Flying in a plane is not only safer than driving a car, it’s also better for the environment, says a University of Michigan researcher. In a follow-up study from last year, Michael Sivak of the U-M Transportation Research Institute found that it takes twice as much energy to drive than to fly. He examined recent trends in energy intensity—the …

A combined team of researchers with MIT and India based, JAIN Irrigations Systems has won the top Desal Prize—a competition to see who could come up with the best desalination system for providing water for crops in arid places. The team has won US $140,000 for their efforts. The timing for the competition could not have been better as the …

Nokia notes recent news reports claiming the company communicated an intention to manufacture consumer handsets out of a R&D facility in China,” the company said in a statement. “These reports are false, and include comments incorrectly attributed to a Nokia Networks executive.” Nokia was said to be working on a secret projectthat would result in the company announcing a new …

  A computer outage affecting registers forced Starbucks to give away free drinks Friday before closing stores early. The coffee chain said the outage affected 7,000 company-operated stores in the U.S. and 1,000 in Canada. It did not say when it expects registers to be back up and running, or explain exactly what caused the outage. The outage began in …

The Niconico (“smiling”) website hosts video-sharing communities of various interests, ranging from robots, animation and cosplaying to politics, sumo and the military. The annual offline meet-up, at which display booths and stages are aired live online for those who can’t make it in person, last year drew about 125,000 visitors, with some 7.6 million viewers logged on to watch through …

  Homes with the accompanying tag of “smart” are often described as deploying devices that can tell the temperature and air quality as signals of the home’s health status. What about residents’ health status? A team from MIT believe that, as health-monitoring technologies advance, future smart homes will not only monitor the environment but also people’s vital signals such as …

Emails to and from President Barack Obama were read by Russian hackers last year in a breach of the White House’s unclassified computer system, The New York Times said Saturday. Earlier this month, US officials admitted there was a cyber “event” late last year, but refused to confirm reports Russia was behind the attack. However the incursion was “far more …

UK-based Williams Advanced Engineering, the technology and engineering services business of the Williams Group, has collaborated with UK-based Aerofoil Energy to develop an aerodynamic device that can reduce the energy consumed by refrigerators in supermarkets and convenience stores. For supermarkets, large consumers of power that are biting into operational costs are the stores’ refrigerators. Open-fronted multideck refrigerators which line the …

  A research project has been under way to explore a biometric authentication system dubbed Bodyprint, with interesting test results. Bodyprint has been designed to detect users’ biometric features using the capacitive touchscreen as an image scanner. As such, one would use Bodyprint as a convenient replacement for PIN codes for smartphones. The biometric scanner can scan body parts such …

  A group of former top Sony Corp executives has delivered an unusually blunt critique to the firm’s chief executive Kazuo Hirai, accusing him of losing sight of innovation by focusing on cost-cutting. At a meeting at Sony’s Tokyo headquarters last Thursday, five former executives, including PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi, took Hirai to task for failing to encourage the kind …