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"Researchers in China say that they've successfully managed to test an engine that runs on electricity, requires no propellant and produces no exhaust. It's called the EmDrive, and it's able to convert microwave energy directly into thrust inside a sealed chamber. Oh, it's totally silent and highly efficient, too. If it seems too good to be true, well, you're not the only one who feels that way. But the researchers have a prototype that apparently works, and they've just published a paper detailing it."

Note-I am going to try this for our blog. If you've ever wondered how some website that looks like it was an early draft from the proverbial infinite number of monkeys on infinite keyboards managed to get to the top of a search result page instead of something you actually want to read (or something you've written), you've been victimized by the dark art of search engine optimization (SEO). In the never-ending battle for the top of the Google search results page, and for advertising click-throughs, marketers and bloggers enlist an ever-changing bag of tricks to game search engine algorithms, often with the help of SEO consultants and a collection of tools that track the best tactics of the moment.

interesting - bet law enforcement uses it to reverse engineer energy high spots - possible labs or growing dens

The 2013 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings2013): These conferences will provide a high-profile, leading-edge forum for researchers, engineers and practitioners to present state-of-art advances and innovations in theoretical foundations, systems, infrastructure, tools, testbeds, and applications for the internet of things, cyber, physical and social computing, green communications and computing, as well as to identify emerging research topics and define the future.    This is a good chance which aims at exchanging research experience in such fields. It will bring together experts from the areas of computational intelligence, communications, networks, distributed systems, and computer science. 

ou like to ask Wikipedia tougher questions than today's simple keyword searches allow? A prototype plug-in that can do just that will be demonstrated at the World Wide Web conference in Lyon, France, next month. Called Swipe - loosely short for "searching Wikipedia by example" - the software aims to let users of the online encyclopedia answer complex questions that most search engines would stumble over. For example, trying to figure out "which actresses won academy awards when they were under 30 years old in the last 25 years?" becomes relatively simple when using the program.

n 1961, IBM commissioned Charles and Ray Eames to create an exhibition for the California Museum of Science and Industry.  The resulting exhibition, called Mathematica: a World of Numbers, is a founding document of interactive STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) exhibitions.

Researchers have remotely activated genes inside living animals, a proof of concept that could one day lead to medical procedures in which patients' genes are triggered on demand. The work, in which a team used radio waves to switch on engineered insulin-producing genes in mice, is published today in Science1.

Last year Golan Levin's son decided to build a car. Aside from the minor inconvenience of being 4 years old, the younger Levin faced an engineering challenge. His Tinkertoys, which he wanted to use for the vehicle's frame, wouldn't attach to his K'Nex, the pieces he wanted to use for the wheels. It took his father, an artist, hacker and professor at Carnegie Mellon, a year to solve that problem. In the process he cracked open a much larger one: In an age when anyone can share, download and create not just digital files but also physical things, thanks to the proliferation of cheap 3-D printers, are companies at risk of losing control of the objects they sell?

Berlin, February 14, 2012 - The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.5, the third major release of "the best free office suite ever", which shows to end users the improvements derived from the development strategy adopted since September 2010. LibreOffice 3.5 derives from the combined effort of full time hackers - the largest group of experienced OOo code developers - and volunteer hackers, coordinated by the Engineering Steering Committee.

US experts have developed what they say are the most biologically-accurate robotic legs yet. Writing in the Journal of Neural Engineering, they said the work could help understanding of how babies learn to walk - and spinal-injury treatment. They created a version of the message system that generates the rhythmic muscle signals that control walking. A UK expert said the work was exciting because the robot mimics control and not just movement.

Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong are currently putting together a paper explaining why the presence of Dyson Spheres would actually deepen the mystery that is the Fermi Paradox. Armstrong recently gave a talk on the subject, titled "von Neumann probes, Dyson spheres, exploratory engineering and the Fermi paradox."

Star Trek: The Next Generation may be coming to your living rooms soon courtesy of some hot new Blu-ray pressing, but one of the most compelling pieces of the technology shown on that series still remains elusive: the holodeck. Don't get down, sunshine, because we might soon be making our first, tentative steps into a virtual courtesy of Project Holodeck. It's underway at USC's School of Cinematic Arts as well as the Viterbi School of Engineering and starts out with a pair of Project Oculus glasses. These glasses, which were shown off at E3 by none other than John Carmack, cram a 1,280 x 800 display into a pair of glasses that present a wide, truly immersive field of view. Pair that with a PlayStation Move for head tracking and a Razer Hydra controller and you have the beginnings of a proper virtual reality environment.

Becoming a university professor requires a lot of work for very little financial reward, compared to most other professions. In STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields, the minimum requirement is four years of undergraduate education, plus anywhere between four and a half and eight years of graduate studies, followed by an (ever increasing) number of years of post-doctoral work. That may get you an assistant professorship where, at a state university, the starting salary is in the $60k-70k range. 

Equal parts origami and electrical engineering, each robot "has 137 folding joints," PopSci explains. "The assembly scaffold, which has folds of its own, performs 22 origami-style folds, resulting in a fully formed robot you can pop out and turn on.

Google, MSN Search, Yahoo!, AOL, and most other search engines collect and store records of your search queries. If these records are revealed to others, they can be embarrassing or even cause great harm. Would you want strangers to see searches that reference your online reading habits, medical history, finances, sexual orientation, or political affiliation?

Institutional memory comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why. Sometimes they write it down and store that information somewhere. Institutional amnesia works similarly. The people leave and the documents disappear, rot, or just become forgotten (as it were).