LED lover writes "The discovery of the LED is usually credited to four US groups in 1962, but an unrecognized Russian genius got there forty years before. Oleg Losev even filed a patent on using his device for long range communications, and wrote to Einstein to ask for help with the theory — but got no reply."

grease_boy writes "A UK company will start selling server racks submerged in oil baths within a year. Very-PC is working on prototypes and says that because oil transfers heat more efficiently, power usage can be cut by fifty percent."

Via a Wired Blog, an anonymous reader wrote with a link to a post on the Geek Technique website. There, post author Mark Hoekstra details how to replace an iPod's HDD with flash memory. It's not an inexpensive procedure, as 16 Gigs of flash memory is still a mite expensive, and the post is not a 'how-to'. Just the same, the project took painstaking work and is well worth recognizing. "I guess I can say I found ways of eliminating almost every hard drive out of almost every hard drive based iPod thereby eliminating all moving parts. The only one left is the iPod video which would only need a slightly different adapter. But next to that I've got a gut feeling that one's being upgraded to flash memory by Apple themselves any time soon."

Matthew Sparkes writes "This article is a list of the best nano-scale artworks. It includes a 15 micron wide badger, a ten micron long guitar (which was actually played) and a 120 micron long New Scientist logo. Of course these are the images that got released to the press. In labs around the world people must have used their bleeding-edge technologies to make structures just to impress their friends. I wonder how many scientists' significant others have received nano-Valentines on Feb 14th?"

Today's Los Angeles Times has an article about a North Hollywood junkyard that stocks a huge quantity of used aerospace parts, from valves to rocket engines. Norton Sales Inc. got started in the early 1960s. The junkyard had fallen on hard times, with the collapse of the Los Angeles-area aerospace economy in the 1980s, but it's making something of a comeback now with NASA's new plans for moon and Mars missions. The customers used to be rich Hollywood types; nowadays they are as likely to be private space entrepreneurs. "It's dangerous coming to a place like this," said Dave Masten of Masten Space. "It's like shopping on an empty stomach."

TunesBoy writes "Only a couple of days after being shipped, the Apple TV is already being modified in a variety of ways. A thread at Something Awful discusses installing VLC, and a dedicated site, AppleTVHacks.net, has appeared and is cataloging hacks including a hard-drive upgrade tutorial. Did Apple intend for the Apple TV to be so easy to upgrade and hack?"

Somnus suggests we check out the latest issue of MIT's Technology Review, where researchers describe how they can dramatically boost engine output and efficiency by preventing pre-ignition, or "knock." How they do it: "Both turbocharging and direct injection are preexisting technologies, and neither looks particularly impressive... by combining them, and augmenting them with a novel way to use a small amount of ethanol, Cohn and his colleagues have created a design that they believe could triple the power of a test engine."

LWATCDR writes "Has a great write up on combining LinuxBios a Linux kernel, busybox, X, a window manager, and rxvt into a two meg flash chip. So what does get you? A six second boot time for one. All sorts of uses come to mind. Terminals to use with the Linux Terminal server. A very fast booting embedded system like a Car computer. With every one pushing for multi-core cpus, mega gigabyte drives and many gigabytes of ram it is interesting to see how small you can go."

Brietech writes "Ever felt like building your own laptop from (almost literally) scratch? This is a microcontroller-based "laptop" built from the ground up from a handful of chips and other hardware found lying around. It runs a self-hosted development environment, allowing the user to write and edit programs in "Chris++" on the machine, and then compile and run them. The carpentry looks like it could use some work, but it's a neat project!"

ThinSkin writes "While gas-guzzling cars are greatly to blame for releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, computers play their role in warming up the Earth too. ExtremeTech has an informative how-to article on building a green PC that will not only help save the planet, but will also slim down that energy bill. An important component, or culprit, to consider is the power supply, so investing in an 80 PLUS PSU is a step in the right direction. The article also discusses how to configure Windows Vista to utilize its power-saving options."

An anonymous reader writes "When silicon fails to beat Moores law, maybe dominos can help. This guy has created a half adder in dominos as a proof of concept for domino computation. If he intends to make a full domino computer he's going to need an awful lot of dominos."

An anonymous reader writes "Who said there's no use for your old IBM "M Series" keyboards anymore? This creative fellow shows us step by step how to convert the keyboards of yesteryear into keyboards of an even further distant, fictional time. H. G. Wells would be proud."

ndogg writes "This story is all wet. Paulo Blikstein at MIT has created a water computer. The one boolean logic gate he created functions as a half-adder (i.e. both XOR and AND). He then proceeded to create a four bit adder."

chris-chittleborough writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that 'a Marine officer in Iraq, a small network-design company in California, a nonprofit troop-support group, a blogger and other undeterrable folk designed a handheld insurgent-identification device, built it, shipped it and deployed it in [Iraq] in 30 days.' Compare this to the Automated Biometric Identification System, a multi-megabuck Pentagon project now 2 years old. With bureaucracy increasingly strangling innovation, will agile smaller businesses be able to accomplish what once required a sprawling government project?"

An anonymous reader writes "Cambridge University researchers, in an investigation for BBC Television's Watchdog programme, have demonstrated a man-in-the-middle attack for the chip-and-pin credit card security system used throughout the UK and Europe. In the attack, the card is inserted into a card-reader that has been tampered with, and the information transmitted in real-time to an accomplice who uses a specially modified card to make a higher-value purchase elsewhere. The modified card-reader shows only the expected amount, but the larger amount is deducted from the victim's bank account. It would not be easy to use this method in practice because the two transactions must be made simultaneously. The same team recently demonstrated a hacked chip-and-pin terminal playing Tetris."

Via Ars Technica's Opposable Thumbs blog, and their commentary on the device, a review of the first Wii mod chip at the MaxConsole site. The review offers step-by-step instructions for putting it in place, and then rates the resulting options opened up by the device. Most interestingly the chip is apparently updateable via a DVD, allowing for new functionality to be released for as time goes on. At $50 and with just a little soldering to get in place, the Wii CycloWhiz sounds like a great deal for anyone looking to do some outside-the-box thinking with Nintendo's console.

ianchaos writes "WiiBot is the pet project of two engineers who apparently have way too much cool hardware and time on their hands. These two guys figure that as long as you have a Kuka KR16 industrial robot to work with, why not see if you can control it with the Wii Remote? The result is a tennis-playing, sword-wielding mechanical arm that simultaneously captures 'weekend of nerdy fun' and 'accident waiting to happen' in a fun two minute video. The website even details the technical aspects of teaching a robot to parry."

holy_calamity writes "US researchers have made a transistor from a Bose-Einstein condensate. They claim it to be the first step towards 'atomic circuits' that run with atoms instead of electrons. 'A small number of atoms can be used to control the flow of a large number of atoms, in much the same way that an FET uses a gate voltage to control a large electric current,' says lead research Alex Zozulya. The abstract of their paper is freely available."

MattSparkes writes "It seems that 3D silicon chips, allowing designers to fit more components into a smaller space, could soon be made far easier to create with a little inspiration from a classic children's toy. "Silicon wafers covered with matching patterns of Lego-like teeth and holes could aid the development of 3D electronics, say UK researchers." Crucially, this technique can make use of existing machinery."

Migraineman writes "I stumbled upon a clever hack by Sprite. He reverse-engineered the pin functions on an HP inkjet cartridge and built a simple driver board that converts the cartridge into a hand-held inkjet printer. The driver board is programmed with a fixed message. Moving the 'print head' is your responsibility. Printing messages on a whiteboard was the original inspiration, but printing messages on the foam head of a Guinness is just inspired."