Technology

Volvo is trying to retain its image as a leader in safety with new technology designed to help drowsy drivers.

Volvo and its owner, Ford Motor Co., released results of a study on the problem Wednesday at the New York Auto Show and announced plans for the technology to be included in Volvo cars and SUVs before the end of the decade.

Because the features are still several years from being offered in cars for sale, Ford was cagey about details for competitive reasons. It described a few different products that had been developed and were being considered as options.

With just a flicker of blue light, little Johnny's mother one day may know for sure whether her son washed his hands before dinner.

New light-scanning technology borrowed from the slaughterhouse promises to help hospital workers, restaurant employees -- one day, even kids -- make sure that hand washing zaps some germs that can carry deadly illnesses.

A device the size of an electric hand dryer detects fecal contamination and pinpoints on a digital display where on a person's hands more scrubbing is needed.

Mobile phones are in the hands of millions of people around the world. And increasingly, it appears, in the hands of terrorists.

The bombers who targeted commuter trains in Madrid on March 11 used the built-in alarm clock in mobile phones to set off explosives.

In Jerusalem, it is believed a call to a cell phone in a rucksack set off a bomb at Hebrew University in 2002, killing seven.

One of the Bali bombs outside the Sari nightclub in October 2002 had a cell phone attached, as did a car bomb which killed 12 people at the Jakarta Marriott hotel last August.

Broadband Net-phoning services pushing aggressive expansion plans are discovering a harsh reality: Some residential Internet service providers in the United States currently can't guarantee the bandwidth required to handle calls effectively. AT&T Vice President Kathy Martine said she learned that lesson the hard way during recent trials of the company's CallVantage Net-phoning plan, which it hopes to introduce in 100 markets this year. Some customers' broadband connections just weren't good enough to provide "AT&T-like" quality, she said.

Hundreds of technophiles Saturday wired their computers together in an attempt to generate computing power on a par with the world's strongest supercomputers.

The experiment organized by researchers at the University of San Francisco was designed to determine whether a gymnasium full of off-the-shelf laptops and desktops networked together can muster enough power to process the most complex research problems.

Now that it has launched a 3G service for mobile business workers, Vodafone is close to putting a consumer version on the market

Vodafone is planning a third-generation mobile service for consumers, after unveiling a high-speed data product targeted at mobile businesspeople on Friday.

Details of a 3G consumer product will be formally unveiled in a couple of months with a full launch planned for autumn 2004.

While doing a regular checkup on Slashdot, I've came across a new product announcement concerning PuTTY being ported to Nokia Series 60. If you are not familiar with PuTTY, it is the best freely available SSH client for the Windows platform (it is also available for Unix).

Three years after its first test flight ended in an explosion, NASA on Saturday successfully launched an experimental jet that the agency believes reached a record-setting speed of about 5,000 mph.

The unpiloted X-43A made an 11-second powered flight, then went through some twists and turns during a six-minute glide before plunging into the Pacific Ocean about 400 miles off the California coast.

"It was fun all the way to Mach 7," said Joel Sitz, project manager at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center.

The use of electronic tags is often discussed for inventory control, but more developers are applying the technology to security applications, a survey released Wednesday showed.

Radio frequency identification technology (RFID) has been in the spotlight since Wal-Mart Stores, the world's largest retailer, said last year it would require some of its largest suppliers to be ready to track goods using RFID tags in 2005. Other large retailers have made similar announcements since, including Albertsons and Target.

The megapixel camera phones are coming, probably just in time for the arrival of speedier cellular technologies that can transmit higher-quality digital photos and even video.

Nearly every major cell phone maker at the annual wireless industry trade show unveiled a new handset with a built-in camera capable of snapping digital photos with more than three times the picture quality of existing camera phones.