Kent, WA-based LaserMotive has won $900,000 in a NASA competition to build a small prototype device that one day could help lead to a commercial “space elevator,” a cable that could transport cargo to and from outer space. The news was reported by the New York Times and other outlets. LaserMotive, a laser power-beaming company, is led by Thomas Nugent and Jordin Kare, who both also work with Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures. The power-beaming project and competition was reported by TechFlash earlier today.

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Kryptiq, a Portland, OR-based developer of healthcare software announced today that NASA’s space medicine division will begin using Kryptiq’s Connect IQ software for sharing health data.  Financial details of the deal were not revealed.  NASA will use Connect IQ to share health information with its patients, colleagues and partners, including other government space organizations like the Russian Federal Space Agency (RSA).  There are currently about 30,000 practices that use Connect IQ.

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For a long time, watching video on the Apple iPhone meant YouTube or nothing—and it only worked if you were within range of a Wi-Fi network. But now Cambridge, MA-based content distribution firm Akamai is helping many of its customers optimize live and recorded video for direct delivery to iPhones. Which, in effect, turns Apple’s devices into mobile televisions: if you’re at the bus stop and have a craving for Fox Business News, for example, it’s now there for you, even if you don’t have a strong Wi-Fi or 3G signal.

It’s all part of the iPhone 3.0 changeover. When Apple released the update for the iPhone’s operating system on June 17, it offered an improvement especially designed to help people on the go watch video on their phones even when they’re in areas with flaky broadband wireless access. Called “variable bit rate streaming,” the technology has long been a feature of most Web-based video delivery; it allows video providers to adjust the quality of streaming video in real time to fit the available bandwidth.

Last week Akamai said its clients publishing iPhone video can now take advantage of variable bit rate streaming as part of the company’s existing Media Delivery service. It also launched a mobile showcase for organizations doing exactly that. The showcase, at iphone.akamai.com, includes live and previously recorded videos from NASA, NPR, Fox News, USA Today, and the Discovery Channel, among other publishers.

To generate the live video streams, which include Fox Business News and NASA TV, Akamai turned to Raleigh, NC-based Inlet Technologies for help. Inlet’s “adaptive streaming” technology turns a live TV broadcast into digital packets that go out over a wireless system like AT&T’s 3G EV-DO network at whatever bit rate the network and the destination device can handle. That means users don’t have to pick from high- or low-bandwidth video streams, don’t have to wait while video “re-buffers,” and aren’t even aware when the stream shifts from a lower rate to a higher one, or vice versa.

Inlet also makes video encoding software that helps media companies build up libraries of recorded video content that can then be delivered on demand. That’s what most of the companies featured in the Akamai iPhone showcase are doing; today’s lineup, for example, includes several short episodes from USA Today’s “Talking Tech” video feature and a selection of animated slide shows accompanying audio reports from NPR News.

Akamai’s role is to transport the Inlet-encoded video over its global network to the AT&T media servers closest to the actual iPhone users requesting the material. The company hopes to work with more broadcasters to get their programs to iPhone and iPod Touch owners, who consume far more broadband content than owners of other mobile devices. (Some 80 percent of all data requests from mobile devices over Wi-Fi networks come from iPhones and iPod Touch devices, according to Akamai.)

“Apple’s extensive support for new web standards like HTML 5 and HTTP streaming of live and on-demand video to the iPhone and iPod touch has transformed the quality of video content that consumers can now view while mobile,” Tim Napoleon, Akamai’s chief strategist for digital media, said in an announcement last week. “To be able to watch video anytime, anywhere at a quality this high is nothing short of amazing.”

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Northern Power Systems is a busy company these days. The Barre, VT-based firm is expanding its business of designing and making medium-sized wind turbines to include the production of larger, utility-scale systems. Competition in the utility-scale market is fierce, but Northern Power has developed wind-turbine technology that its leadership believes will enable the firm to compete with the majors.

The company has undergone many changes since last June, when it went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy along with previous owner Distributed Energy Systems, of Wallingford, CT. In September, a group led by Boston-based venture firm RockPort Capital Partners and New York investment bank Allen & Company purchased Northern Power. The new ownership group has invested more than $50 million to make the acquisition and recapitalize the company. Northern Power was one of two operating subsidiaries under Distributed Energy Systems. The other, Proton Energy Systems, also of Wallingford, is a provider of hydrogen fuel cell technology. It was sold last year as well.

“We were reborn with a company that was laser focused as a pure play in the wind turbine industry, but far more important laser focused on developing an extraordinarily differentiated technology approach,” says John Danner, president and CEO of Northern Power. Danner took the reins at the company in late October, having previously served as chief executive at Codon Devices, a former Cambridge, MA-based provider of synthetic DNA and other biological materials that was shut down this year. Yet he’s no stranger to energy systems. Earlier in his career, Danner was a naval officer who ran a nuclear reactor aboard an attack submarine called the USS Dallas.

