Seems strange, but by manipulating extra dimensions with astronomical amounts of energy, two Baylor University physicists have outlined how a faster-than-light engine, or warp drive, could be created that would bend but not break the laws of physics.

"We think we can create an effective warp drive, based on general relatively and string theory," said Gerald Cleaver, coauthor of the paper that recently appeared on the preprint server ArXiv.org

The warp engine is based on a design first proposed in1994 by Michael Alcubierre. The Alcubierre drive, as it's known, involves expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would rest in between the expanding and shrinking space-time, essentially surfing down the side of the bubble.

The tricky part is that the ship wouldn't actually move; space itself would move underneath the stationary spacecraft. A beam of light next to the ship would still zoom away, same as it always does, but a beam of light far from the ship would be left behind.

That means that the ship would arrive at its destination faster than a beam of light traveling the same distance, but without violating Einstein's relativity, which says that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object with mass to the speed of light, since the ship itself isn't actually moving.

The fabric of space has moved faster than light before, says Cleaver, right after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded faster than the speed of light.

"We're recreating the inflationary period of the universe behind the ship," said Cleaver.

While the theory rests on relatively firm ground, the next question is how do you expand space behind the ship and contract it in front of the ship?

Cleaver and Richard Obousy, the other coauthor, propose manipulating the 11th dimension, a special theoretical construct of m-theory (the offspring of string theory), to create the bubble the ship would surf down.

Source: Discovery

For a number of years now, the LCD display has all but made the older CRT displays extinct. While LCD screens are still being improved on by making them thinner, brighter, and produce better image quality, researchers are always on the lookout for the next technology breakthrough.

Microsoft announced that a pair of its engineers and a graduate student from the University of Washington, Anna Pyayt, have invented a new type of display technology that is much more efficient with energy than current LCDs. The new technology uses optics that are similar to those used in telescopes.

According to IEEE Spectrum, a typical LCD in use today is backlit and less than 10% of the light produced by the backlight is transmitted to the surface of the LCD screen. The polarizing layer alone absorbs 50% of the light output from the backlight.

The telescopic design on the other hand is able to transfer about 36% of the light produced to the surface in prototypes using reflective optics. The telescopic pixel has a tiny primary mirror facing the backlight with a hole in the middle. A smaller secondary mirror located 175 micrometers behind the primary mirror faces it and reflects light making it though the primary mirror back. When voltage is applied to the primary mirror it turns into a parabola and allows light to be focused on the secondary mirror and onto the screen.

When you turn on a high-definition broadcast, you assume that your TV will come to life with the crispest, sharpest picture imaginable. But the fact is, hi-def doesn't always mean high quality

This is an issue that I have been seeing a lot of in the tech news lately. Basicly HDTV is turning into a scam. Comcast and other companies have been compessing the picture quality so that they can fit more "HD" content through cable lines, which causes lower picture quality. More channels could be a good indication that your cable provider isn't giving you high quality HD broadcasts.

Check out this story by Popular Mechanics.

One of the most important factors in determining picture quality is bit rate, or how much video and audio data is being sent down the pipe for each program. The technology behind digital television relies heavily on digital compression, and the ATSC specifies that digital TV use the MPEG-2 compression standard, which is also utilized by DVDs, although some satellite broadcasters use the more efficient MPEG-4 advanced video coding (AVC) standard. These compression technologies are necessary in order to deliver a large number of channels to consumers. Without these codecs, an uncompressed HD video stream could require as much as 1 gigabit per second of data capacity—that's 52 times the capacity of the average broadcast channel. With compression, the same stream can be shrunk almost infinitely. But compression is often used overzealously, and picture quality suffers as a result

If you haven't yet gotten around to buying a Wii Classic Controller or old GameCube pad (for Virtual Console use, Smash Bros., what have you), then you might want to do so quickly. Bloomberg reports that Nintendo may be forced to stop selling the controllers as a result of losing a bid to overturn a $21 million patent-infringement court ruling.

The lawsuit concerns the analog sticks in the Classic Controller and GameCube controllers, which Texas-based Anascape Ltd. claims to hold a patent on that Nintendo violated. The court has ruled in favor of Anascape, and U.S. District Judge Ron Clark has rejected Nintendo's request for a new trial. As a result, Clark said he will put a ban on the sale of the controllers (which includes sales of GameCube systems) starting tomorrow, July 23, unless Nintendo posts a bond or puts royalties into an escrow account.

Nintendo, however, is already planning on appealing the decision in a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which would put the ban on hold while the case is being heard. "Nintendo was already planning to appeal this case to the Federal Circuit court," said Nintendo spokesman Charlie Scibetta. "The recent ruling by the trial court does not impact that decision."

While the ruling concerns the analog sticks on the controllers, it doesn't include sales of the Nunchuck attachment for the Wii remote, which was deemed not to violate Anascape's patent. According to Doug Cawley, Anascape's lawyer, his client argued for the ban because Anascape wants to enter the market itself, and they claim that Nintendo has "clogged the channel."

Nintendo isn't the only platform holder that's tangled with Anascape, though -- Sony licensed their patent in 2004, and Microsoft settled a looming lawsuit with them out of court on May 1 before the trial began.

Source: 1up.com

MIT researchers built upon previous research into colored dyes from the 1970s and created special glass panels.  Each panel absorbs a different wavelength of light and carries it to solar cells.  The result: the first potentially viable solar windows.

AMD has released it's plans to overhaul its processor socket architecture once again. The new architecture will feature 8 to 12 processors cores (45nm), four HyperTransport 3 interconnects, 12MB of L3 cache and 512KB L2 cache per core.

The processors will work with with registered and unregistered quad-channel DDR3 support. Current road maps claim standard support will include speeds from 800 to 1600 MHz.