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Analysis of data collected by a NASA infrared space telescope shows there are fewer near-Earth asteroids than previously believed, scientists said today.

But the majority of the nearly 20,000 bodies between 330 and 3,300 feet wide have not yet been detected and it's not yet clear whether a reduced population also means a reduced number of midsize asteroids in orbits that could pose a threat to Earth.

"We find that there are fewer near-Earth asteroids out there," said Amy Mainzer, principal investigator with NASA's NEOWISE program. "However, it's very important to note that fewer does not mean none. And there are still tens of thousands that are out there that we need to find."

Using NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer--WISE--space telescope, researchers conducted a census of near-Earth objects, or NEOs, orbiting within 120 million miles of the sun. Scanning the entire sky twice between January 2010 and February 2011, the NEOWISE project observed more than 100,000 asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter and nearly 600 that pass near Earth.

"With NEOWISE, we didn't go out and find every single asteroid that's out there, but we got a good representative sample, kind of like doing a census where you take a poll of a small subset of people that you think is representative of what everybody thinks," Mainzer said. "And so, that's what we've been able to do with NEOWISE."

She said the NEOWISE data, along with surveys conducted by ground-based instruments, show that more than 90 percent of the so-called "planet busters" six-tenths of a mile across and larger have now been identified, meeting a goal set by Congress in 1998.

Previous estimates put the population of large near-Earth objects at around 1,000. The NEOWISE survey indicates the actual number is around 981, of which 911 have been detected, including all of the very large bodies like the six-mile-wide asteroid that is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. None pose any threat to Earth, at least for the next few centuries.… Read more

The owner of the Qwikster Twitter handle is banking on selling it to Netflix, Verizon unveils a $99 4G LTE capable smartphone, and Google Wallet finally launches with support only on Sprint's Nexus S 4G phone so far.

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Despite a globe-spanning, bruising legal battle with Samsung, Apple has little choice but to keep getting key parts for its iPhone from the electronics maker, according to sources and a news report.

Those key parts include the iPhone 5's expected main processor, the A5, as well as system memory and flash memory--components that together make up the electronic core.

Sources who track the chip industry say that Apple must stick with Samsung for the time being. Some rumors had claimed that Apple would switch to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) for a so-called "shrink" (smaller version) of the A5 for the iPhone 5.

That's simply not doable, sources tell CNET. TSMC has not perfected the advanced manufacturing processes needed to make an A5 for the iPhone and, maybe more importantly, it's prohibitively difficult to jump to a different manufacturer for the same chip design. … Read more

Intel will put its large spotlight on Ultrabook laptops and Windows 8, among other technologies, at its annual developer conference next week.

In a keynote on September 14, Mooly Eden, general manager of the PC client group at Intel, will describe the "transformation of the PC" being driven by Ultrabooks at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), according to an overview of the forum CNET received from Intel today. IDF begins next Tuesday.

Ultrabooks are very light, very thin Windows laptops that compete with the MacBook Air. The core hardware includes Intel second-generation "Sandy Bridge" processors and … Read more

Nokia is jumping even further onto the NFC bandwagon with plans to support the mobile payments technology in its latest Symbian phones and all future phones.

The Finish phone maker's current C7 handset and its new 700, 701, and 600 phones already include the NFC hardware and will fully support it by the first half of 2012, according to NFC World and other sources.

The company also plans to outfit all upcoming Symbian phones with the NFC chips as part of its aggressive move into the mobile payments market.

"From now on, all of our products will have … Read more

Visa is planning to roll out dual-mode chips in its infrastructure in an effort to step up mobile payment adoption. Meanwhile, it's deploying a mix of carrots and sticks to get merchants on board.

Specifically, Visa is aiming to prepare payment infrastructure for NFC (near-field communication) mobile payments. Google has pushed NFC payments, and other mobile phone players are aiming to turn your smartphone into a wallet. Visa will support EMV and NFC. EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, is a global standard for credit and debit payment cards. EMV has been popular abroad, but lags in … Read more

The number of consumers paying for items via their mobile devices will shoot past 141 million this year, says new data out today from Gartner.

That figure is a 38.2 percent increase over 2010, when mobile-payment users hit 102.1 million. The amount of money generated via mobile payments is expected to reach $86.1 billion this year, up almost 76 percent from the $48.9 million seen last year.

The surge in mobile payments will come despite the slow adoption of mobile-payment technologies.

The mobile, retail, and financial industries have been rushing to roll out near-field communication (NFC) … Read more

All mobile phones have microphones and speakers. Hardly any have near-field communications chips. At least for now. And that's what a new company, Naratte, is planning on leveraging as it launches a technology that allows fast, secure, short-range, point-to-point communication over ultrasonic sound waves.

Compared with other device-to-device communication technology, its Zoosh tech is about as fast as NFC (the tap-to-communicate technology Google and other companies are pushing), but slower than Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. However, like NFC, the "setup time" for communication is extremely fast--there's no waiting around for a handshake to be established between devices.

Naratte CEO Brett Paulson says, "We built an acoustic baseband in software," and he points to two big benefits to doing communication this way. First, it's cheap, since there's no additional hardware required on mobile devices. Big point-of-sale terminals, he says, can be retrofitted with microphones and speakers for about a dollar (they already have the input ports on their motherboards); smaller credit-card terminals might need a bit more hardware, but they can piggyback on the input ports that exist for barcode scanners.

The other big benefit: Paulson showed a Zoosh demo using Java on a currently available feature phone. In other words, this NFC competitor can be rolled out to the world as a download on pretty much every mobile handset there is. NFC requires new phones (or for people to put stickers on their existing phones.)

… Read more

Consumers around the world could generate as much as $50 billion in sales through NFC-based mobile payments by 2014, according to a report released yesterday by Juniper Research.

NFC, or near-field communication, lets consumers pay for goods and services on the go through their mobile phones simply by touching or passing them over another NFC-equipped device such as a register or terminal. The funds themselves are transferred from the user's credit card account stored through the mobile phone.

A variety of industry players have kicked off their own efforts to tap into the potential of NFC.

Google recently announced … Read more