Northern Power says its technology enables its turbines to operate with minimal maintenance and high efficiency. A key to the system is what the firm calls its direct drive technology, which enables turbines to convert energy without troublesome gearboxes. This is a big deal. Gearboxes—which are used in traditional turbines to covert high-torque, low-speed energy from the turning turbine blades into low-torque, high-speed energy for electricity generators—have many moving parts that need to be replaced several times during the typical 20-year lifecycle of a turbine. By removing the gearbox, enabling the motion of the turbine blades to directly drive the generator, you can eliminate or lower some maintenance and repair costs. Another key to the firm’s design is its use of magnetic materials in the turbine generators. The permanent magnet generators are said to be lighter and more efficient than traditional wound-rotor generators, among other benefits.

The company, which was founded in 1974, developed many of the technologies that go into its wind turbines in recent decades with grants from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the National Science Foundation, and NASA, according to the firm.

Northern Power’s technology is used in 100-kilowatt turbines that it has developed and installed in such places as remote communities in Alaska, as well as closer to home in Massachusetts. (For example, one of its 100-kilowatt turbines owned by the city of Medford is visible from Route 93 north of Boston.) There are few competitors for 100-kilowatt turbines, but that market is believed to be many times smaller than the utility-scale turbine business. The larger turbines are used, for instance, on  wind farms that utilize many machines. To capitalize on this multibillion-dollar market segment, Northern Power is developing a 2.2-megawatt wind turbine. The first of these turbines is slated for deployment as a testing model in the first half of 2010.

The foray into the utility-scale market is behind much of what’s making the company so busy. This summer the firm plans to open a Boston-area office focused on research and development for utility-scale wind turbines, Danner says. Northern Power is also in the midst of working out a deal to open a manufacturing facility in an undisclosed location in …Next Page »

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A few local tech companies have still been able to raise significant new funding rounds in a very tough climate. The latest is Seattle-based Adapx, which is announcing today it has raised a $9 million Series B round, led by new investor UV Partners in Salt Lake City, UT. Existing investors OVP Venture Partners, based in Kirkland, WA, and Paladin Capital Group in Washington, DC, also participated in the round, which closed in March.

Adapx (pronounced “adapts”) makes digital pen technology that allows workers in the field to take handwritten notes and efficiently upload them to a computer. The technology allows workers to use pen and paper to collect data, mark up charts and maps, and draw on design diagrams, and then digitize their pen strokes by docking the pen to their PC. That way, they can automatically integrate the info with mainstream software applications like Microsoft Office, Excel, Autodesk (for engineering design), and ESRI (mapping).

“Investors and customers really get our story. Adapx has exceeded our expectations for adoption,” says CEO Ken Schneider. The company, founded in 1999, counts more than 500 companies and government organizations as customers, including the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, the Port of Seattle, Holland America Line, and various public works agencies and construction firms.

OK, but digital pen technology has been around for many years, and has never really taken off. So what’s special about Adapx? From what I can tell, two things. First of all, the technology really seems to work. In the past, everyone from Apple to Logitech to Microsoft has developed digital pens to capture handwriting and integrate it with digital files. These systems have tended to be clunky and unreliable, or just too much of a pain for mainstream customers to get started on. Some have required special paper, for instance.

The Adapx version, which uses technology from the Swedish firm Anoto, requires no special paper—though it does require you to print out the form (a spreadsheet or chart, say) you’ll write on, using software that prints a special watermark to help the pen keep track of where on the page you’re writing. The pen, which is the size of a magic marker and writes regular ink, contains a tiny scanner that captures your handwriting and stores it until you dock the pen with your PC. “That allows the paper to become the device,” says Schneider.

Which then leads to the second main advantage of Adapx. The handwriting is uploaded, recognized as text, and integrated into an Excel form or Office document automatically. The point here is that …Next Page »

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Geospiza, the Seattle-based maker of software to help researchers sort through massive amounts of genomic data, said today it has received a two-year, $1.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. It’s part of a collaboration with The HDF Group. The collaboration will aim to support biological software applications that use Hierarchical Data Format, an advanced data capability used by other demanding applications like NASA’s Earth Observing System, that helps monitor climate change, says Laura Lucas, Geospiza’s vice president of marketing.

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Most of the teams that gathered at the San Diego Sports Arena last week came from the American Southwest—from places like Flagstaff, AZ, and El Centro, CA. One team came all the way from Pennsylvania. Another came from Brazil. But these teams didn’t come to the arena to play hockey, football, or some other sport.

They came to show that they could build a better robot. They came for the San Diego regional FIRST Robotics Competition. As a foreign visitor seeing this kind of competition for the first time, I was amazed and had incredible fun just watching it.

The sports arena was filled with strange-looking robots, cables, containers, bolts, joysticks, duct tape, rock music, cheering, and teen-agers—thousands of spirited, excited teen-agers. The San Diego event, which ended Saturday, is part of an annual high school engineering contest organized by FIRST, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. It drew dozens of high school teams for an event that requires students to spend six weeks building robots to scrimmage against each other in a game.

