“Nanotubes assemblies of various types are black and highly conductive,” said Dr. Mikhail Kozlov, a research scientist and the study’s lead author. “Their dark, conductive surface can be effectively heated with laser light or electricity to induce variations in the pressure of the air around the nanotubes — which we perceive as sound. It’s called the photo- or thermo-acoustic effect, and it’s the same principle Alexander Graham Bell used to produce sound on the first telephone.” With laser excitation, no electrical contact with the nanotube speaker is required, making the speakers wireless. “Speakers made with carbon nanotube sheets are extremely thin, light and almost transparent,” Kozlov said. “They have no moving parts and can be attached to any surface, which makes the surface acoustically active. They can be concealed in television and computer screens, apartment walls, or in the windows of buildings and cars. The almost invisible strands form films that can ‘talk.’” In addition to filling a room with sound from invisible speakers, nanotube speakers could easily cancel sound from the noisiest neighbor or dim the roar of traffic rushing past a neighborhood, using the same principles as current sound-canceling technologies. “The sound generation by nanotube sheets can help to achieve this effect on very large scales,” Kozlov said.

Engadget has posted two slides that appear to come from a Dell presentation showing that the Google Android-powered Dell Streak tablet will include access to over 300,000 e-books in the Kindle store, everything in the Amazon MP3 download store (over 11 million “songs and extras”), and over 50,000 movies and television shows available for one-day rental or permanent purchase. Taken together, this mirrors what iTunes offers for Apple devices, giving hardware manufacturers such as Dell a way to kick-start plans to take on the iPad. Other Android devices already ship with the Amazon MP3 store, but an addition of the company’s Kindle e-books and sizable catalog of on-demand movies and television shows to Dell’s upcoming line of various-size tablets — and possibly Android devices in general — signals a more significant alliance between Google, Amazon and hardware manufacturers like Dell, as they team up to copy Apple’s successful mix of touchscreens and entertainment.

Never mind that Chicago power pop group OK Go pleaded for weeks to get their greedy record company EMI to allow this unique video to be embeddable — it is now, and just look! The group's Rube Goldberg masterpiece is here for all to see. "This Too Shall Pass" might be the most elaborate setup ever, and beyond that, it's got to be the most tasteful and colorful. That's what you get when you assemble a brilliant team consisting of wizards from Syyn Labs, Caltech, and MIT Medialab. They created this magnificent machine inside a 10,000-square-foot abandoned warehouse, and Flying Box Productions shot it all with brilliant skill and artistry. Why were all those people clapping at the end? Was the video successfully shot in one take? That huge warehouse full of paraphernalia couldn't have been easy to set up. Want to see how this was done? Four videos with a few hints:

Simon, 64, gave an interview to Uncut magazine about the backward whispering, which prompted the U.K. tabloid The Sun to report that "David" is record executive David Geffen. But Simon's publicist disputed the theory. "The man's first name is David," she told CNNRadio, "but it could be one of many Davids." The Sun's theory revolves around the idea that Simon recorded the song to express displeasure at Geffen's signing of a rival, Joni Mitchell, for his record label, Asylum Records. Simon wasn't on Asylum, but her label, Elektra, merged with it in 1972, the year her album "No Secrets," containing "You're So Vain," was released. Geffen was put in charge of Elektra/Asylum. Simon is on record as being uncomfortable with Geffen. In Jac Holzman's oral history of the label, "Follow the Music," she said, "[The merger] was devastating. It was like I was a child of divorce -- my father was leaving me and now I had David Geffen as a stepfather." Simon has long played possum (to paraphrase one of her album titles) about the identity of the "You're So Vain" character, who travels by Lear Jet to witness an eclipse and, cuttingly, "probably think[s] this song is about you." At one point she said he was a composite; other times she has maintained he has certain letters in his name. NBC executive Dick Ebersol paid $50,000 at a charity auction for the revelation and a live performance of the song. Rumors have focused on Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger and Kris Kristofferson, among others. Beatty has said he believes it's about him. In a 2002 interview with CNN.com, Simon said that "You're So Vain" wasn't the only song about the man, whomever it might be. "There are always clues in other songs. The guy has repeatedly appeared in my songs," she said.