In the end, Pixel crashed.

The lunar spacecraft engineered by Armadillo Aerospace, and known as Pixel, bit the dust Saturday, catching fire in its final try at winning the Northrop Grumman Lunar Challenge, a NASA-funded contest to build a next-generation vehicle that could simulate landing on the moon.

Armadillo made three attempts at the challenge during a two-day space festival, the Wirefly X Prize Cup, held in Las Cruces, New Mexico, but it only completed half of the requirements. Those were flying for 90 or more seconds to an altitude of 50 meters and over a distance of 100 meters. … Read more

Charles Simonyi, one of the principal figures behind Microsoft Word and Excel, will try to be the next space tourist.

Space Adventures, the company that books tourists on Russian space flights to the International Space Station, will later this month announce Simonyi's training schedule and launch date, as well as discuss what exactly he will do up in space.

Simonyi was once romantically linked to Martha Stewart, so there's a slim chance he may try to see if it's possible to assemble a collection of monogrammed napkins from hotels in the 1930s in a zero-gravity environment.

The … Read more

Sick of traffic jams? Had enough with the neighbor's barking dog? No place to park? War on crime. War on terror. War on poverty. War on drugs. Worn out with war? Could be time to move off and move on.

The folks at space.com have a plan. Now that we've trashed our first planet with overcrowding, nuclear waste, global warming and tribalism, try someplace new. Their suggestion? Asteroid.

And they promise plenty of resources on these handy chunks of more than rock. And think of the peace and quiet. No lawn, no rats, no TV reception, no … Read more

Practical Instruments, which makes a device that lets solar panels follow the sun, has announced it has raised $8 million dollars in a series A round of funding.

Practical, which grew out of Cal Tech, has designed the Heliotube, a tube that contains solar panels. The trick is that the tube rotates with the sun, so that the panels can generate more electricity. Commercially available silicon solar panels at best can convert about 22 to 20 percent of the light that strikes them into electricity. The theoretical maximum is 29 percent. Different elements can be added to solar panels to … Read more

Samsung, Texas A&M University, a leading South Korean research institute and others have formed EMC-3D, an organization dedicated to hammering out standards for through-silicon vias, or TSVs.

TSVs are electrical data pathways connecting a processor to memory. With TSVs, data can get to the processor far more rapidly than through conventional buses, and for the past several years getting data to the processor from memory has been one of the main barriers to higher performance. AMD's jump in performance with the Opteron was largely accomplished by speeding up the memory-to-processor path.

Intel showed off an 80-core chip … Read more

Toshiba CEO Atsutoshi Nishida said during a keynote at the Ceatec trade show in Japan this week that his company is working to come out with hard drives based around patterned media that could replace perpendicular drives in a few years.

In pattern media drives, the magnetic material is segmented into independent points through imprint lithography. By separating the bits, the danger of one bit corrupting its neighbor is reduced.

Seagate, the largest drive maker, wants the industry to get behind heat-assisted drives. In these drives, the drive material is heated up before it records or erases data. Hitachi is … Read more

Last weekend's Wired NextFest in New York City was touted as a look into the future, with exhibits that included spaceships (a trip on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo will cost you only 2,000,000 frequent flyer miles!), robotic receptionists and bartenders, virtual-reality video games, and "Minority Report"-style hand-controlled projection screens.

But don't take my word for it. Check out CNET's video coverage, courtesy of senior editor Rich DeMuro, and see if you think you'll be seeing this stuff somewhere down the road. Watch it now on CNET TV!

Scientists have, once again, looked to the natural world for inspiration.

A team of NASA scientists has developed "earbots," devices modeled after the cochlea, a section of the inner ear that uses clusters of sensory cell receptors and nerve fibers to help humans maintain a sense of balance.

The earbot is a Styrofoam golf ball-like structure containing clusters of micro electro-mechanical sensors used to sense direction of motion, acceleration and rotation, much like the cochlea measures head movement.

The earbot is part of a NASA goal to develop walking robots that can travel over tough terrain. The first … Read more

Back in the 80s, it looked like Japan would take over the tech industry. A stock market and real estate bubble took care of that.

But there's no reason the country can't rise again. High definition television is all the rage and many of the big manufacturers are based here. And this week, during Ceatec, the Japanese version of CES, manufacturers will be showing off the latest technology with TV. At the show, NHK will show off Super Hi-Vision TV, which is supposed to be even more realistic than standard high dev while Toshiba will give another exhibition … Read more