Updated Archos 13 laptop to roll out next month

Updated Archos 13 laptop to roll out next month originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Windows Phone 7 Series gaming, all up in the club (video!)

Continue reading Windows Phone 7 Series gaming, all up in the club (video!)

Windows Phone 7 Series gaming, all up in the club (video!) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Dragonfly jet-powered helicopter runs on H2O2, shuns traditional tail rotors (video)

Your average whirleybird is driven by a big motor in the middle, spinning the blades one way and, as per Newton, rotating the body of the craft the other. A tail rotor counteracts the force, but a more efficient solution is to have the rotors power themselves, which is exactly how the Dragonfly DF1 works. It has tiny, hydrogen-peroxide jets on the blade tips, spinning them up without pushing the body of the helo in the other way — though a small tail rotor is still needed to turn the craft. It’s much like the tech that propelled James Bond toward his waiting DB5 in Thunderball, but unlike that jetpack this copter can fly for up to 50 minutes. It’s the product of Swisscopter Americas and, while they’ve been playing with the DF1 for many moons now (demonstrated in a video below), the company is also working on the DF2 shown above, a rather more civilized version that seats two. The DF1 is certified for flight in the US, looks to be available for sale and, while no price is listed, they are said to be much more friendly to the environment than traditional helicopters. That’ll surely add to the premium.

Continue reading Dragonfly jet-powered helicopter runs on H2O2, shuns traditional tail rotors (video)

Dragonfly jet-powered helicopter runs on H2O2, shuns traditional tail rotors (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 09:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Gizmag  |  Swisscopter Americas  | Email this | Comments

The Rise and Fall of the Human Genome Project

It’s not just financial markets that experience bubbles, society does too. And the Human Genome Project is a perfect example, says a new study.

The world has become painfully familiar with the notion of financial bubbles in the last two years. These are periods of in which prices are temporarily raised above their fundamental value, sometimes by orders of magnitude.

But the contention put forward by Monika Gisler and a couple of pals at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich is that it’s not just financial markets that experience bubbles. They say there is good evidence for the existence of social bubbles too. They point to the great boom of railway building in Britain in the 1840s, cloning of mammals such as Dolly the sheep, and the craze over Haute Couture, the so-called democratisation of fashion design.

All of these were characterised not by prices rising far above fundamental values, but by human expectations being inflated beyond reason. “These cases were all characterized by extremely high expectations concerning the outcome of the proposed research and/or innovation project,” say Gisler and her colleagues.

Today, they show how the Human Genome Project is a particularly good example of a social bubble. They give a fascinating history of the project and the expectations associated with it and focus in particular on how it was funded. This, they say, is an objective way of assessing the enthusiasm for it project, at the time.

The Human Genome Project generated huge expectations that it would revolutionise the treatment of illness and disease and huge commercial opportunities for the development of drugs . The belief that this would dramatically change our society eventually persuaded the US government to spend around $3billion on the project.

It also led to a fierce battle between this government-funded project and a private company called Celera that aimed to complete the task first using cheaper, more powerful sequencing techniques.

This battle led to a kind of virtuous circle which reinforced investors’ belief in the potential benefits and caused the scientists themselves to redouble their efforts.

But it also deflected attention from the huge uncertainties about the project. The fear, more or less ignored, was that the benefits would not be as great as imagined.

These fears have more or less come to pass. “Having the complete gene set on the table, the knowledge of the genetic map and sequence is now considered by experts to be only a starting point for future research in biology and medicine,” says Gisler and co.

That’s not to say it has been of little value. On the contrary, they say. “While there is little to show in terms of progress in medical diagnosis and treatment, in pharmaceutical development, in agriculture, and in other industrial sectors, the HGP catalyzed enormous technological progresses in DNA-based methods.”

Gisler’s point is that if managed correctly social bubbles can be hugely beneficial, even if they don’t produce the desired outcome. But they require a careful hand on the tiller and that’s not easy since they require the combined forces of industry, academia and government working towards a common goal.

There are various bubbles in the making today, such as the UK’s investment in offshore windfarms in the North Sea, a project that will produce a quarter of the UK’s electricity by 2020. This project is huge by any standards: equivalent to building 8 channel tunnels in the next ten years and requires the same kind of link between government, industry and academia to make it work.

