Looking for the best way to feed the world's hunger for energy, James May visited a solar furnace to see how powerful they really are. Usually, solar furnaces are used to boil water into steam to generate electricity or make hydrogen fuel. But May thought that the best way to make people understand their insane power is to do something equally as insane: Melt steel almost instantly.

A solar furnace is a mirror structure used to concentrate sun rays into a small area called the focal point. As you can expect, the concentrated rays produce extremely high temperatures: At the focal point, solar furnaces can achieve temperatures of 5,430 ºF (3,000 ºC). The idea is not new–coming from ancient Greece–but their potential is starting to become more relevant now as we try to cut dependency on fossil fuels.

More than 50 years ago, Russian scientists discovered that simple Scotch tape emits x-rays when peeled off glass. New research conducted by colleagues at UCLA has determined that the power that the tape generates is much higher than anyone could have imagined. In fact, they have constructed a machine that generates x-rays by peeling up Scotch tape in a vacuum at the rate of 3 centimeters per second. As you can see in the recent demo they did for the journal Nature, their device was able to successfully generate an x-ray of a finger.

The researchers believe that this "technology" could eventually be refined to make inexpensive medical devices for developing countries. They have even applied for a patent that would cover such devices. In the meantime, using Scotch tape in normal situations should not produce any harmful effects, although one researcher on the project noted: "If you're going to peel tape in a vacuum, you should be extra careful." But "I will continue to use Scotch tape during my daily life, and I think it's safe to do it in your office. No guarantees."

The results suggest that adult gamers have an average body mass index of 25.2, compared to the overall American average of 28. The average gamer also engages in vigorous exercise once or twice a week, which the researchers say is more than most Americans. The reasons for this are not obvious, although the team suggest it may be because more educated, wealthier people are attracted to computer games, and these people also tend to take better care of their health.
"Average gamers engage in vigorous exercise once or twice a week"

The downside, however, was that the gamers reported more cases of depression and substance abuse than their compatriots. "They may be drawn to use the game to help deal with emotional distress," says team member Scott Caplan of the University of Delaware.

The quest to discover whether an amateur was up to the task presented the US Army with the profoundly bizarre challenge of trying to find people with exactly the right lack of qualifications, recalls Bob Selden, who eventually became the other half of the two-man project. (Another early participant, David Pipkorn, soon left.) Both men had physics PhDs - the hypothetical Nth country would have access to those, it was assumed - but they had no nuclear expertise, let alone access to secret research.

"It's a very strange story," says Selden, then a lowly 28-year-old soldier drafted into the army and wondering how to put his talents to use, when he received a message that Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb and the grumpy commanding figure in the US atomic programme, wanted to see him. "I went to DC and we spent an evening together. But he began to question me in great detail about the physics of making a nuclear weapon, and I didn't know anything. As the evening wore on, I knew less and less. I went away very, very discouraged. Two days later a call comes through: they want you to come to Livermore."

Even though Nvidia’s Nvision tradeshow did not achieve its goal of 10,000 visitors, more than a thousand gathered at the Center for Performing Arts to witness the ending of the event. The duo behind the popular Mythbusters showed the results of six months of work, demonstrating the difference between a CPU and a GPU, following the conventional wisdom of parallel computing.

Dubbed Smiley and Mona Lisa, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman presented two robots that represented the difference between a CPU and a GPU. Smiley was given a task to draw a smiley using conventional CPU techniques, doing one thing at a time. Smiley was a relatively simple robot, while Mona Lisa consisted out of "1100 massively parallel barrel processors", dwarfing the 240 shaders offered by a GeForce GTX 280 chip.

Members of Custom PC’s Folding@home team may have noticed a major increase in our production rate recentlys, and there’s little doubt that much of this can be attributed to Stanford’s new GPU2 client for Nvidia and ATI GPUs. However, it looks as though Nvidia GPUs are the king of the folding castle at the moment, as they’re currently responsible for a whopping 42 per cent of the project’s total output.

This is despite the fact that over three times as many active PlayStation 3s as there are Nvidia GPUs contributing to the project, not to mention 16 times as many CPUs folding under Windows. There are currently 12,982 Nvidia GPUs actively folding, out of a total of 323,424 active processors in total. As such, the fact that Nvidia GPUs make up such a colossal percentage of the total output is pretty incredible.

