Technology

It’s hard to tell what kind of wars the future will bring, but one thing is certain: Robots will be doing much of the fighting. In fact, they already are. Last year, aerial drones flew 258,502 hours of missions—up from 27,201 in 2002. Spending on unmanned aircraft systems by the U.S. military is expected to hit $3.76 billion by 2010. Robotic warfare, long the stuff of science fiction, is now a reality.

The Storm Worm, malicious software spread via spam, has been so active in recent weeks that the FBI has even gotten involved. The agency posted an alert on the home page of its Web site Tuesday: If you unexpectedly receive a Valentines Day e-card, be careful. It may not be from a secret admirer, but instead might contain the Storm Worm virus.

This week, Disney announced that it will reveal a $15 million, 5000-square-foot house of the future thats full of gadgets, and boasts smart countertops capable of recognizing the groceries you set down, and then suggesting recipes. (Boy, that sounds, umm, annoying.) The house will be unveiled in May as part of Tomorrowland, and will also include four actors playing a family of four, and demonstrating the homes coolest features.

Finally. NASA astronauts installed the $2-billion science laboratory known as Columbus as a new wing of International Space Station on Monday. Yesterday morning, European astronauts officially opened the hatches, and began the process of bringing the computer, cooling and ventilation systems online.

Spore, the highly-anticipated new game from Sims creator Will Wright, is set to go on sale this September. The game, which we described in detail in this article on Wright, was supposed to come out last year. But the delays arent a huge surprise considering that Wright has invented a game that essentially lets players manage the evolution of creatures from single-cell organisms into complex, space-conquering life forms.

Deep Impact, the NASA spacecraft that watched a sister craft smash into the Comet Tempel-1, is now roaming the universe in search of extrasolar planets. Deep Impact still has another date with a comet, Hartley 2, but those observations wont start until 2010. During its downtime, scientists will use one of the probes telescopes to examine some of the more than 200 planets that astronomers have discovered in orbit around nearby stars in recent years.

Syracuse University physicists hope that a new supercomputer will help them pick out the sound of a black hole from the cosmic symphony. The computer will process data gathered by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, which is designed to listen for the ripples in space-time known as gravity waves.

This morning, NASA astronauts due to take off on STS-122 suited up and made their way to Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, where the shuttle Atlantis is ready to go. Liftoff is set for 2:45 EST today, but there's only a ten-minute window during which the ship can launch—otherwise it wouldn't effectively rendezvous with the International Space Station.

Everyone at some point wishes she could talk with her "future self" and have some insight into how it's all going to turn out. Unfortunately—unless you count Miss Cleo's tele-clairvoyent services—technology hasn't given us a portal to the future yet. But it has improved upon the time capsule.

Have 24 cameras handy? Too bad, because if you had 'em (along with a cabal of the East Coast's best graffiti artists and some flashlights), you could make a stab at the below. We've always liked Graffiti Research Lab, but after taking a peek at their winning Intructables entry (How to Enter the Ghetto Matrix (DIY Bullet Time)), we're downright smitten.

The U.S. State Department is not happy about yesterdays celebratory announcement and rocket launch in Iran. Revealing the opening of a new space center, Iran also launched a rocket, the Explorer-1, towards the heavensalthough whether it actually got to space is up for debate, since Irans first domestically built rocket, sent skyward last year, may have failed to reach orbit. Iran says this effort is all about scientific and technological development, but the international community is clearly concerned that the country isnt just envisioning using these rockets to launch satellites.

MySpace, the popular online community and social networking site, announced plans to add games, email and other features developed by outside providers next month. Adding applications from the outside is possible now, but its a little too difficult for the average member, involving cutting and pasting the relevant code from a third party.

Last summer, more than 1,000 environmentalists in the U.K. staged a weeklong protest in a "Climate Camp" at Heathrow Airport, where about 70 people were arrested. Their immediate purpose was to block a planned expansion of Heathrow, but the protests highlighted a growing complaint in Europe—that the ride to global-warming catastrophe is being fueled not only by coal-fired power plants and SUVs, but also by the ever-rising number of commercial jets. Now governments are starting to listen.