There are other efforts that have not yet achieved the kind of terminal velocity necessary for bubble status. One of them is the human genome project’’s successor: proteomics, the characterization of the entire array of proteins encoded by our genes, a task that is an order of magnitude more complex than the genome project.

Gisler and co say that the lessons from the Human Genome project could be used to create the same kind of bubble for proteomics. For the moment, however, investors, government and perhaps even the scientists themselves, have yet to achieve critical mass.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1003.2882: Exuberant Innovation: The Human Genome Project

Google says Android should ‘flourish’ in China, effectively concedes a point

Whether for real or for show, Google tried to make the world believe it would use Android OS as a bargaining chip during the company’s terse, slow negotiations with China. Now, the company has seemingly abandoned that option. During an educational webcast about the future of Google’s mobile business, CFO Patrick Pichette told viewers that he expected the company’s Android platform to do well in China despite all the recent threats and ultimatums in the country. “The Android platform is available to everybody,” said Pichette, “and China is obviously another great market in which Android should flourish.” Good to hear that Google and China are finally in accordance, right? Thing is, with China circumventing Android’s default search engine, Google’s stance against Chinese censorship of search depended on taking Android handsets hostage. But if the OS is indeed available to everybody, that’s not going to happen. The mobile market might one day be dominated by Android, but if Google doesn’t step up, mobile search will go to competitors more willing to play wallball with the Great Firewall of China.

Google says Android should ‘flourish’ in China, effectively concedes a point originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink AFP (Yahoo News)  |  Google IR (YouTube)  | Email this | Comments

T-Mobile goes official with HTC HD2 launch details: March 24th for $200

We’ve heard it all before, but it’s always nice to get a modicum of legitimacy from a primary source. T-Mobile has now officially announced the release details for the HTC HD2 — you know, that phone whose cool factor has dropped a few Mega Fonzies since we confirmed once and for all it wasn’t getting a Windows Phone 7 upgrade. Look for it next Wednesday, March 24th, for just a penny under $200 on a two-year contract (and $450 without). Hey, at least this one’s definitely got copy and paste, right?

T-Mobile goes official with HTC HD2 launch details: March 24th for $200 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

The Commodore name licensed again for a line of keyboard PCs

The Commodore name licensed again for a line of keyboard PCs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Commodore USA  | Email this | Comments

Rock-paper-scissors glove will learn to beat its wearer

Continue reading Rock-paper-scissors glove will learn to beat its wearer

Rock-paper-scissors glove will learn to beat its wearer originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

JooJoo refund issues creating some bad juju

Given the legally-disputed origins of the JooJoo and the current shipping delays, you’d think Fusion Garage would scrupulously maintain a squeaky-clean image with its customers as it leads up to launch, but it looks like it wasn’t quite prepared to handle refunds in a sensible way — we just confirmed that the company asked a customer for his bank account information in order to deposit a refund directly after running into some troubles with PayPal. Here’s the relevant exchange:

“Support Joojoo” wrote:

Dear Rony,

We have checked this at our end and there seems to be a problem with
refunding via paypal.

To avoid any further wait time, could you send us your bank name, bank
account name, bank account number, sort or swift code and your bank address.

We will have a direct transfer done to your bank account. If you could
provide us the details today, we will ensure that the refund hits your bank
account by friday of this week.

Please advise . Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Fusion Garage tells us that this customer actually changed his mind about getting a refund several times, and that they’ve only had three customers with refund issues, all of which were related to problems with PayPal issuing credit long after pre-orders were placed. While it’s uncommon here in the States (and obviously this buyer wasn’t keen on it), bank to bank transfers are the norm in Europe and widely used for the wiring of cash across international lines. Clearly after the issues with PayPal, however, the idea of handing over bank details doesn’t seem appealing in this case. We’ll see how everyone feels when that promised March 25 ship date rolls around, and we’ll let you know what happens with Rony and his refund when we find out more. Maybe next time just mail a check, guys.

JooJoo refund issues creating some bad juju originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Military looking to build autonomous, bunker-busting killbot

Military looking to build autonomous, bunker-busting killbot originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.