You can see the current statistics on the next page, showing that Nvidia GPUs are currently churning out 1,428 TFLOPS out of a total of 3,372 TFLOPS for the whole project. Meanwhile, ATI GPUs are responsible for 404 TFLOPS, but even this is double the output from Windows CPU clients, and is an impressive figure considering that there are only 3,677 ATI GPUs actively folding at the moment.

Last October the team at CD Projekt Red released The Witcher, one of the best PC RPG titles of year, and they've been working on it ever since. Not in a big fixing sort of way, though surely some of that has gone on, but rather working on improving the title – enhancing it, hence the subtitle of next month's The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. See, despite the slew of awards and accolades the original release has received, CD Projekt isn't done. They are trying to build the perfect game, and they're not content to rest until both themselves and The Witcher community are completely satisfied.

I got a chance to sit down with a beer on a nice, comfy couch and watch a demonstration of the newly enhanced features of the ultimate edition of The Witcher.

While hundreds of tiny changes were made for the latest edition of the game, the presentation whittle things down to the biggest, most notable changes the game underwent.

Joe Davis is telling me about his design for a 110-foot lightning-laser tower that will literally seize a hurricane’s force, bottle it up and hurl it angrily back into the sky. It’s intended as a memorial for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Davis—whose official role at MIT is research affiliate associate in the biology department—plans to name the tower "Call Me Ishmael." I ask him why, but before I finish the question, he smashes his steel peg leg down onto the table.

Good answer.

When Davis’ proposed 110-ft. memorial lightning tower is finished, it will be only the most recent instance of his lifelong unusual art-science repertoire. As a younger lad, he caught single-cell organisms using full-sized fishing tackle, built an ornithopter powered by real electrically stimulated frog legs, and in the 1980s became the first man to transmit the sound of a contracting vagina into space.

Ever wonder why some PSUs claiming huge wattages are so cheap? Why should you buy a branded one - or are you just paying for the name and some fancy cables?

Well, no, you're paying for the fact that it won't blow up - that's why we test PSUs to their limits and we never, ever recommend anything other than branded products. Some people don't listen though and Corsair recently took it upon itself to test some of shoddiest looking power supplies we've seen.

But now comes word that it isn’t just wildlife that can go extinct. The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany’s University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet’s stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.

Running out of oil, yes. We’ve all been concerned about that for many years and everyone anticipates a time when the world’s underground petroleum reserves will have been pumped dry. But oil is just an organic substance that was created by natural biological processes; we know that we have a lot of it, but we’re using it up very rapidly, no more is being created, and someday it’ll be gone. The disappearance of elements, though—that’s a different matter. I was taught long ago that the ninety-two elements found in nature are the essential building blocks of the universe. Take one away—or three, or six—and won’t the essential structure of things suffer a potent blow? Somehow I feel that there’s a powerful difference between running out of oil, or killing off all the dodos, and having elements go extinct.

Researchers measure activity of an exercising shrimp by time, speed and oxygen level.

In a Nature Physics journal paper currently online, the researchers describe how they have created a new, hybrid molecule in which its quantum state can be intentionally manipulated - a required step in the building of quantum computers... "This development may not bring us a quantum computer 10 years faster, but our dreams about these machines are now more realistic."

Remember that incredible Svalbard Global Seed Vault we told you about? It protects the Earth's plants for when aliens blow up our civilization so that they too can enjoy the natural decadence of fried plantains (that are generously fertilized by our decaying corpses). 60 Minutes got a peek inside the vault, and it's pretty neat stuff.

Many scientists have predicted this effect. Global warming already appears to be injecting more fresh water into polar seas due to increased precipitation and the melting of the Greenland ice cap. This freshening of the North Atlantic current makes its waters less dense–so they don't sink down to depths at which they would then be transported back south. As result, the circulation stalls, with warmer water no longer being drawn north.

You probably haven’t heard much of Solar Cycle 24, the current cycle that our sun has entered, and I hope you don’t. If Solar Cycle 24 becomes a household term, your lifestyle could be taking a dramatic turn for the worse. That of your children and their children could fare worse still, say some scientists, because Solar Cycle 24 could mark a time of profound long-term change in the climate.