Miss Daisy was a regional winner

I work as a newspaper reporter in Finland, and I haven’t heard of anything like this in Europe. I was amazed by the passion and enthusiasm that FIRST has inspired among the high school students. These students help each other, love what they are doing, and show it.

The student-built robots don’t look like something you’d see in a sci-fi movie. These robots are heavy plastic boxes, about four-feet tall, that whirl on wheels. Others look like modified shopping carts.

The robots in the 2009 competition were designed to play a game called Lunacy, which is played on a small court. The robots are supposed to scoop up “orbit balls” as if they are on the moon collecting moon rocks. During the first 15 seconds of each match, the robots play the game by themselves in autonomous mode. Six robots compete at a time, divided into two teams selected five minutes before …Next Page »

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In the 11 years since Andrew Hibbs started QUASAR, the privately held company has flourished by developing a smorgasbord of sophisticated sensing technologies under various government research and development contracts.

I met Hibbs more than a decade ago, during the formative years of San Diego’s Quantum Magnetics, where he led development of advanced electromagnetic sensors so sensitive they could detect the unique molecular resonance of explosives. His work resulted in the first commercially available explosives detector using Nuclear Quadrapole Resonance, a technology akin to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans that are commonly used in medical diagnostics.

Hibbs founded QUASAR in 1998, after InVision Technologies acquired Quantum Magnetics (and General Electric acquired InVision in 2004). Hibbs acquired a penchant for studying the quantum phenomena at the core of such technologies while earning his PhD in physics at England’s Cambridge University. In fact, he named the company for Quantum Applied Science & Research.

Since QUASAR was founded, Hibbs has formed a group of several related companies focused on biomedical, geophysical, and various military applications of electromagnetic sensing. The company bills itself as a world leader in low-frequency electromagnetic sensing systems that operate at room temperatures (at frequencies from 0.01 Hz to 5 MHz).

When I dropped in for a briefing earlier this week, Hibbs was out of town, so I met with Lowell Burnett, chief technology officer for QUASAR Federal Systems and at least four other PhDs who oversee different development efforts within the group. Burnett told me the QUASAR group has grown to about 70 employees (at least a third are former Quantum Magnetics employees), funded solely by revenues from government contracts.

Burnett says QUASAR’s scientists have made steady advances in electromagnetic sensors, particularly in electric field sensors, with each group applying …Next Page »

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It was the week before Christmas, and the deals were flying. Could San Diego’s economy be downturn defying? Heed the tech news and be of good cheer! We wish you an Xconomy Xmas and Xponential New Year!

—The big deal of the week came Wednesday, when Abbott Labs (NYSE: ABT) exercised its option to acquire Ibis Biosciences from Isis Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ISIS) for $215 million—plus continuing payments from sales of Ibis’ diagnostics products.

—San Diego’s Ligand Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: LGND) also scored with a big pharma partner, GlaxoSmithKline, (NYSE: GSK) by awarding exclusive rights to Glaxo for its drug candidate shown recently to effectively boost blood platelet cells. Glaxo agreed to pay $5 million now and as much as $158 million later, not including royalty payments.

—San Diego’s Solera Holdings, which makes software for the auto claims industry, announced it has paid $117.4 million to buy HPI Ltd, a British firm that compiles a data base of used car histories. Solera was founded in 2005 by Tony Aquila, a former president of Mitchell International, a rival auto claims software developer also based in San Diego.

—San Diego’s Huntington Capital raised $78 million in capital commitments for its second fund, which the boutique venture lender launched in May. The firm hopes to raise a total of $100 million for “Fund II” by early next year.

—Privately held Sierra Nevada Corp. of Sparks, NV, completed its buyout of SpaceDev, which is based in the suburban San Diego community of Poway, in a deal estimated at roughly $30 million. SpaceDev said its shareholders approved the deal Monday.

—Ardea Biosciences (NASDAQ: [[ticker: RDEA]]), the San Diego biotech developing small molecule drugs for inflammatory diseases, raised more than $30 million in a private stock placement.

—Pfizer (NYSE: PFE), sensing new opportunities in stem cell research for treating diabetes, formed a two-year collaboration with San Diego’s Novocell.

—Serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson, who made his fortune as the founder of MP3.com, launched a new version of Gizmo5 technology at SIPphone. The new technology, GizmoCall.com, enables users to log onto a Web site to make VOIP calls (Voice Over Internet Protocol) and can be used with any computer running a Windows, Macintosh or Linux operating system.

—Finally, the government awarded a couple of noteworthy contracts this week to San Diego’s SAIC, (NYSE: SAI) the research and engineering company also known as Science Applications International Corp. The first, from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, was for a $14.9 million biofuel contract to develop ways of using algae to make JP-8 grade jet fuel. The second deal, from NASA, could be worth as much as $69 million over the next five years to SAIC for engineering services and support for the Constellation program, which calls for returning astronauts to the moon.

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San Diego defense contractor SAIC said today NASA has awarded the company a technology services contract to support its Constellation program at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. The company, also known as Science Applications International Corp., said the contract could be worth as much as $69 million over the next five years if all options are exercised. The Constellation program, which intends to return astronauts to the moon by 2020, calls for developing technologies needed to open the lunar frontier.

