universe? – Now, that's a neutrino!
• Stuck Mars rover peeks beneath its belly
• Astronauts suffer 'exploding' space headache – Ouch!
• NASA falling further behind – Orion milestones slipping. More headaches for astronauts (and engineers, and NASA and contractor workers, and policy makers, and…).
• Space Monkey Pictures: 50-Year Anniversary – I knew that Ham had tested Mercury/Redstone for Shepard and Grissom, but somehow had never heard of Enos, who tested Mercury/Atlas for the other members of the Mercury 7.
• "Extinct" Beavers Back in U.K. After 400 Years – Nice start, UK. Here in North America, we need to get busy with the beaver re-introductions, too. Although we retain native populations, the species was once everywhere from Canada down to northern Mexico. So, my fellow N. Americans, if there's reliable water in your area, and there aren't any beavers, things are not as they should be.
• Scotland's only wallabies face extermination – Meanwhile, France's kangaroos have been doing fine.
• The koala who thought he was Goldilocks
• Dolphin-Inspired Man-Made Fin Works Swimmingly – Old news, but I was recently reminded that I'd love to try these things.
• Jet Cyclist Hits 73 MPH and Lives to Tell the Tale – I like a good pulse jet as much as the next guy (combustion on a hypersonic wave-front, if memory serves), but bicycles powered by nothing but humans reach those speeds regularly. My personal record is only 57.3 mph (92.2 kph), but I ran out of gears (despite pedaling ≥140 rpm). Also, I've never had, for instance, an Alp to descend.
• Mystery Ingredient Cleaning Earth's Atmosphere
• Estrogen in Waterways Worse Than Thought
• Earth Gets Billion-Year Life Extension
• How Antarctica grew its ice – and lost its hanging gardens
• Royal Navy warship almost fires on UFOs – In which we find that neither the Telegraph, nor the Royal Navy, is well equipped to handle this sort of thing.
• Construction Crew Severs Secret ‘Black Line’ – When spooks lose their connectivity. (Beats the heck out of Time Warner technical support.)
• Inside the Military’s Secret Terror-Tagging Tech
• Goodbye, GM – “It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete.”
• Illness Behind Most Bankruptcies …and because financial ruin is so important in building character, we certainly don't want any sort of national health insurance.
• Texas Governor Perry makes Rush Limbaugh an honorary Texan – In Texas' defense, it's worth noting that the vast majority of Texas voters voted against Perry.