The crew of the No One’s Listening podcast. L to R: Irene McGee, Mandy Brown, Chris Cornell, Skye Ladybug
Podcasting use is rising and now reaches 18% of the US population, up from 13% a year ago.

 
A travel guide in the palm of your hand
Future cell phones may act as a mobile tourist guide, and provide tourists with information on whatever they see while journeying.
The target seems achievable with an eye-Phone technology that emerged as a regional winner in the European Satellite Navigation Competition, sponsored by ESA’s Technology Transfer Programme, recently.

“Brain drugs” are common among scientists
Twenty percent of scientists admit to using performance-enhancing prescription drugs for non-medical reasons, according to a survey released Wednesday by Nature, Britain’s top science journal. The overwhelming majority of these med-taking brainiacs said they indulged in order to “improve concentration,” and 60 percent said they did so on a […]

Student loans are about to get tougher
Parents will have to navigate unfamiliar and difficult terrain when it comes time to pay for college this year, with student loan companies in turmoil and banks tightening their standards and raising rates on other types of borrowing.

The coming era of “green” plastics
Chemists are investigating ways to use carbon dioxide removed from smokestack emissions to make a raw material for the production of DVDs, CD-ROMs, beverage bottles and other products made from polycarbonate plastics.

Apart from the benefits in terms of combating climate change, using CO2 normally released the atmosphere as a feedstock […]

Closeup of a silicon surface pockmarked with holes, designed to slow light passing through it.
This “slow light” waveguide, designed by a team led by Yuri A. Vlasov of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson
Research Center, a crucial component of an optical computer.
New Scientist has a quick round-up of what they consider to be the ten […]

 
Conventional chemotherapy can wreak havoc on healthy tissue, causing painful side effects, and it’s not always effective. Nanotechnology-based methods to deliver these drugs only to cancerous cells have shown promise, but they don’t work for all cancers. Now a handful of research groups are developing more-complex approaches that use microscopic carriers to deliver a variety […]

Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, presented his survey at the RSA Conference, which opened Monday in San Francisco. The survey ranked the top 11 botnets that send spam; by extrapolating their size, Stewart estimated the bots on his list control just over a million machines and are capable of flooding the Internet […]

The good people at Buffalo Technology have created a massive amount of storage that fits in the palm of your hand - 1TB to be specific. To put this into perspective, the U.S. Library of Congress Web Capture team has claimed that as of May 2007, the Library has collected 70 terabytes of data.

There is no question that online video advertising is generating plenty of excitement, and also a great deal of confusion.
In-stream, in-banner, in-text, linear, non-linear, pre-roll, post-roll, layovers; when it comes to online video ads the jargon piles up faster than e-mail messages. But what exactly does it all mean?

Data revenues at US mobile service providers surged to $23 billion in 2007 and now account for 17% of all mobile service revenues, according to the CTIA. The total represented a 53% increase over 2006.
Much of that revenue is due to the enormous popularity of text messaging. Nearly 50 billion messages were sent in […]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp6T0-NCZaQ

Germany likes to call itself the “Land of Ideas” - and over the centuries it has certainly had plenty of them. It was Germans who invented the aspirin, the airship, the printing press and the diesel engine.
But Germany has surely never produced anything quite as weird as the automated restaurant. It actually looks more […]

During the first three months of the year, only five companies backed by venture capital investors went public on Wall Street, the National Venture Capital Association said last week. That is down from 31 in the fourth quarter of last year, and is roughly the same level as at the nadir of the dot-com bust.

At first glance, the man and woman at the nightclub look like any other couple on a date. He flirts and pours champagne. She looks at him and laughs. This isn’t a date, though. It’s business.