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When NASA announced last week it was postponing the launch of its next mission to Mars by 26 months, Michael Ravine says his heart sank—and then he breathed a sigh of relief.As the advanced projects manager at San Diego’s Malin Space Science Systems, Ravine says his team has been working frantically to deliver two cameras for the mission by the end of January. They are the last two of four cameras that NASA hired the company to build for the Mars Science Laboratory, an SUV-size rover designed for backcountry four-wheeling across the Martian landscape.

NASA’s decision to delay the launch that was set for next October until 2011 was disappointing, Ravine says. But the extra time could give one of San Diego’s most unusual business ventures a chance to restore advanced optical capabilities that NASA was forced to delete from the two cameras to meet its test schedule.

Malin’s 2004 proposal called for building identical stereoscopic cameras that would be mounted on masts aboard the big Mars rover. Ravine says that for several reasons their plans included a wide-field zoom lens in each mast camera. One was the fact that Ravine had recruited “Titanic” filmmaker James …Next Page »

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Space exploration doesn’t captivate the public imagination like it once did—and small wonder, considering that the Space Shuttle is limited to endless circles in low-earth orbit, a mere 250 miles up. So now the small group of people who have had the privilege of looking down on Earth are doing something about it. They are going on a barnstorming tour of Washington state to whip up excitement among schoolchildren about seeking discoveries beyond this planet’s atmosphere.

The Association of Space Explorers started its 21st Planetary Congress yesterday at the Sheraton in downtown Seattle, marking only the third time the group has met in the U.S. The group includes 320 astronauts and cosmonauts from 32 countries who have been on missions in space. About 60 of them will tell stories about the wonders of space to an estimated 50,000 children in grades K-12 across the state tomorrow. To give their talks some added oomph, they won’t just talk about the Apollo glory days, but plan to grab the kids’ attention with an issue currently on a lot of minds—global climate change.

“It’s an eye-opening experience to see the parts of the atmosphere of the earth that are about the width of your little finger,” says John Fabian, the co-president of the space exploration group, and an astronaut who flew on the shuttles Challenger and Discovery in the mid-’80s. “It’s fragile, and we need to protect it.”

Fabian, 69, a resident of Port Ludlow, WA, is leading the charge. He’s one of seven Washington residents who have flown in space. The local contingent also includes shuttle astronauts Bonnie Dunbar, president of the Museum of Flight, George (Pinky) Nelson, John O. Creighton, Wendy Lawrence, and Apollo astronauts Bill Anders and Richard Gordon.

I must say they have their work cut out. My most vivid memory of the U.S. space program is the explosion of the Challenger shuttle in 1986, when I was in fifth grade. The No. 2 memory: Columbia’s disintegration over Texas five years ago. NASA’s big successes came before I was born—and well before today’s schoolkids came along—and it shows in public support. One telling statistic: the space program accounted for about 4.4 percent of the federal budget in the peak years of Apollo, a figure that’s dwindled to about 0.5 percent in the current federal budget, Dunbar says.

The public doesn’t appear very motivated to back space exploration. Even during the heat of a presidential election, neither major candidate has had a lot to say about the right future direction for the nation’s space program, Fabian says.

Still, the group has rounded up prominent sponsors for its new mission, including Boeing, Microsoft, the University of Washington, the Museum of Flight, and the Suquamish Tribe. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels appeared at the opening ceremony, welcoming the astronauts, and cracking a joke about Starbucks’ desire to open new stores on other planets (which I’m not sure all the foreign visitors really got.)

Boeing’s Jim Albaugh, the CEO of the Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems unit, stressed in his opening keynote speech that the astronauts are in a unique position to push for more resources for space exploration. NASA technologies have contributed to our ability to monitor climate change, hurricanes, artificial hearts and even new high-speed Olympic swimsuits, Albaugh says. It’s also churned out a steady of supply of some of Boeing’s best engineers, he noted. The country’s lack of interest in science and math careers has amounted to “intellectual disarmament,” he says.

“An entire generation was lost,” Albaugh says. “We need a curriculum for the information age, not the industrial age. We can’t wait for another Sputnik to galvanize government to action.”

Exactly what the space program’s priorities ought to be is another matter, which the astronauts and cosmonauts talk about a fair bit, Fabian says. The space explorers have their own views about whether to continue the shuttle program past its scheduled retirement in 2010, and some are clearly nervous about what will happen during the years we’ll have to wait for NASA’s new spacecraft program, called Constellation. “A lot of us are nervous” about the end of the shuttle program and the lack of funding for Constellation, Fabian says. I suggested that if the shuttle were extended past its retirement date it could increase the risk of another disaster. Fabian’s reply: “We always take risk in space flight.”

