SKIRMISHER

Samso [Wikipedia] is currently the largest human settlement on the planet that has completely eradicated its carbon footprint by using wind power. With everyone on the island owning a turbine, and relying on solar power and wind farms, it even sells power to the mainland.
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Defense contractor Northrop Grumman assures the Pentagon that weapons-grade electric lasers will actually come by the end of 2008. Which means 100-kilowatt lasers that can knock mortars and rockets out of the sky — just like in your favorite video game! Fo sho!

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Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article, “As We May Think,” has been much celebrated as a central inspiration for the development of hypertext and the World Wide Web. Less attention, however, has been paid to Bush’s motivation for imagining a new generation of information technologies; it was his hope that more powerful tools, by automating the routine [...]

Three men appear through the body of Tokyo University graduate student Kazutoshi Obana during a 2003 demonstration of optical camouflage technology.
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{Intriguing: the jaw-dropping technology of invisibility}

The image below is not a photo — it’s a computer-generated imagery produced in real time, made from a demo of what AMD’s “Cinema 2.0″ can do in the very near future.

AMD’s new effort, “Cinema 2.0,” promises to bring photorealistic graphics that blend the visual fidelity found only in the most recent of Hollywood movies [...]

Remember Metamaterials, which were supposedly being used in creating a completely non-bullshit “invisibility cloak”?
Scientists working on it are apparently achieving something:
Researchers have demonstrated for the first time they were able to cloak three-dimensional objects using artificially engineered materials that redirect light around the objects.
Previously, they only have been able to cloak very thin two-dimensional objects.
The [...]

New light sensor technology that almost mimicks the human retina just knocking on our door:
One of the disadvantages of modern photo cameras is the flat image sensor that converts light into electric signals. Because of its shape, optics must make up for various aberrations that come to light (excuse the pun). Now scientists at Northwestern [...]

The Large Hadron Collider, or simply called “Hell,” is set to begin firing its beam tests within this week. Alright, it’s probably silly to think it is actually going to make a planet-destroying black hole, into which Earth would go and fuck itself. But if it would, imagine the drama and those naughty doomsday prophets [...]