Famed inventor Dean Kamen is back in front among the tech elite this week with a new invention. The last time we heard from Kamen, he was unveiling the Segway, a product he hoped would revolutionize human transportation, and solve problems like pollution and urban congestion. But unlike the Segway, Kamen hopes his new product never reaches a mass market.

It’s a prosthetic arm that weighs as much as a human arm. It boasts the same range of motion, and the same tactile sensitivity.
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticke...ention?tickers=

Monkeys have been able to control robotic limbs using only their thoughts, scientists report.

The animals were able to feed themselves using prosthetic arms, which were controlled by brain activity.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7423184.stm

Exactly 100 years ago a comet or an asteroid exploded a few kilometers above the Tunguska region of central Siberia, leaving a huge zone of destruction.
Despite many searches, no one has found any remnant of the impact body. Such evidence could help scientists gauge the danger posed today by medium-size comets or asteroids.
A team of Italian scientists has found evidence of a possible impact crater about 10 kilometers from ground zero. They will soon return to recover what may be a fragment of the cosmic object.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id...unguska-mystery

The Phoenix lander has sent back new pictures from the arctic circle of Mars, showing for the first time the spot where it will dig through the Red Planet's dusty surface looking for water and assess conditions for life.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080528...v3li2dsmxD2is0N

May 26 (Bloomberg) -- NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander touched down safely today on the Red Planet, where the probe will sift through the icy soil for any signs that it once harbored life.

``We've passed the hardest part and we're breathing again,'' Mars Phoenix Project Manager Barry Goldstein said, according to NASA. The Red Planet's rocky terrain and equipment problems have led to the failure of more than half of all Mars missions, including a Phoenix predecessor destroyed in 1999.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?...id=aEIz18ZoPk6M

More footage of one of several tornadoes to hit the US this weekend has emerged.
Several people have died following two days of tornadoes in Kansas and Oklahoma.

[URL]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7419140.stm[/UR,]

NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center and Boeing have expanded flight testing for the X-48B blended wing body (BWB) research aircraft into the second of six planned phases.

The second phase of flight tests with the 500-pound, remotely piloted test vehicle involves higher speed regimes. The 21-foot-wingspan test aircraft is flying without its slats deployed. Slats are flight control surfaces on the leading edges of wings which, when extended, allow an aircraft to take off, fly and land at slower speeds.

X-48B flight testing is taking place at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. NASA Dryden is providing critical support to a Boeing-led project team that also includes the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, and Cranfield Aerospace Ltd., of Bedford, England.
http://www.aviation.com/technology/...ody.html?ybf1=1

Please vote for The Fantastic Forum for the 2008 DCTV Viewer's Choice Awards.
It is a comic book forum, and I am one of the panelists..
Please go to www.dctvonline.tv and give Ulie a crystal pyramid to go along with his IRON Man suit.

www.dctvonline.tv

Antimatter engines could make trips to distant galaxies a real possibility.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/antimatter.htm?ybf1=1

Antimatter engines could make trips to distant galaxies a real possibility.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/antimatter.htm?ybf1=1

A group of Israeli technology and defense firms are working on what could become the world's first robotic aircraft for evacuating, and even treating, soldiers injured on the battlefield. Let's just hope the technology is a little slicker than the concept art (right).

Israel's Fisher Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies is working with local techies and arms-makers to build "MedUAV," a combination of ducted-fan flying drone and robotic ambulance. According to Defense News' Barbara Opall-Rome, the Institute is hoping -- hoping -- to start test flights in 24 months. Eventually, the idea is to carry up to four passengers at speeds of 150 knots and heights of up to 10,000 feet.

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/...?npu=1&mbid=yhp

If you tell somebody a planet is a hard thing to spot, they might look at you funny - unless they're an astronomer. Planets (small, rock, don't emit light) tend to hang out near stars (gigantic, fusion reactors, emit light pretty much by definition) and can be hard to make out, especially since the only light they emit is reflected from the parent star (the gigantic mega-bright source of the exact same radiation). We do have one chance - as the planet orbits, the frequencies reflected get shifted up and down around the original value by the Doppler shift (just as ambulance sirens get higher then lower as they shoot past you in the street). The problem so far has been that these frequency shifts are orders of magnitude below what we can resolve - until the new super-miniature comb, built by Albrecht Bartels at the Konstanz Center for Applied Photonics, gets in on the action.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblo...aser-techn.html

Once you've used the moon as your trampoline, you spend the rest of your life waiting for a second turn on the ride. It's no surprise, then, that Gene Cernan and Alan Bean, two Apollo-era astronauts who have bounded on the lunar surface, are thrilled with NASA's plans to return Americans the moon. Thrilled, but not entirely convinced it will ever happen. "To be honest with you," says Cernan, the last man to leave the moon in December 1972, "I'll be surprised if this happens [by] 2020."
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2...1,00.html<br />

Once you've used the moon as your trampoline, you spend the rest of your life waiting for a second turn on the ride. It's no surprise, then, that Gene Cernan and Alan Bean, two Apollo-era astronauts who have bounded on the lunar surface, are thrilled with NASA's plans to return Americans the moon. Thrilled, but not entirely convinced it will ever happen. "To be honest with you," says Cernan, the last man to leave the moon in December 1972, "I'll be surprised if this happens [by] 2020."
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2...1,00.html<br />

If you’re looking for the tallest tower of LEGO in the world, here's a picture of it right here. This monster was built in the Legoland Windsor theme park in the U.K. of 500,000 LEGO bricks, and stands just shy of 100 feet high. That eclipses the old record of 96.1 feet from August of last year by more than three feet, and has been submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records for authentication.

http://dvice.com/archives/2008/05/worlds_tallest_1.php

The 2008 National Motorcycle Show in Toronto has always been heavily influenced by the American V-twin crowd and highlights some of the area's top custom builders who have on display a fine array of one-off custom machines.

This year's show, however, had one very unusual one-off custom, the Uno. The orange and grey coloured Uno made its first public appearance balanced on its two side-by-side wheels and its footpegs. Looking more like it should have been ridden by George Jetson as he pulled up to his space platform, it looked out of place amid the other custom creations in the building. Perhaps that's why it garnered so much attention. Since no one has ever seen a machine like this, the first question asked by on-lookers was:

"What is it?"

http://www.motorcyclemojo.com/articles/the-uno/

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory is sending a spacecraft closer to the sun than any probe has ever gone – and what it finds could revolutionize what we know about our star and the solar wind that influences everything in our solar system.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...80502094224.htm

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) -- The ship was laden with tons of copper ingots, elephant tusks, gold coins -- and cannons to fend off pirates lurking off Africa some five centuries ago.

It had nothing to protect it from the fierce weather off a particularly bleak stretch of inhospitable coast. It sank, only to be found last month by men seeking other treasure.

"If you're mining on the coast, sooner or later you'll find a wreck," archaeologist Dieter Noli, who is researching the ship's origins, said in an interview Thursday, describing De Beers geologists stumbling on the wreck April 1 as they prospected for diamonds off Namibia's southwest coast.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/afric...k.ap/index.html