Jason Kennedy

As the race to find real renewable energy keep increasing its pace, some really innovative ideas have come out of some pretty poisonous materials. Take the University of Southern California’s development with cadmium nanocrystals that are stable enough to conduct electricity and are able to float in a liquid solution, making them printable. This means “solar paint” is nearly within reach.

Not to get too sciency (it’s a real word, I swear!) with it, but the main obstacle to nanocrystal infused solutions is that in order to make them stable they are paired with what’s called a ligand. (in essence, molecular glue that allows the creation of a larger complex via atomic binding). This pairing causes a significant reduction in electronic conductivity, usually to the point of ruining the bonding to begin with. There’s also the fact that the most common agent to create this bond is cadmium selenide, which is a pretty toxic compound.

As you've probably learned in school or through various films and books regarding the "final frontier," space is a dangerous place. Between wandering "extinction level event"-sized asteroids, nearly invisible black holes, and stars exploding all over the place, it's a wonder anything is alive in the big old cosmic soup. And if those things weren't enough, here's something else to worry about: cosmic rays.

In an ideal situation, the sun would be protecting us from potentially harmful cosmic rays by hurtling through space so fast that it created a wake of sorts ahead of itself, physically pushing cosmic clouds, dust, and everything else aside as it went. Unfortunately, our Earth, according to research reported on by New Scientist, isn’t moving fast enough through the galaxy to do that.

You probably can't turn a corner in the office without hearing about Voice over IP--a popular, cheap, and effective way to provide telephony to businesses. The premise is simple: Instead of using the existing telephone lines in your building, or having new ones installed, you push all of your voice, teleconferencing, and video traffic through the Internet.

The single most expensive component of a phone bill is the minutes. But VoIP differs from regular telephone service by treating your phone conversations as data passing through your IP network. In today's world, broadband is relatively cheap and easy to get, so VoIP has considerable appeal to businesses that want to cut costs and use their existing resources more efficiently.

[Photo: Adafruit]So, you've got a Raspberry Pi (or you're impatiently waiting for one to be shipped, as most of us are) and you're trying to figure out what to do with it. The options are pretty much limitless for this devilishly cute little ARM Linux system on a board, but here's something to think about from our friends at Adafruit Industries: the Adafruit Prototyping Pi Plate Kit for Raspberry Pi!

Before you go crazy, this board isn't available quite yet, as it's in testing. Pricing and ETA are still up in the air, but instead of wondering about that, let's take a look at the cool things you'll be able to do with the APPPKfRP (my own acronym!).

Are you wondering what it means to own a smartphone, tablet, or HDTV that's MHL-certified? Here's how MHL works, and how it can benefit you.

Back in 2009, Silicon Image developed a prototype mobile audiovisual interface called Mobile High-Definition Link to output high-definition content from a smartphone to a HDTV. A year later, Nokia, Samsung, Silicon Image, Sony, and Toshiba announced the MHL Consortium, a group developed to oversee the licensing and promotion of the specification.

Thirty-six years ago, the Viking 2 Lander picked up some dirt and did some donuts on the surface of Mars. Based on the computational data recorded then (and the fact that no one came out and kicked the lander off of their lawn), the Red Planet was stamped with a big "nothing to see here" sign; no life was found. But reevaluation of the data is changing all of that, according to a newly published paper at IJASS.

So where's the life? Well, that question is a lot simpler to ask than to answer.

If you’re anything like me, you always have to have the latest and greatest piece of technology. Unlike me, though, you may not be eager take that shiny new gadget and unlock, root, install a custom OS, or brick it in the name of progress.

Rooting an Android smartphone and installing custom firmware is always a risky proposition, and by doing so you void your smartphone warranty and may even render the device inoperable. Please be careful when trying to root your phone, as PCWorld cannot be held responsible for the consequences if you accidentally brick your Galaxy Nexus in an attempt to make it more awesome. Of course, Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus (with Google's Android OS and Verizon as carrier) is already a pretty awesome smartphone; it may be the best phone currently on the market, and it's certainly one of the best smartphones Google has ever endorsed.

When Microsoft released its Kinect Software Development Kit (SDK) to developers to fuel innovation on the Kinect platform, the possibilities were palpable. Projects like Open Kinect have made real strides in pushing the envelope for community involvement in areas including science, medicine, and even teleconferencing. But a company from Spain wants to use the Kinect to track your skeleton.

Igalia’s Skeltrack is a completely open source skeleton-tracking programming library for the Kinect. It can track up to 7 joints, including in the neck, shoulders, elbows, and hands. This gives a pretty large range of motion tracking potential for the upper body of a person.

If you use Linux at all (and in many cases these days, even if you don’t), you have heard of the open source Linux compiler called GNU Compiler Collection, or GCC for short. It’s the most common compiler used, shipping with almost all distributions of Linux, and it’s actually older than Linux itself.

A compiler transforms one computer language into another, generally making the code executable and machine-readable. Way back in 1984, programmer Richard Stallman wrote a C compiler called GNU C Compiler. GNU stands for "GNU’s Not Unix," a common naming convention for hackers at the time.

Linux founder Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 3.3 Linux kernel on Sunday, bringing a host of fixes and updates that were long overdue--most importantly, the merging of Android into the main Linux source tree.

Now, developers and hardware vendors can plan to build (and build on) Android-compatible Linux devices, and utilize Linux advances that haven’t made it to Android beforehand. The code integration, a long time in coming, puts to rest the idea that ideological and technical differences would interfere with ever bridging the two kernels.

One of the coolest features of the Kindle Fire is Amazon's proprietary Silk browser, an application designed to leverage Amazon's massive server resources by precaching Web pages and delivering them to you faster--in theory--than any other browser. It works by preloading all the content (including music, images, and video) on popular websites to Amazon's remote servers first, and then delivering the entire package to your mobile device in a single stream of data. Amazon calls it a "cloud-accelerated" browser, and it's the first of it's kind.

Sounds cool, right? Cool enough to try hacking the Silk browser onto your Android device? If you think so, read on, and we’ll show you how to do it. Before we dive in, a word of warning: You need a PC running Windows and a compatible rooted Android device for this hack. The creator of Amazon Silk Port maintains a device compatability list that you should check first to ensure that the hack will work with your device. Remember, even if your device is supported, the hack is not guaranteed to work, and you run the risk of damaging or destroying your device.

I’m a reformed gamer, but I’m old enough to know what terms like OGL and CAL-I mean, as far as competitive gaming is concerned. I can’t even tell you how many times I was interrupted from some critical point in World of Warcraft or Portal because some insensitive person sent me an IM or Skype request and it caused my game to minimize. Back in the day, we didn’t have liquid cooled gaming rigs with flux capacitors and other things that appear as sorcery to my aged eyes; I knew that if my machine minimized to the desktop, I was 2 minutes out from maximizing the game. The raid was going to wipe for sure now with their tank just standing there.