You get the idea pretty quickly this is an optimistic bunch of people. One of the Russian cosmonauts, Yuri Usachev, was unfazed when asked whether tensions between the U.S. and his country over hostilities in Georgia could derail future cooperation between the two countries’ space programs. “We’ve had situations in the past and we resolved them, and I think we will resolve them again,” he said through an interpreter. That sounds like the kind of hopeful attitude that just might rub off on some children across the state this week.

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Most Countries Unready for Future Broadband Needs

A group of MBA students has developed a Broadband Quality Score for 42 countries and found that the only country with enough bandwidth capacity to meet its needs in the next three to five years is Japan. Ars Technica reports that the score includes upload and download speeds and other measures. The United States, the study found, has slightly more capacity than it needs right now, but not enough to handle future demands, which will include visual networking, high-density streaming, consumer telepresence, and large file sharing.

Comcast Explains Bandwidth Caps to Customers

Comcast has begun sending emails to its subscribers to explain its cap on bandwidth use, which is set to go into effect October 1. The company says it is trying to put its 250-gigabyte monthly cap into perspective, saying that amounts to 50 million plain text e-mails, 62,500 songs, or 125 standard-definition movies. GigaOm reprints the full text of the e-mail.

Chemists Make Common Products a Little Greener

New regulations, growing consumer demand, and a fear of future lawsuits are leading companies that make consumer products to find ways to make them less toxic and more environmentally friendly. The Los Angeles Times reports that green chemistry is emerging in a variety of areas, from plastics and pesticides to toys and nail polish. While some makers of cosmetics and household cleansers are leading the way, others are lagging behind.

Contact Lens Delivers Drugs to Eyes

Dosing eyes with drugs to fight eye diseases is difficult, as eyes are very good at washing out foreign substances. Now an engineer at Auburn University in Alabama has developed a new material to make contact lenses that can absorb greater amounts of drugs than previously possible and release them slowly into the eye. New Scientist says that he has set up a company, OcuMedic, to commercialize the idea.

Virginia Court Tosses Anti-spam Law

The Virginia Supreme Court has overturned that state’s wide-ranging anti-spam law, ruling that it violates First Amendment guarantees of free speech. The Washington Post reports that the ruling also overturned the conviction of a man described as a prolific spammer. The law had outlawed all forms of unsolicited email, not just commercial junk mail.

Airplanes Remain No-Call Zones

Airlines have started providing Internet hookups on their flights, but at least one says that passengers won’t be allowed to use voice-over-Internet-Protocol to make telephone calls over the connections. The New York Times says that service-provider Aircell and American Airlines block Skype, Vonage, and similar programs, because they worry the conversations will annoy other passengers. No airline so far plans to allow phone calls.

Researchers Beam Solar Power Across Space

Researchers have collected solar power on a mountain-top in Maui and beamed it 92 miles to the big island of Hawaii. The experiment, by former NASA executive and physicist John Mankins, demonstrates how an array of solar power collectors in Earth orbit could transmit energy to Earth, Wired reports. Mankins predicts that such an orbital system, where solar energy is undimmed by clouds and atmosphere, could be put up in 10 to 15 years.

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NSF Grant Supports Study of Next Generation Internet

A project to re-think the Internet from the ground up has received $12 million in funding from the National Science Foundation. The Associated Press reports that the money will go toward developing prototypes for the Global Environment for Network Innovations, a testbed to try out new networking ideas. Actual construction of GENI would cost about $350 million.

Social Networking May Stimulate Science

A new social network site, Labmeeting, is designed to let scientists easily upload their papers and lab notes to be shared with other members of their research team. TechCrunch tells us the site was started by Harvard graduate Mark Kaganovich with $500,000 in seed funding and opened last week to anyone with a college email account. His hope is to spur researchers to talk with each other more.

California Sues EPA Over Greenhouse Gases

The state of California is suing the Environmental Protection Agency, claiming the EPA has ignored its duty to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from ships, aircraft, and construction and agricultural machinery. Reuters reports that state Attorney General Jerry Brown says he tried to work with the EPA but was met with only weak responses.

Is the FCC Ignoring Metered Broadband?

The Federal Communications Commission has been cracking down on Comcast for slowing down connections of customers using peer-to-peer networks to share files. But a columnist at GigaOm argues that that’s just a diversionary tactic to draw attention away from the lack of FCC action on proposals to charge extra to customers who use more than a certain amount of broadband each month. Om Malik worries such a policy will reduce use of services from YouTube to Facebook.

British Hacker to Face Trial in U.S.

A British computer hacker who rummaged through military computer systems looking for evidence of space aliens will be extradited to the United States to stand trial. Gary McKinnon is charged with accessing computer networks at the Pentagon, the Army, the Navy, and NASA in 2001 and 2002, New Scientist reports. If found guilty, he could face up to 70 years in prison.

California Sticking to Paper Ballots, Hand Counting

Given the fears about possible flaws and abuses with electronic voting machines, the California Secretary of State has announced the state will be relying on paper ballots that can be optically scanned and recounted by hand this election season. Debra Bowen says she opted for the paper ballots because they preserve the original vote, CNET News reports. Bowen commissioned a study last year that showed that electronic voting can be tampered with or have programming mistakes that alter results.

