Technology

Batteries that harvest energy from the nuclear decay of isotopes can produce very low levels of current and last for decades without needing to be replaced. A new version of the batteries, called betavoltaics, is being developed by an Ithaca, NY-based company and tested by Lockheed Martin. The batteries could potentially power electrical circuits that protect military planes and missiles from tampering by destroying information stored in the systems, or by sending out a warning signal to a military center. The batteries are expected to last for 25 years.

Cray’s Jaguar supercomputer is the fastest machine on the planet, according to the Top 500 list of supercomputers published today by four researchers in the computing industry. It marks the first time that Jaguar beat out IBM’s Roadrunner on a performance basis, achieving 2.3 petaflops, or about 2 million billion calculations a second.

Using the Internet has many benefits for people. They can find information about health conditions and keep in contact with friends and family. The problem is that for some users modern computers are very difficult to use and understand. This is a particularly big issue for the elderly.

Rocky. The Chicago Cubs. Charlie Brown. Avis, back when its whole schtick centered on being America's #2 rental car company. America loves its underdogs-and the technology business has always been home to a disproportionate number of exceptionally lovable underdogs. They may never achieve market leadership, but without them, the tech in our lives would be less interesting, innovative, and inspiring.

We gaze into a crystal ball and and ponder the future, or possible demise, of some well-known technologies. Earlier this week, people in Mexico and the US recognized Dia De Muertos (Day of the Dead), a holiday which recognizes friends and loved ones which have recently departed.

So this week we have decided to recognize some technologies which have recently or will soon be leaving the technology mainstream. Unlike other recent lists, this was fairly easy to construct and there was limited, if occasionally spirited (no pun intended), debate about its order.

Cloud service providers can make compelling and simple sales pitches in terms of cost of individual services-$100 per user per year sounds pretty good. But "hidden" expenses can alter a company's outlook.

If there's a killer app lurking in today's tech market, it's those new chipsets that will bring GPS to all manner of future devices and applications. This is the hottest thing since Internet. Sure every techie has a GPS device in his car and likes to fool around with the location help on his phone, but that's only the beginning of the possibilities for this technology.

Last month Intel finally got round to releasing a CPU based on its Nehalem core for under £150.

Universally applauded, it delivers exceptional performance out of the box for everything you use a desktop for. Given the right circumstances, it can intelligently increase its own clockspeed from 2.66GHz to 3.2GHz, thanks to Intel's Turbo Boost technology.

A mind reading machine that can peer into someone's brain and reproduce images of what they are seeing or remembering has been developed by scientists. The astonishing device studies patterns of brainwave activity and turns them into a moving image on a computer screen.

BitTorrent Inc. is about to launch a completely improved implementation of the BitTorrent protocol that will benefit both users and ISPs. uTorrent 2.0, which is currently being tested by thousands of people, will eliminate the need for ISPs to throttle or stop BitTorrent traffic, and will optimize the download experience for its users.

ISPs have been throttling BitTorrent traffic for years already. Although the true reasons for this are not always clear, some ISPs have argued that a high number of BitTorrent connections are slowing down other applications and traffic.