TECH

Looking for a parking space is about to get much easier, at least for San Franciscans. Later this year they will be able to use cell phones to access a live online map of where spaces are free in the city, thanks to a huge network of sensors.The devices include a magnetometer that picks up the change in the magnetic field caused by a parked cars. False positives are possible, so there's also an array of other sensors within each device to monitor parking spaces. There are no details yet on exactly what those sensors are.The network is impressively easy to set up.

Google's latest service, Knol, has just launched, intended as a repository of knowledge for everything from literature to DIY.In the words of its creator, it's meant to be "the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read".We predicted at the start of the year that Knol would kill off Wikipedia, mainly by choking off its hold on the top spot for search results. The motivation?

Bart Remes and his team at the Technical University of Delft have just produced the smallest-ever flapping wing robot (ornithopter) with a built-in camera.With a wingspan of just 10 centimetres, the DelFly could easily be confused with a real dragonfly. There's a video of it in action below. The small box in the bottom righthand corner gives a DelFly's eye view of the world.The DelFly should help the researchers understand more about the aerodynamics associated with ornithopter flight, but its onboard camera suggests it could have immediate practical uses too. A swarm of the cheap fliers could quickly bring back footage from a wide area after, say, an earthquake.But taking the DelFly out of the lab and into the real world might generate its own problems. As one commentator on YouTube has already pointed out: "it would probably get blown away".

"Double-u-double-u-double-u" does not trip off the tongue. Yet I seem to say and hear it hundreds of times a day. Attempting to pronounce a web address in English is not easy.As noted in Wikipedia, www is the longest possible three-letter string to pronounce in English. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams remarked that "the World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for."You might expect a better way to emerge and spread, as new words usually do. But the www has been around for more than 15 years, and we're still waiting.

The PC is changing. In the last year or so we've seen a significant change in the portable market with dirt cheap, low spec laptops such as the Asus Eee PC taking the world by storm.These devices are cheap because they use low end processors and Linux operating systems but are web-enabled, giving users access to the ever growing number of applications that are available online. The term netbook seems more suitable than laptop.So if you need to surf, email, knock out the odd text-based document or spreadsheet, most people will be more than happy with a $300 netbook.Now a similar change is happening in the desktop market.

In Japan, they do things differently, even when it comes to demolition.For example, the Japanese construction firm Kashima, has perfected a technique of demolishing a building floor by floor, starting at the bottom. Yep, that's starting on the ground floor.What they do is replace the building supports on the ground floor with hydraulic jacks and then remove all internal walls, supports and structures. The floors above are left sitting on the hydraulic jacks. When these are then lowered to the ground, workers start on the next floor and so on.This video shows a time lapse record of the demolition of a 20 story office block in Japan.Neat! In more ways than one.

This week, researchers at MIT, Harvard and NASA unveiled the iShoe, a pressure-sensitive insole that detects the unusual weight distribution that heralds balance problems.The iShoe was originally designed to help astronauts returning from space to reacquaint themselves with Earth's gravity, but the designers quickly identified a larger - and potentially more lucrative - market.

Hot on the heels of our post about rumours that Google is designing a gPhone to show off the power of its Android mobile operating system, comes news of a potential tie up between the search engine and Symbian, the market leader in smartphone operating systems.Symbian is the granddaughter of the famous Psion operating system that brought personal digital assistants to the masses in the early 90s. Under pressure from Palm and other PDA makers, Psion was eventually forced out of the PDA market but sold its operating system, updated to work on smartphones and renamed Symbian, to a consortium of technology companies including Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola.Earlier this year, however, Nokia announced its intention to buy out its partners and relaunch Symbian as an open, royalty-free operating system for smartphones.Sound familiar?

Why are off-road wheelchairs like London buses?

The news this morning that Apple sold 1 million 3G iPhones over the weekend has fanned the flames of a Google rival hitting the market in the near future.Last November, Google unveiled an operating system called Android that is designed to power a new generation of mobile phones. Powered by Linux and available for free, Android is designed kickstart an entirely new kind of innovation in mobile phone applications.

