Tech Today w/ Ken May

dcblogs writes “The U.S. Dept. of Energy has set a goal to develop battery and energy storage technologies that are five times more powerful and five times cheaper within five years. DOE is creating a new center at Argonne National Laboratory, at a cost of $120 million over five years, that’s intended to reproduce development environments that were successfully used by Bell Laboratories and World War II’s Manhattan Project. ‘When you had to deliver the goods very, very quickly, you needed to put the best scientists next to the best engineers across disciplines to get very focused,’ said U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu, on Friday. The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research isn’t designed to seek incremental improvements in existing technologies. This technology hub, according to DOE’s solicitation (PDF), ‘should foster new energy storage designs that begin with a “clean sheet of paper” — overcoming current manufacturing limitations through innovation to reduce complexity and cost.’ Other research labs, universities and private companies are participating in the effort.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It seems the rumors of e-ink based displays’ imminent death at the hands of tablets were greatly exaggerated. Despite a glut of portable color screen devices now on the market, e-book readers are more popular than ever, and a company called ZBD Solutions now wants to use the e-ink technology as easily updateable store signage. More »

November 29, 2012, between 1026 and 1029 (UTC), all traffic from Syria to the rest of the Internet stopped. At CloudFlare, we witnessed the drop off. CloudFlare spent yesterday morning studying the situation to understand what happened. The following graph shows the last several days of traffic coming to CloudFlare’s network from Syria. More »

Thanks to a (now password protected) page on Redbox’s support site, details on the company’s joint streaming venture with Verizon have finally surfaced. More »

Most foods deteriorate over time, but bread’s a major culprit, often going stale after just a couple of days. Now, though, a US research company claims to be able to make your loaf stay fresh for up to 60 whole days . More »

AlphaWolf_HK writes “Newzbin2, one of the most recognized index sites for usenet, has closed for good. A statement reads: ‘It is with regret that we announce the closure of Newzbin2. A combination of several factors has made this the only option. For a long time we have struggled with poor indexing of Usenet, poor numbers of reports caused by the majority of our editors dropping out & no-one replacing them. Our servers have been unstable and crashing on a regular basis meaning the NZBs & NFOs are unavailable for long periods and we don’t have the money to replace them. To make things worse all our payment providers dropped out or started running scared. The MPA sued Paypal and are going at our innocent payment provider Kthxbai Ltd in the UK. Our other payment provider has understandably lost their nerve. Result? We have no more payment providers to offer & no realistic means of taking money (no, Bitcoin isn’t credible as it’s just too hard for 90% of people).’” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some Staples stores in Belgium and the Netherlands will have MCOR color 3D printers that will print out model-files uploaded to a store website for in-person pickup. MCOR printers use plain pulp paper as build material, so the resulting models will be essentially cellulose, dye and glue, and should be easy to recycle. Staples’ Easy 3D will offer consumers, product designers, architects, healthcare professionals, educators, students and others low-cost, brilliantly coloured, photo-realistic 3D printed products from Staples stores. Customers will simply upload electronic files to the Staples Office Centre and pick up the models in their nearby Staples stores, or have them shipped to their address. Staples will produce the models with the Mcor IRIS, a 3D printer with the highest colour capability in the industry and lowest operating cost of any commercial-class 3D printer. The press release promises that this technology will be made available in other Staples stores around the world. Mcor Technologies and Staples division launch 3D printing service

Greg sez, “This project is using a number of computational photography techniques to document Charles Babbage’s ‘Difference Engine No 2′ for the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. There are interactive gigapixel images for the four cardinal views of the device available to view.” Babbage Difference Engine in Gigapixel ( Thanks, Greg ! )

NASA has confirmed a surprising, counterintuitive discovery. The burning hell known Mercury—the closest planet to the Sun—has water. Frozen water. Three new research papers, based on data obtained by the Messenger spacecraft, show undeniable evidence. More »

Apple’s slightly overdue update to iTunes is out. Finally. It’s a sizable re-imagining of a piece of software used by a massive amount of people. So you should probably take a minute or two to acquaint yourself with the new stuff. Here’s what’s changed. More »