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Mathematicians have now visualized abstract mathematical objects called flat tori - items resembling donuts with corrugated, fractal surfaces. These were thought to be impossible to envision in ordinary 3-D space... until now.

Forgetting that cloak of invisibility - how about a device that hides you in the very fabric of time? New research published in Nature reveals that scientists have successfully hidden an object in both space and time - even if for only for 40 picoseconds. Rather than bending light around the object, their technique creates a temporal hole in light beams where an event can be hidden.

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?

There's been a movement afoot to boycott Elsevier journals. It's started over in the mathematics community, led by Timothy Gowers, a serious mathematician indeed. The objections to Elsevier are the ones you'd think: high prices, unsplittable bundles of journal subscriptions for institutions, and their strong support for legislation like the Research Works Act.

Bruce Schneier was invited to testify about the TSA to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, but at the last minute he was disinvited, after the TSA objected to having him in the room.

In addition to a high-tech grocery cart and an augmented-reality mirror, one of the futuristic projects on display at Microsoft's TechForum event earlier this week was a research project exploring the possibilities for using a transparent LCD display in conjunction with a Kinect sensor to let people interact with virtual objects in a 3D space by moving their hands around behind the screen.

Results from FIA Aalborg: The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most important fundaments for the smart cities, and is becoming slowly but steadily one of the core elements of the Future Internet (FI). In fact, various architectures and approaches from Future Internet such as Cloud Computing (Software as a Service - SaaS), which are being linked with the Web of Things, which is also allowing to define Sensors as a Service (SaaS) are clear examples of this relation between Future Internet and IoT architectures. At this particular point, where the IoT is a reality, where several IoT-based high scale deployments are being carried out such as Rome, and Santander. It is essential to discuss what are the IoT-specific aspects that the FI architecture has to take into account, in order to efficiently map the IoT architectures into an overall FI architecture, and particularly, how to manage rights of the individual (i.e. privacy) and its interaction with IoT objects taking into account aspects like delegation, access control as key aspects in the inclusion of the Internet of Things in the common lives with its total inclusion in the city of the future.

The kinds of drones making the headlines daily are the heavily armed CIA and U.S. Army vehicles which routinely strike targets in Pakistan - killing terrorists and innocents alike. But the real high-tech story of surveillance drones is going on at a much smaller level, as tiny remote controlled vehicles based on insects are already likely being deployed. Over recent years a range of miniature drones, or micro air vehicles (MAVs), based on the same physics used by flying insects, have been presented to the public. The fear kicked off in 2007 when reports of bizarre flying objects hovering above anti-war protests sparked accusations that the U.S. government was accused of secretly developing robotic insect spies.

Robert Harvey asks: Occasionally I see questions about edge cases on Stack Overflow that are easily answered by the likes of Jon Skeet or Eric Lippert-experts who demonstrate a deep knowledge of a particular language and its many intricacies. Here's an example of this from Lippert's MSDN blog: You might think that in order to use a foreach loop, the collection you are iterating over must implement IEnumerable or IEnumerable. But as it turns out, that is not actually a requirement. What is required is that the type of the collection must have a public method called GetEnumerator, and that must return some type that has a public property getter called Current and a public method MoveNext that returns a bool. If the compiler can determine that all of those requirements are met then the code is generated to use those methods. Only if those requirements are not met do we check to see if the object implements IEnumerable or IEnumerable. This is cool stuff to know. I can understand why Eric knows this; he's on the compiler team, so it's explicitly in his job description to know. But how do mere mortals, those of us on the outside, find out about stuff like this?

A refrain running through the debate over global warming suggests we need to nothing to slow it, because after all, the climate science predicting more warming could turn out to be wrong. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake, and Galileo almost was, for objecting to the scientific doctrine that the Sun revolves around the Earth. For two thousand years people believed in systems of physics and astronomy that turned out to be incorrect. And for a few more centuries after that they held to a new celestial mechanics only to see it displaced by relativity theory.

PopFab is a multi-tool for the 21st century. At its heart is a computer-controlled motion platform and a means of attaching various toolheads. These enable PopFab to make objects from a digital plan in a variety of ways: current capabilities include 3D printing (as you are about to see), milling, vinyl cutting, and drawing - with more on the way. PopFab has traveled the world as a carry-on item of luggage to Saudi Arabia and Germany, and within the USA to Aspen in Colorado. We hope that this is only the beginning.

Saylor.org is a free and open collection of college level courses. There are no registrations or fees required to take our courses, and you will earn a certificate upon completion of each course. Because we are not accredited, you will not earn a college degree or diploma; however, our team of experienced college professors has designed each course so you will be able to achieve the same learning objectives as students enrolled in traditional colleges. More Information

The objective of this project is the design and development of a privacy-aware content filtering platform focused on future pervasive wireless networks.  I'm expected to design a content filtering and users protection platform based on two building blocks: