Technology

The chief marketing officer of Ericsson announced at a conference in Europe yesterday that he thinks Wi-Fi is endangered, and will be soon be replaced by mobile broadband networks. Connectivity wont be hotspot-based, but available everywhere. He went so far as to compare cafe-style Wi-Fi to the telephone boxes of yesteryear.

Did anyone really expect 10,000 BC to be scientifically accurate? The reviews of the critically-condemned movie are fun to peruse, but the ones focused on the science are especially entertaining. Because, well, the science (as we all should have guessed) is way, way off.

The Cassini spacecraft has uncovered evidence of a ring of space dust orbiting the second largest of Saturns moons, Rhea. No other moons have ever been found to have rings, so this could be a first, but it may also provide some interesting clues to Rheas past. When it captured the data in November 2005, Cassini was actually looking for evidence of an atmosphere around the moon.

Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie has announced that he will not race in the marathon at this years Beijing Olympics due to the potential pollution. Gebrselassie, the world record holder in the event, says he suffers from exercise-induced asthma, and that the risk to his health would be too great for him to run that race, though he does plan to compete in the shorter 10,000 meter event.

Sunday at SXSW Interactive, a venerable panel of experts in publishing, literature, film—and even computational biology—gathered to discuss the problem of how narrative entertainment forms like film and literature are going to need to adapt in order to thrive in new media environments.

We had a quick phone call with Russ Johnson of Pioneer yesterday evening to find out what the decision to stop making plasma modules means. While Russ didnt have answers to all our questions, we got a much clearer picture, so to speak.

He confirmed that Panasonic will provide the plasma modules—essentially the basic screen, without most of the electronics and the color filter. And though he didnt say explicitly, we got the impression that Pioneer will be taking what Panasonic is giving, rather than dictating a design based on Pioneers plasma technology. This has to be a disappointment to Pioneer fanboys and girls, but it may not be a complete tragedy.

Tic, the unfortunate hamster in this video, loses his footing while getting some exercise and gets pulled into the spin cycle, completing nearly 12 revolutions in about four seconds before ignominiously dropping out of the wheel. However, while Tic may be bewildered by what happened during his morning training session, we need not be.

Why does he get pulled into the spin? How does he remain in orbit for 12 rotations before falling off of the wheel? How does he finally escape? These are the questions we will address for Tics sake.

After 20 years of development, problems with funding, lawsuits, and an arduous 25-mile journey to cart its key parts uphill, the $102 million Large Binocular Telescope is finally complete. The telescope, an internationally-run observatory that points skyward from a mountaintop in southern Arizona, has already captured some beautiful images, including the spiral galaxy pictured to the left, which is 102 million light years away from Earth.

Friends of the Dark Side, your time may soon be at hand. It seems we have a literal death star aiming in our general direction. The culprit is part of a binary star system—two stars which orbit each other—by the name of WR 104. Both are massive and very, very hot. One will eventually explode into a harmless supernova, providing us with a lovely astronomical light show. The other, however, might be deadly.

Sure, they are pricey energy hogs, but dang, those Pioneer Kuro plasma TVs are stunning. Crisp pictures, gorgeous colors and sky-high contrast ratios that make the movie characters practically jump off the screen.

So it was with great alarm and sadness that we got the news that Pioneer still stop making those incredible panels. By my reckoning, it will be at least another three years of eating nothing but beans and rice until I can afford to buy one of the sets, and I suppose they may all be sold out by then.

What do you get when you cross stitch taxidermy with the mug of a dead robot? Well, if youre the artist/robot teacher France Cadet, you get a wall full of interactive robo-trophies programmed to react to their environment.

The highest-endurance aircraft currently flying is Northrop Grummans Global Hawk UAV, which can stay aloft for up to 40 hours. Now Darpa—which, to its credit, is never short on outlandish ideas—wants to beat that endurance record more than 1,000 times. The goal of Darpa's recently launched Vulture Program is to build a kind of atmospheric satellite that can stay aloft for five years at a time with little or no maintenance.

Everyone can guess the worst way to load passengers on to a plane is to do it front to back. People would have to wait at every row or squeeze awkwardly past. It would stand to reason, then, that the way airlines usually do it—back to front—would be the best way. But according to Fermilab physicist Jason Steffen, that's not the case. As it turns out, it's far from the best: it's the second worst.

The title of the paper might not jump out at the average science fan—Search for Axionlike Particles Using a Variable-Baseline Photon-Regeneration Technique—but the big idea behind the research certainly should. Physicists at Fermilab have designed an experiment to look for the particles that may make up dark matter—the elusive material that may make up most of the matter in the universe.

For years, Ask.com has been trying to supplant Google as the Internets search leader, but this week the company has announced that it is headed in another direction. In truth, Ask never really got all that close.