It’s kind of hard to imagine this thing flying at all, really, but the folks over at Aurora Flight Sciences say that their conceptual surveillance craft, the Odysseus could zip around at an altitude of 60,000 to 90,000 feet for five whole years. What you’re looking at is actually three separate, wing-shaped craft that take off independent of one another. Once in the air, the 164-foot-long winglets come together and create a single craft with a 492-foot wingspan.

It keeps itself in the air using energy gathered by solar panels, though the team is still trying to decide what to do when the sun isn’t shining and are considering fuel cells, batteries and even flywheels.

As for what the Odysseus would be doing on its odyssey, Aurora sees the craft fulfilling diverse roles, from helping monitor the weather to aiding in border control. For it to do that, though, it has to be built: Aurora wants to have a full-sized prototype complete in the next five years, with a hall-sized version already on the way.

PopSci, via Inhabitat

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We called the Verbatim InSight USB hard drive “sexy” the other day, and now that we’re the first ones to get our hands on one, we know that’s true. Who cares if this svelte piano-black 500GB drive is a fingerprint magnet? Besides its beauty, the convenience of its always-on display showing you the name of the drive and available disk space is a delight. That’s right, we were so mildly astonished with this feature that we named the drive “WTF.”

It works just like any other drive, except after you type a name for it in My Computer, the next time you plug it in, that always-on “cholesteric LCD” display proudly changes its name in the display. Then it stays like that, without sucking any power, even when you unplug it. Better yet is its helpful free space-remaining line just underneath the drive name.

While the tiny display is a bit small to read for bleary eyes, we like having the exact number of gigabytes we have left sitting right there in front of us, any time. And when you plug the drive into any USB port on a Mac or PC, there’s an attractive blue LED that lets you know that power is on.

The drive is fast, writing a gig of data in 46 seconds, right up there with the fastest USB drives we’ve seen here. With the 500GB model we tested retailing at $140, and its 320GB brandmate coming in at $100 (and both destined to get cheaper any day now), we think this newfangled ability to determine drive space at a glance is excellent, and it’s something all hard drives should have on board.

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This LEGO animation has been bouncing all over the Interwebs this weekend. It’s pretty stunning stuff since it was all done with LEGO and by one person who clocked 1,500 hours on it. It goes to show how much you can do with a pile of LEGO and a regular digital camera.



That all said, the video is st…


By: fungus amungus

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Today Nokia unveiled its upcoming Booklet 3G, the company’s first netbook, though it has a few features that make it stand out from the pack. It certainly looks like a netbook, with a full keyboard, an Atom processor that can run Windows 7, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and a 10.1-inch display — plus the added bonus of an HDMI output. But its smartphone-esque features can’t be denied: a hot-swappable SIM card, built-in 3G/HSPA connectivity, and GPS (well, A-GPS) with Ovi Maps. Not to mention it’s a lightweight, measuring just 0.78 inches thick and weighing 2.75 pounds.

If you believe the 12-hour rated battery life and Nokia’s promise of “all-day mobility,” the Booklet starts to feel like more than just a netbook… it’s really closer to a smartbook — an emerging category in between smartphone and netbook — though running Windows 7 would seem to disqualify it. Is that just marketing semantics, though? And does it matter? We kind of want it either way. We’ll see if it’s still just as desirable when Nokia announces pricing and release dates next week.

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NASA and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) have launched a water-powered rocket 1300 feet into the atmosphere!



The rocket was actually propelled by a frozen mixture of "nanoscale aluminium" (isn’t that "dust"?) and water, pumped in at the consistency of toothpa…


By: Kiteman

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The space shuttle Discovery is poised for liftoff on the STS-128 mission from Pad 39a at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Monday, Aug….

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