InsideTech

LONDON - A leading climate change scientist whose private e-mails are included in thousands of documents that were stolen by hackers and posted online said Sunday the leaks may have been aimed at undermining next month's global climate summit in Denmark. Kevin Trenberth, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Colorado, said he believes the hackers who stole a ...

When it comes to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), it was a Herculean enough task simply to build the $10B USD device -- a 17-mile-long circular tunnel between the Franco-Swiss border lined with some of the world's most sophisticated electronics.  However, that proved only to be the first of many challenges in building and bringing online the world's largest particle accelerator. ...

For a great many years, scientists have believed that the oceans on our planet were formed from water vapors emitted during volcanic eruptions that condensed and fell to the ground over millions of years. But a scientist now proposes that this might not have been the case. He argues that water is not something that our planet had when it ...

Just about all of the gadgets that we take for granted each day from cameras to our notebooks and mobile phones use lithium-ion batteries. These batteries have been around for many years and for the most part are trouble free. However, last year and in 2007 a number of fires and explosions caused  by overheating lithium-ion batteries resulted in some of ...

Chief Engineer Andrew Farah and Battery Engineering Group Manager Bill Wallace recently gave members of the press an update on the status of the 2011 Chevy Volt and its battery pack.  Designed with the goal of providing a 40 mile range from a 16 kWh (8 kWh usable) charge, the pack and its supporting systems have evolved greatly over the past ...

Swiss biotech company Novartis discovered that a half dose of its A(H1N1) 2009 unadjuvanted vaccine may help the person receiving the shot to develop a sufficient immune response. The company conducted clinical trials of about 4,000 individuals who were given the Novartis Fluvirin vaccine, which found that many of the adults had immunity from the virus.   Novartis hopes to use similar ...

SAN FRANCISCO - Scientists say they've made a breakthrough in their pursuit of computers that "think" like a living thing's brain - an effort that tests the limits of technology. Even the world's most powerful supercomputers can't replicate basic aspects of the human mind. The machines can't imagine a wall painted a different color, for instance, or picture a person's ...

NASA's Swift satellite is the first spacecraft to have spotted the first signs from the earliest known explosion in the entire Universe. The phenomenon is believed to have taken place about 13 billion years ago, when the Cosmos was just around 700 million years old. The star that exploded sent forth a massive amount of radiation, in the form of ...

WASHINGTON - As federal regulators take their first tentative steps toward policing the wild west of medical information online, pharmaceutical companies are pressing their case to market drugs via Google, Twitter and other Web sites. The Food and Drug Administration will convene a two-day meeting beginning Thursday to hear the drug industry's position on Internet marketing. The agency has agreed to ...

New engine ideas are gaining traction thanks to a combination of technical breakthroughs and demand for more fuel efficient vehicles.  Such diverse technologies as cam-less (solenoid driven) engine valves, gasoline direct injection, and advanced turbocharging are being explored. However, one fundamental problem is that when you reduce the engine to the smallest possible size with these technologies, it's still a block ...

Among the most effective tools in the arsenal of medicine for detecting and diagnostic disease and injury inside the body without cutting the patient open is Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The technology allows medical personnel to get a look inside the body of a patient to form better treatment plans and to diagnose serious diseases like cancer. The problem with detecting ...

Good drivers can make the road a friendly place for their fellow drivers and milk great gas mileage (or equally great performance) out of their vehicles.  However, for every good driver on the road, there's plenty of bad ones.  According to studies, cell phones play a role in the poor overall quality of driving that leads to many accidents across America.  ...

One of the biggest challenges in moving tiny objects like single cells is moving them accurately without damaging the living cell. Techniques that work for moving tiny beads or other objects involve optical tweezers, but this method could kill live cells. Optical tweezers on the other hand are large and expensive devices. Researchers at Penn State, however, have developed acoustic tweezers ...

To gather more information about space radiation, NASA plans to increase its testing of monkeys, according to a report published by Discovery News. The U.S. space agency previously used lab mice and rats to test radiation, but testing must be carried out on animals more similar to humans. “We realized there was a need for this kind of work,” Harvard Medical ...

STOCKHOLM - Three scientists who created the technology behind digital photography and helped link the world through fiber-optic networks shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday. Charles K. Kao was cited for his breakthrough involving the transmission of light in fiber optics while Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith were honored for inventing an imaging semiconductor circuit known as ...

Last year about this time, Google launched a new program called 10 to the 100 seeking ideas from everyday people that could help others around the globe. Google reports that it received over 150,000 ideas and has chosen the best as part of a handful of finalists for the public to vote on. Out of the 150,000, ideas that were submitted ...

A new research study indicates some children and teenagers will become addicted to the internet, which can lead to ADHD, hostility, and social phobia. Even though internet addiction is a growing problem with adults, according to researchers, there is even more concern related to internet addiction for the younger generation. Researchers surveyed 2,293 seventh graders in Taiwan, noting 10.8% of them ...

This week saw one of the most important announcements made in the past decade. Scientists were finally able to conclude that water ice existed on the Moon, and their theory is supported by scientific measurements conducted by three separate instruments. Additionally, the find could be again proven next month, when the LCROSS impactor is scheduled to hit a Southern lunar ...

If there's one thing that recent paleontological discoveries have taught us, it's to expect the unexpected.  A recently discovered miniature T. Rex predecessor cast doubt on many theories, including the idea that T. Rex evolved its bizarre proportions (small arms, huge legs) over time (its ancestor had them too) and that it was a scavenger (the mini-Rex was fast and ideally ...

SAN FRANCISCO - Our economy sure could use the Next Big Thing. Something on the scale of railroads, automobiles or the Internet - the kind of breakthrough that emerges every so often and builds industries, generates jobs and mints fortunes. Silicon Valley investors are pointing to something called cleantech - alternative energy, more efficient power distribution and new ways to store ...