Air Force Developing Anti-Laser Protections

Anticipating a day when enemy combatants will be armed with lasers capable of melting holes in its equipment and weapons, the U.S. Air Force is looking for technology that will protect its weapons. Among the possibilities listed in a request for proposals is a spray-on coating to deflect laser energy or a broadband reflector that can be embedded in a weapon’s skin, Wired tells us. Such technologies, the Air Force suggests, could also protect commercial airliners from terrorists with lasers.

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Online Crime Gets More Organized

Cybercrime, once the province of unaffiliated hackers, is coalescing into to a more organized structure that resembles the Mafia, according to a report from the web security company Finjan, of San Jose, CA. As described by Ars Technica, Finjan found that cybercriminals are often organized into a system with a boss and several underbosses and lieutenants. Leave the computer virus, take the cannoli.

Biofuel Spending Doesn’t Cut Carbon, Group Claims

Between them, the United States and the European Union are spending $11 billion to promote biofuels. But Bloomberg reports that, according to a study by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, all that spending is having little impact on carbon dioxide emissions. The report predicts a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by vehicles of, at best, 0.8 percent by 2015.

Sprint Moves to Higher-Speed Broadband

Sprint has announced plans to convert the core of its network to handle data traffic at 40 gigabits per second, GigaOm tells us. That’s up from the current standard of 10 Gb/s. The increase in speed is needed as video downloads and third-generation data transmission become increasingly popular, the company says.

CERN Previews Network of the Future

Today’s Internet capacity will seem incredibly limited in a decade or two, but some of the steps needed to increase bandwidth are being previewed in a large-scale physics project in Switzerland. As CNET News reports, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has built an ultra-high-speed network so scientists can share massive amounts of data collected from the world’s largest particle accelerator, scheduled to go online next month. The people who built the network are learning how to handle data moving at speeds about 1000 times as fast as the average home broadband connection.

U.S. Lags on Creating Science Graduates

The United States has not made as much progress on attracting more students to the sciences, engineering, mathematics, and technology-related fields as businesses had hoped, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2005, 16 business groups called for the U.S. to double its number of bachelor’s degrees in those fields, from 200,000 in 2005 to 400,000 in 2015, to keep up with foreign competition. So far, the number has only grown to 225,000.

NASA Aids Fight against California Wildfires

Aerial sensing drones designed by NASA for research on global warming and general Earth science turn out to be great volunteer firefighters. As the San Jose Mercury News reports, the drones, equipped with infrared sensors, are able to identify trouble spots that firefighters don’t know about, allowing them to successfully adjust their strategy in combating the blazes.

Republican Spider Tracks Obama’s Website

Republican Presidential candidate John McCain may not, by his own admission, have much use for e-mail. But his campaign is employing an Internet spider to crawl Barack Obama’s website and keep track of any changes on an hourly basis, according to Wired. The campaign’s hope is to highlight any shifts in policy Obama might make.

EPA Creates Rules for Storing Carbon

One proposal for limiting greenhouse gas emissions is to capture carbon as it is produced at power plants and store it underground, perhaps in exhausted oil wells. The Environmental Protection Agency is taking a step toward making that possible by publishing a draft of a rule governing such underground storage. The New York Times quotes a carbon storage expert as saying the rule is an important step, but not the only one needed to make carbon storage a reality.

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Little Headway Gained Against Spam and Malware

A report from Commtouch, a maker of antimalware, says the amount of spam on the Internet remains fairly constant, despite the efforts of companies to counter it. Botnets, in which viruses infect computers and allow them to be used to dispatch spam, continue unabated, says Ars Technica, with Turkey, Brazil, and Russia leading the pack of “zombified” machines in the second quarter of 2008.

Supreme Court Judge Illustrates How File Sharers Risk Personal Data

One source of data breaches that Internet users should be aware of are peer-to-peer software programs such as Limewire. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer found that out the hard way, when a file sharing program exposed his social security number. The Washington Post’s Security Fix blog expands on the newspaper’s story.

Everyone’s Talking the Global Warming Talk, Few Walking

Despite statements from world leaders that talks on global warming by the G8 industrialized nations were productive, the agreement actually has very few concrete goals to curb carbon emissions, says the New York Times. One climatologist, Michael Schlesinger at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, characterized the results as “talking the talk” rather than “walking the walk.”

Offshore Wind Energy Mapped by NASA

Companies looking for sites to place offshore wind turbines can thank NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for identifying the best spots. CNET News reports that 10 years of satellite data led to a map showing the sites where wind is steady and strong for most of the year.

California Startup Seeks to Reuse Carbon Emissions

Carbon Sciences, a startup in Santa Barbara, CA, says it has developed a relatively simple method to take the carbon dioxide emitted during mining operations and turn it into precipitated calcium carbonate, or PCC. The Environmental News Network reports that the company hopes to keep the carbon out of the atmosphere by turning it into useful products, at the same time earning money from what used to be waste. PCC is a component of many everyday products, including paper, wallboard, and fertilizer.

Earthquake Prediction May be Coming

Imagine if state and city governments could get 10 hours’ notice that an earthquake was expected, giving them time to evacuate their citizens and start an emergency response. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, have discovered subtle geological changes that occur hours before a quake and might lead to such an early warning system, reports MSNBC. It will take more study, and possibly another decade or two, to develop such a system, the researchers say.

Volt’s Gas Tank to Be Smaller, Says GM

General Motors has been hyping its Chevy Volt, a car that would run 40 miles on a battery before having to burn gasoline to keep going. While the original plan was to have a 12-gallon tank that would allow the Volt to travel 600 miles after the battery ran out, using the gas engine to recharge the battery, the KickingTires blog reports that’s changing. GM won’t say how many gallons the redesigned tank will hold, but the range has been reduced to 360 miles.

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Last October marked the 50th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. And next month, Sputnik’s American offspring, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, will also hit its 50th birthday. The milestone has occasioned the biggest flurry of media retrospectives on the space program since Ron Howard’s 1995 film Apollo 13, including two well-made documentaries that aired this week on the Discovery Channel’s HD Theater, When We Left Earth and In the Shadow of the Moon.

If you missed them, it’s worth searching your local listings to catch these two programs when they’re shown again. (They’re also available on DVD and Blu-Ray disc.) Though much of the footage in the two films is familiar, they’re notable because this is the first time most of this material has been shown in high definition. Also, both programs contain extensive new interviews with the surviving astronauts from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo days—plain-spoken rocket jockeys who are just plain fun to listen to.

I’m a veteran space buff—my first piece of “technology journalism” was a poster on the Saturn V rocket that I designed when I was in the fourth grade—and the Discovery Channel programs sent me on a trip across the Web to see what else I could find in the way of historical images from the Apollo missions. If you follow NASA at all, you know that the Web is the best place to see the raw data coming back from current-day missions like the Mars Phoenix lander and the Spirit and Opportunity rovers (which are still trucking across the Martian surface, four years after they were expected to expire). But it turns out that the Web also holds a vast mine of original data from the Apollo project, and in today’s column I thought I’d point you toward some especially rich veins.

While NASA itself has a large collection of Web resources about the Apollo days, they aren’t particularly well organized, and they tend toward the hagiographic. The two Apollo sites that impress me the most are labors of love created by amateur historians with no direct connections to NASA. One is the Project Apollo Archive, assembled by a Lynchburg, VA, native named Kipp Teague.

Pay no attention to the 1994-era Web graphics and ugly HTML tables (Teague deliberately labels his collection of history sites the “RetroWeb”). The glory of the Project Apollo Archive is the material itself: thousands of photographs scanned from NASA originals, including large-format Hasselblad images captured by astronauts on Apollo 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17; hours of MP3 recordings of communications between flight controllers and the astronauts; and a few MPEG videos covering events you don’t see in the TV shows about the moon landings, such as the moment when Apollo 12 lunar module pilot Alan Bean accidentally points the television camera at the sun, destroying its vidicon sensor (and preventing the world from witnessing the rest of the mission on TV).

An even more detailed resource—hosted on a NASA web server but assembled and edited by a former Los Alamos scientist named Eric Jones and a Canadian space buff named Ken Glover—is the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. Destined to be used by historians far into the future, the site is a collection of transcripts of all the recorded conversations between the lunar surface crews and Houston, interwoven with after-the-fact commentary from the editors and from 10 of the 12 astronauts who were actually there. It’s supplemented by MP3 and RealAudio clips of the same transmissions, as well as hundreds of photos, Quicktime VR panoramas, and flight documents, right down to the technical checklists the astronauts wore on the cuffs of their spacesuits.

Here’s one of my favorite passages from the journals. This is from Apollo 17, at the moment when Harrison Schmitt—a PhD geologist, and the only trained scientist to go to the Moon—noticed something unexpected:

145:26:22 Schmitt: Oh, hey! (Very brief pause)
145:26:25 Schmitt: Wait a minute…
145:26:26 [Eugene] Cernan: What?
145:26:27 Schmitt: Where are the reflections? I’ve been fooled once. There is orange soil!!
145:26:32 Cernan: Well, don’t move it until I see it.
145:26:35 Schmitt: (Very excited) It’s all over!! Orange!!!
145:26:38 Cernan: Don’t move it until I see it.
145:26:40 Schmitt: I stirred it up with my feet.
145:26:42 Cernan: (Excited, too) Hey, it is!! I can see it from here!
145:26:44 Schmitt: It’s orange!
145:26:46 Cernan: Wait a minute, let me put my visor up. It’s still orange!
145:26:49 Schmitt: Sure it is! Crazy!
145:26:53 Cernan: Orange!
145:26:54 Schmitt: I’ve got to dig a trench, Houston.
145:27:00 [Bob] Parker [EVA Capcom]: Copy that. I guess we’d better work fast.
145:27:01 Cernan: Hey, he’s not going out of his wits. It really is.
145:27:07 Parker: Is it the same color as cheese?

It turned out that Schmitt had discovered an unusual deposit of volcanic glass—formed under the surface of the moon billions of years earlier and stirred up by a relatively recent meteor impact—with a colorful orange cast that strongly contrasted with the Moon’s generally gray-black soil. (The moment is recreated fairly faithfully in From the Earth to the Moon, a wonderful 1998 TV mini-series produced by Tom Hanks, who, of course, played astronaut Jim Lovell in Apollo 13). If people ever go back to the Moon, …Next Page »

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One of my goals with this column—which is now in its third week—is to tell you about new stuff on the Web that’s so delicious you just have to taste it. Here are three morsels to tide you over until next time.

The first is a quick appetizer: Very Short List, an e-mail newsletter funded by IAC/Interactive Corp. VSL has been around since mid-2006, but I just discovered a couple of weeks ago. If you sign up, every day they’ll send you one—exactly one—nugget of entertainment or media content that, in the site’s words, hasn’t already been hyped to within an inch of its life. So far, every item I’ve received has been intriguing at least (an amazing TV ad for a soccer video game), and often utterly engrossing (an online museum of online museums).

For the main course: I suggest Google Earth 4.3. This week Google rolled out the latest version of its free geographic browser for Windows and Mac, which lets you tour a 3-D simulation of the entire planet built on the company’s database of real satellite and aerial photographs.

Like its competitors, Microsoft Virtual Earth and NASA’s Worldwind, Google Earth started out as a digital atlas, showing huge amounts of classical map and photographic data that was itself 2-D but happened to be draped over a spherical globe, which mainly made it easier to shift between top-down views of different locations. As the product has evolved, however, the sphere forming the scaffolding for the map data has gained realistic 3-D topography, followed by other real-world touches such as 3-D buildings and even clouds based on real-time reports from the National Weather Service. In other words, it’s gradually becoming what Yale computer scientist David Gelernter first termed a “mirror world”—a software model that tries to recreate the human environment as accurately as possible.

The latest version provides improvements in both content and navigation that nudge it even farther in this direction—which is a blessing for people like me who are intrigued by virtual worlds and all the possibilities they offer for new kinds of learning and interaction (though it should be noted that some traditional map mavens like Stefan Geens, the author of the Ogle Earth blog, feel that the profusion of cosmetic improvements in Google Earth is diminishing its information value as an atlas).

The most visible addition to Google Earth 4.3 is an expanded crop of 3-D buildings for dozens of cities around the world, along with extremely realistic textures or “skins” for those buildings. In past versions of Google Earth, most 3-D buildings were represented by gray boxes of the appropriate shape and height. In 4.3, most of the 3-D models, including hundreds of Boston buildings, are now clothed with photographs of the actual structures. (Don’t ask me how Google pulled this off: The process of creating photorealistic 3-D models of buildings was, until recently, a tedious one tackled mainly by enthusiastic amateurs, who used Google’s SketchUp 3-D modeling program and uploaded their finished models to Google’s open-source 3-D Warehouse. Clearly Google has found a way to automate the whole process.)

The program’s 3-D buildings are now so detailed that it’s possible to “fly” to a given location in the Google Earth landscape and get a view that’s astonishingly close to actually being there. To see what I mean, compare the two images here: one is a photograph I took yesterday from the roof of the building in Cambridge, MA, where Xconomy is headquartered. The other is a screenshot from Google Earth with the imaginary “camera” positioned in roughly the same spot.

When comparing these two images, keep in mind what makes the Google Earth version so remarkable: It’s entirely synthetic. No one from Google went out and took a picture from that perspective (although Google’s vast collection of Street View photographs is now integrated into Google Earth—but that’s a different story). Rather, it’s a reconstructed view based entirely on 3-D modeling, pasted-on photographic skins, Google’s map data, and some very sophisticated computer graphics algorithms.

Google Earth 4.3 contains a ton of other great improvements, but I’ll just mention two more. One is the sun. Now you can turn on a feature that puts a simulated sun into the proper spot in the simulated sky and lets you adjust the time of day with a slider, generating realistic shadows on buildings and landforms. Finally, the Google Earth team has completely revamped the program’s navigation controls to make panning, zooming, tilting, and otherwise moving around inside the 3-D environment much more intuitive—which is to say, much more like a videogame or a Second Life-style virtual world. If you’re a longtime user of Google Earth, the new controls might take some getting used to, but ultimately you’ll appreciate the added flexibility. Meanwhile, if you’ve never downloaded Google Earth before, there’s never been a better time to start exploring.

And now for dessert: Go check out MyLOC, the newest online resource from the Library of Congress. Launched April 12, the site is a history buff’s dream, containing a digital collection of historic books, maps, and other resources from the Library’s vast archives. The site—the online counterpart of an exhibit at the Library’s Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C.—provides some clever Flash and Microsoft Silverlight multimedia tools for browsing individual books, including a Gutenberg Bible and several volumes from Thomas Jefferson’s personal library. Bon appetit.

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