News.com Extra

It's languished for a while, but Rob Galbraith's extremely useful and detailed database of performance tests on CompactFlash and SD media has just been updated. If you've got burning questions about whether it's worth the extra bucks for a flashier flash card, this is the place to look. Recent additions include tests with the Canon EOS 40D and Nikon D300.

So how do you think your favorite baseball team will fare in 2008? New Jersey Institute of Technology's Bruce Bukiet has some fodder for the baseball buffs among us.

For the past seven seasons, Bukiet has been using a mathematical model to predict how many games each Major League Baseball team is likely to win. The Mets fan sees his team edging the Braves in the NL East divisional race, with 92 wins. In the AL East, Bukiet's formula has the Yankees and Red Sox both finishing up with 98 victories.

Of course, like any of the countless baseball predictions made each year, Bukiet's should probably be take with a grain of salt. Bukiet had an off year in 2007, correctly picking only two clear Division winners. That's something to give, say a Giants fan like yours truly, some hope. My beloved San Francisco team is pegged as the NL West cellar dweller with just 75 wins.

Check out Bruce Bukiet's predictions in LiveScience: "Study Predicts Baseball's Top Teams in 2008"

Shanghai developers plan to begin construction next year on what they say will be the world's first sustainable "eco-city" on a plot almost the size of Manhattan. The Dongtan, or East Beach, project is to be built on Chongming Island and is slated to eventually support half a million residents.

Among other things, the city is envisioned to recycle almost all of its waste, produce its electricity, and ferry people around in hydrogen fuel-cell buses and solar-powered water taxis, according to The Seattle Times

But amid high hopes, there is fear that the environmental project will end up as "another grand idea that failed in practice."

Read the story at The Seattle Times: "Can a bold new "eco-city" clear the air in China?"

(Credit: VisBox)

It used to be that if you wanted to get a good look at microscopic bits of matter, you had to have to use, well, a microscope. You'd smoosh a drop of liquid between two small glass plates, slip them under the lens, and then fiddle with the focus until the mitochondria -- hopefully -- came into view. At least, that's how it was in my high school biology class way back when (and never mind those film strips).

Things are different if you're a scientific researcher at a 21st-century institution of higher learning. Take the Tufts University School of Engineering, which has the luxury of a $350,000 scientific display device called the VisWall, from company called VisBox, that casts molecules and more into eye-popping 3D relief on an 8-by-14-foot screen. In flat-screen mode, it's said to be twice as sharp as an HDTV--just the thing for studying the inner workings of the colon, apparently.

Read more from The Boston Globe: "Plasma TV has nothing on this visionary virtual device"

Scientists in Germany believe they have discovered how humans are able to filter out unimportant noise in order to zoom in on that single voice they want to hear.

Neuroscientist Holger Schulze and his colleagues think the brain's auditory system probably sorts different sources of sound based on their unique pitch and suppresses less important ones.

The scientists conducted experiments on gerbils, which have a similar hearing mechanism to humans, reports Live Science.

Read the story at Live Science: "Party trick: How we hear one voice amid many"

In the wake of science fiction great Arthur C. Clarke's passing last week at the age of 90, Popular Mechanics' Erik Sofge examines 10 futuristic movies that "got the science right, or will sometime soon."

Read more at Popular Mechanics: "The 10 most prophetic sci-fi movies ever"

It's not exactly Gershwin's "An American in Paris," but there is one thing very significant about an archaic 10-second recording discovered earlier this month in the City of Lights by a group of American audio historians: it is the earliest known sound recording. The phonoautograph of the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was made in 1860, some 17 years before the advent of Thomas Edison's phonograph. And get this: it was a visual tool, not an audio one. Still, scientists figured out how to make it play.

Read more at The New York Times: "Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison"

The 2010 census was supposed to be the first truly high-tech headcount, with workers going door-to-door with handheld computers to collect and transmit data and to verify every address.

Now, despite billions of dollars earmarked for what would also be the most expensive census to date, technology problems have officials considering a return to pencil and paper counting, according to the Associated Press.

Read the AP story on CNN: "Fancy computers spell trouble for 2010 census"

It's as much a part of the school experience as homework, cliques, and senioritis: the fund-raiser. In the Internet era, however, things aren't what they used to be: the quest for funds to supplement the never-quite-enough out of state and city coffers is no longer limited to car washes and bake sales. Nowadays, booster groups and administrators are turning to online auctions--$275 for a private pole-dancing lesson, anyone?--with the potential to rake in more than ever before and to avoid too-blatant competition among neighbors.

Read more at The Boston Globe: "Boosters turning to online auctions"

What do Princess Leia headphones, a Darth Vader gumball machine, and a Jabba the Hutt beanbag chair have in common? They're all Star Wars promotional merchandise rejects you won't be finding on eBay anytime soon.

NPR's The Bryant Park Project caught up with Jason Geyer and Steve Ross, two product designers tapped to create merchandise for the Star Wars "prequels" back in the late 1990s.

Some of their products worked, and some, like the Han Solo refrigerator, bombed. Read the story and check out the audio slideshow at NPR: "Rejected: 'Star Wars' merchandise you'll never own"

Outside China, where it has home field advantage, Lenovo is in no rush to sell volumes of low-end PCs. For its export markets, the company plans to concentrate for some time to come on hawking its high-end models like the newly introduced, and roughly MacBook Air-skinny, X300 notebook--those products that it says show "the spirit of innovation." That thinking will also determine how and when Lenovo might come out with a laptop based on Intel's Atom processor.