A large chunk of one of Antarctica's ice shelves broke off at the end of May, new satellite images show, marking the second major breakup of the shelf this year and the first documented episode to occur in winter... In February 2008, an even larger area of about 154 square miles (400 square km) broke off from the ice shelf, narrowing the connection between the islands to a 3.7-mile (6 km) wide strip of ice. After the most recent breakup, the connection was whittled down to just 1.7 miles (2.7 km).

Bill Henriksen, the manager of the McMurdo base station, said nearly 16,500 condoms were delivered last month and would be made available, free of charge, to staff throughout the year to avoid the potential embarrassment of having to buy them.

The base only has a skeleton staff through the long winter.

"Since everybody knows everyone, it becomes a little bit uncomfortable," Henriksen told the Southland Times newspaper.

The Casimir force is a consequence of quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the world of atoms and subatomic particles that is not only the most successful theory of physics but also the most baffling.

The force is due to neither electrical charge or gravity, for example, but the fluctuations in all-pervasive energy fields in the intervening empty space between the objects and is one reason atoms stick together, also explaining a "dry glue" effect that enables a gecko to walk across a ceiling.

Now, using a special lens of a kind that has already been built, Prof Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin report in the New Journal of Physics they can engineer the Casimir force to repel, rather than attact.

I feel it in my journalistic gonads.

"Using NASA, Japanese, and European X-ray satellites, a team of Japanese astronomers has discovered that Sagittarius A* let loose a powerful flare three centuries before the time at which we are observing it (i.e., 26,000 years in the past). X-ray pulses emanating from just outside the black hole take 300 years to traverse the distance between the central black hole and a large cloud known as Sagittarius B2, so the cloud responds to events that occurred 300 years earlier. 'By observing how this cloud lit up and faded over 10 years, we could trace back the black hole's activity 300 years ago,' says team member Katsuji Koyama of Kyoto University. 'The black hole was a million times brighter three centuries ago.'"

'The black hole was a million times brighter three centuries ago.'

A new study published in the American Medical Association has a new and astonishing demonstration of just how much your perception becomes your reality when it comes to prices. People in the study thought they were trying out a new kind of pain med. Instead, they got sugar pills. However, some were told their sugar pills cost $2.50, and the others were told the pills cost $0.10. People with the "pricey" sugar pill had their pain reduced much more than the "cheap" sugar pill. Does this mean that price alone pays for itself?

They say the meek shall inherit the earth, but these experiments with emotional computer programs (pdf) suggest it may actually be the neurotic. And that they'll probably take it rapidly by military force.

The Austrian researchers want games to be more engaging by having emotional, not just coolly calculating, computer players. Instead of just challenging your rational planning and decision skills, you'll have use your emotional intelligence too.

They created aggressive, defensive, normal and neurotic versions of the AI software in the war strategy game Age of Mythology, drawing on "the big five" emotional dimensions to personality recognised by psychologists.

There are two open source Van Eck projects that I know of. The first, pictured above, is Erik Thiele's Tempest for Eliza project. By drawing specific black and white patterns on your monitor, Tempest is able to generate audible signals in the AM range. You can use Tempest to play an mp3 file that you can tune in on your radio.

Tempest for Eliza is a fun demo, but what about being able to read someone's monitor remotely?

There's a second open source project, called EckBox, that claims to do just this. By piping the audio from a radio through an 8-bit analog to digital converter, EckBox claims to be able to read this data from a PC parallel port and reproduce the image of an 800x600 monitor. Looking at the code, it seems almost too simple to be true. Likewise, the project hasn't been updated since June 2004 and there aren't many references or screenshots or words of success floating around the net.

The Inaccessibility Pole marks the point on Antarctica that is furthest from the ocean. At 3718 metres above sea-level it is in the Australian zone and seldom visited.

The Scientific Traverse this week made it to the Inaccessibility Pole for New Year's Day and found a one time Soviet Union base buried under the ice.

The group's website says Soviet scientists first visited the Pole in December 1958 and built a small cabin there.

After several weeks they left, putting the bust of Lenin on top of the chimney facing Moscow.