With Google increasingly dominating search, Yahoo has called on the wisdom of the crowds in its efforts to catch up.Yesterday, the company invited companies or individuals to use its search engine technology to build whatever innovative web pages they can think of.

This week in PLoS Medicine, the team behind HealthMap, a web-based tool to monitor and track infectious disease, discuss updates to the tool.HealthMap trawls news and health websites for references to illness and then plots them on an interactive map of the world, powered by Google Maps. Its algorithms are context-specific to distinguish mention of a new disease vaccine from a disease outbreak.It can now handle data from English, Chinese, Spanish, Russian and French websites, with other language readers in development.

How would you feel if your cellphone network wrote to you on behalf of sports governing bodies demanding you quit sharing video clips of goals, home runs and slam dunks?

Not so long ago, you didn’t even know the sex of your baby until the day of birth. Today, we’ll know just about everything there is to know -- especially now that expectant mums and dads can gaze upon their progeny with the help of Echographic images 4-D. Apparently, these are the best medical images available. Echographic imagery is not new, but it has not been widely used for this purpose.

A performance artist has created a robotic crawling japanese business man. This is supposed to symbolize the crash of the asian economy. It means something else to me. But make your own minds up.

Spare a thought for a team from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California which this week unveiled a new technique for blasting out 50 times as much rock or concrete using the same weight of explosive as a standard shaped charge.The "cluster charge" approach replaces a single shaped charge with a pattern of multiple small charges detonated simultaneously.It's a clever technique that might be compared to what happens if you carelessly drill several holes too close together in a wall. Cracks propagate between them and the entire volume of material in the area bounded by the holes breaks free leaving one large hole.The researchers say the cluster-charge technique is between 40 and 60 times more efficient than the shaped-charge approach.

In November last year, Google's share price hit an eye-watering $744 per share. Today, it sits at $541, a significant drop that has wiped billions of its value (it is currently worth a mere $172 billion).The drop represents the end of one of the most spectacular share price rises in history.

i and some of the protein crew will be there, so if you are going let me know so we can hook-up before/during/after. more details here:

http://www.nesta.org.uk/the-future-of-the-web-with-sir-tim-berners-lee-8...

it's full, but they are running a waiting list.

This new jet plane has just taken its first test flight - but the pilot need not rely on his personal parachute in the event of a problem. The small plane packs one big enough to let the whole craft drift to earth.You can see the new plane take off in this video - it sports an usual split tailplane design.

via Channel 53

A UK internet service provider is in the headlines today for sending warning letters to customers suspected of downloading copyrighted music files. No-one has been threatened with being cut off, or with legal action, but as we report in this week's issue, a new agreement before the G8 could make such punitive measures much more likely.The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was dreamed up by the US in late 2007, and will eventually become international law if G8 heads of government in Japan next week support it.

E-book readers like the Kindle may be getting better, but still fall short of the usability of paper books. You can't turn or flip through pages, or compare different documents as you would with paper. A new prototype with two displays can do all that - as the video below shows.The two leaves can be opened and closed to simulate turning pages, or even separated to pass round or compare documents. When the two leaves are folded back, the device shows one display on each side.

Is pornography as American as apple pie?

The video below shows some new software in action that hides the identity of people in CCTV footage. The idea is that it protects the identity of anyone innocent that is caught on the tape. US firm 3VR say that only if somebody was acting suspiciously would someone with security clearance unscramble the faces of a person shownIn 2006, we wrote about a similar system developed by a Swiss company, Emitall. Their own video shows it at work blurring out people and cars.The technology has been likened to the scramble suits worn by narcotics officers in Philip K Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly.

Most of us know that tornadoes are unpredictable, uncontrollable, and dangerous. But a Canadian engineer thinks they could be the future of electricity generation. He wants to make electricity from artificial tornadoes.Louis Michaud, a retired petroleum engineer in Sarnia, Ontario, plans to use the waste heat from conventional power plants to create an "atmospheric vortex engine" - a small, controlled tornado that would drive turbines and generate electricity. "I'm confident that we could control these things," he says. Michaud also thinks solar powered tornados generated using the sun's heat could also work.His latest design is a circular wall 200 meters across and 100 meters high without a roof.