Read more at InfoWorld: "Q&A: Lenovo takes the high-end road"

Arthur C. Clarke, the science-fiction writer who died last week, inspired and intrigued millions with his "deceptively dry voice of cosmic wonder," writes New York Times science reporter Dennis Overbye.

Clarke was best known as co-creator of 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Overbye has cherished the author's writing since boyhood. Overbye reflects on several of the brilliant stories that poured forth from Clarke's imagination and helped Overbye discover his life's path in science: "I haven't lost my taste for cosmic mystery, for the curiosity about what might lie around the curve of the cosmos that Clarke first instilled in me."

Read the full New York Times essay: "A Boy's Life, Guided by the Voice of Cosmic Wonder"

Bar owner Rufus Terrill has enlisted a rather odd-looking security guard to chase away prostitutes and drug dealers milling about his Atlanta tavern: an R2-D2-like robot called "Bum Bot 2000."

The patchwork device is controlled via remote control and targets law-breakers, reports The Los Angeles Times. But homeless advocates aren't too fond of Terrill's water-squirting Bum Bot.

Read the full Los Angeles Times story: "Robot reports for security duty in Atlanta"

(Credit: U.S. Air Force)

It's arguably the biggest technology success for the Pentagon during the Iraq War era: the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance and reconnaissance missions. But could that very success could prove the undoing of the UAV corps?

The U.S. Army wants more of the aerial drones patrolling the skies, and it has the backing of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who has ordered the Air Force to dramatically boost the number of Predator aircraft on the front lines (at the moment, there are 22). The Air Force in turn is pushing back, arguing that the scramble could put a severe strain on Predator teams--even up to the point where they break down completely.

To read more about the UAV mission and the interservice bickering between the Army and the Air Force, see this story in the Los Angeles Times: "Pentagon battle breaks out over a spy plane.

The Chinese government, facing ever more international scrutiny, appears to be trying to restrict the gaze of its world audience during the upcoming Olympic Games. It has told broadcasters that it may bar live television shots of Tiananmen Square during the Beijing Olympics this summer. The move looks to be a sign of the government's increasing unease following recent protests among Tibetans.

The ban would affect NBC and other major news outlets that plan to broadcast the games Aug. 8-24. Most broadcasters had expected to include live TV shots of the square.

Read the full AP story: "China Might Bar Tiananmen Broadcasts"

Writers over at CNET News.com's sister site TechRepublic have a highly developed sense of sass, which they're gleefully applying to movie reviews and in-depth commentary on the cultural thicket surrounding tech producers and IT types.

This week they've rounded up remarks on the summer's best movies for geeks. Technologically-updated nostalgia (Speed Racer), favorite video games (Hellboy 2), and adorable post-apocalyptic robots (Wall-E) are all contenders.

Make your own forecast at "Rundown: Geek movies of summer 2008"

Question: What kind of machines do Google's thousands of engineers use? Which OS? And how do they keep a gigantic infrastructure protected from security risks, without impairing their famous creativity?

Answers: Several, numerous, and some sound planning ahead.

Read the interview with Google CTO Douglas Merrill at The Wall Street Journal: "Pleasing Google's Tech-Savvy Staff"

Japanese satellite Ajisai

(Credit: JAXA)

Secure quantum communication apparently demands some mighty groovy dance floor decor. With its spherical array of 318 mirrors, the Japanese satellite "Ajisai" looks exactly like a humongous disco ball. ("Ajisai" means "hydrangea," which is a lovely spherical flower. Why it wasn't named "mira bo-ru," or "mirror ball," is unknown; perhaps its engineers had a more refined aesthetic sense than Yours Truly's.)

Ajisai's mirrors aid in mapping the precise locations of isolated archipelagos and other terrestrial features like crustal movement. They have the additional benefit of looking really cool, as you can see in this photo from Japan's space agency.

Wednesday's Ars Technica reports that the disco ball satellite is also proving useful in determining variations in our planet's gravitational field. But its most unexpected application turns out to be in the field of encrypted quantum communications, which requires a satellite to detect (and reflect) packets of single photons sent from Earth.

Read more about those photon packets at Ars Technica: "Mirror balls in space lead to quantum communications advance"

We're wowed by the innovations of today: nanotech, six-core chips, flash-drive notebooks. But the tech of yesteryear is awe-inspiring too.

Silicon.com has posted a video and photos of the reconstruction of the world's first electronic code-breaking computer: Colossus. The machine is housed in England's brand-new National Museum of Computing, which in turn is housed in northern England's Bletchley Park, the secret home to Britain's top code-breakers during World War II.

At the end of the war, Winston Churchill ordered the destruction of most of the Colossus machines and their blueprints. Tony Sale, a computer expert and former spy who spent 14 years rebuilding Colossus in his free time, shows off his handiwork and explains how the mighty machine secretly broke German codes. The National Museum of Computing plans to welcome the public to view some of its first displays this weekend.

The oldest surviving satellite turned 50 years old Monday. It's traveled more than 6 billion miles over the years, it's only as big as a grapefruit, it's solar-powered, and it has played a central role in studying the Earth since its launch in 1958. Should it stay in orbit for sentimental or teaching reasons, or should it be retrieved and installed in a museum?

Read the full report on MSNBC: "Satellite turns 50 years old...in orbit!"