Research

Enemy combatants are close to feeling the heat from an airborne laser weapon called the "long-range blowtorch" and, if officials at US Air Force are right, nobody will know what hit them.

The 5.5-ton Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) combines chlorine and hydrogen peroxide molecules to release energy that stimulates iodine into an intense infra-red, silent and invisible laser with a 20 kilometres striking range.

New Scientist reports that both Cynthia Kaiser, chief engineer of the US Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate and John Corley, director of USAF's Capabilities Integration Directorate, used the phrase &… Read more

Japanese researchers say they have developed a rubber-like material that's able to conduct electricity, paving the way for robots with stretchable "e-skin" that can feel heat and pressure like humans.

The material, described by Tsuyoshi Sekitani of the University of Tokyo in the journal Science, could be used on curved surfaces or even in moving parts, such as the joints of a robot's arm, the researchers said.

Sekitani's team developed their material using carbon nanotubes, a long stretch of carbon molecules that can conduct electricity. They mixed these into a rubbery polymer to form the … Read more

The lazy days of summer on the Internet seem to be a boon for Google and Yahoo, but not Microsoft.

The latest figures from research firm Nielsen Online show a slight lift to Google's audience from June to July, up by about 1 million visitors to an estimated 129 million, the largest population for a parent company of Web sites in the United States.

Yahoo, the third most popular U.S. group of sites, enjoyed a boost of about 4 million visitors over that time to almost 118 million visitors. In contrast, Microsoft's audience fell by roughly 700,… Read more

Microsoft showed off a technology on Tuesday that could one day allow people to edit artifacts into video as easily as they do with digital photographs today.

The research technology, dubbed Unwrap Mosaic, was shown to do things like adding a mustache and rosy cheeks onto a person in a video. It works by sort of unwrapping a 3D object into a flat image that contains the whole object, in this case a face.

"What we've done is built away of patterning the essence of a video in a single pattern," said Andrew Fitzgibbon, who presented the … Read more

You might be enjoying the dog days of summer now, but look out! The school year is just around the corner, and teachers, books, classes, and winter will be here before you know it. Get a jump on the upcoming school year with a collection of downloadable software for communicating with classmates, managing your homework, learning new study skills, or harnessing the reference power of the Internet. You can even find software to let you call your parents free from college. (Seriously, your mom wants a call.)

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Facebook profiles, instant-messaging networks, various Web mail accounts...who can track them … Read more

Researchers at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University have created a camera with a layout similar in size and shape to the human eye. The eye camera is based on "single-crystalline silicon detectors and electronics, configured in a stretchable, interconnected mesh," according to the University of Illinois.

The curved technology will put an entire image in focus, in contrast to today's cameras, which take images that are sharper in the center than near the edges, according to researchers. Plus, the technology could be a big step toward the development of a bionic eye similar to the … Read more

Tech analyst heavyweight Forrester Research just got a little bigger.

The Cambridge, Mass., company said Thursday that it acquired smaller rival JupiterResearch and its parent company JUPR Holdings for $23 million. The JupiterResearch brand will begin to serve Forrester's "Marketing and Strategy" client group.

JupiterResearch, considerably smaller than Forrester, had 83 employees and made $14 million in 2007, while Forrester Research, which has more than 1,000 employees, made $212 million.

Forrester also announced its second quarter earnings Thursday. The company had a $8.6 million profit on $63.5 million in revenue for the quarter ending … Read more

This post was updated at 10 a.m. PDT to include further comments from the companies.

Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo announced Tuesday that they've teamed up to create a "test bed" project for research in cloud computing, the umbrella term for outsourcing hardware and software capabilities rather than handling them locally.

With the rather dry name of The HP, Intel, and Yahoo Cloud Computing Test Bed, the open-source project will consist of data centers around the globe "to promote open collaboration among industry, academia, and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in … Read more

Joel West, professor at San Jose State University College of Business, and Siobh?n O'Mahony, professor at UC Davis Graduate School of Management, have produced some insightful research over the years. However, I particularly like a new academic study the two recently released: "The Role of Participation Architecture in Growing Sponsored Open Source Communities." It studies why developers contribute to certain open-source projects and don't contribute to others.

The key? If you want outside participation, you need to deliver more than mere transparency: Developers need to be able to change the direction of the project to make it worthwhile to stick around. (For a quick example of how too much control can stifle a community, take a look at Sun and OpenOffice.)

This is not surprising, but the research is helpful in detailing why this is so, and how firms cope with it. While most open-source projects attract little to no outside developer interest, corporate-sponsored open-source projects start with an implicit handicap by demanding control of the destinies of their projects:

By comparing the participation architectures that resulted from sponsors' design decisions, we identified two types of openness: transparency and accessibility ["Accessibility allows external participants to directly influence the direction of the community to meet their specific wants and needs"].

While transparency offered potential contributors the ability to follow and understand a community's production efforts, accessibility determined the degree to which external contributors could influence that production. In designing a community, sponsors were more likely to offer transparency than they were to offer accessibility to external community members. … Read more