Eideard

The snowmobile in the photo is only 2 feet long

Several snowmobiles navigated speedily over arctic ice and snow in Alaska’s outback in late June. This scene might seem ordinary except that the recently unveiled snowmobiles are unmanned, autonomous, toy-size robots called SnoMotes – the first prototype network of their kind envisioned to rove treacherous areas of the Arctic and Antarctic capturing more accurate measurements that will help scientists better understand what is causing the well-documented melting of ice in those regions.

Ayanna Howard, associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, worked with scientists at Penn State to create the toy-like robots.

The robots are designed to traverse terrain often too dangerous for scientists, in pursuit of barometric pressure, temperature, and relative humidity measurements that will help scientists improve climate models.

Howard, a former member of NASA’s Mars technology program team who developed SmartNav, an autonomous, next-generation Mars rover, believes that science-driven robotics could be just as useful of a vehicle to new discoveries on Earth as it has been in the quest to learn more about Mars.

Delightful project. I’d love to see a documentary about it. Read the details.

A British company is poised to construct the world’s first floating wind turbine, in a move that could herald a new generation of cheaper, less problematic wind energy.

Blue H, a firm registered in the UK but based in Holland, aims to anchor its prototype device 12 miles off the coast of southern Italy later this month.

The company is one of several racing to build commercial-scale floating wind turbines that sit in deep water far from land. These turbines benefit from more powerful winds and avoid many of the issues that afflict existing wind farms.

Neal Bastick, head of Blue H, said the Italian prototype would be “virtually invisible” from the shore, and that the company plans to build a full scale floating 90 megawatt wind farm in the region. Blue H also wants to build them off Scotland and the northeast US.

Overdue. A sign of changing times that devices which could have been prototyped 20 years ago are finally seeing the light of day.

My native cynicism, daily encouraged by the unwillingness, nay, fear shrouding the minds of ignorant people – may yet take a turn for the positive. Eh?

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The Canadian government is under fire for refusing to seek the repatriation of a teenage national held at Guantánamo Bay, who was shown desperately pleading for his country’s help in recently released footage.

Liberal politicians and human rights groups criticised Canada’s conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, for the lack of action saying it undermined attempts to eradicate the use of child soldiers.

Toronto-born Omar Khadr’s US military lawyer called on Harper to “stand up and act like a prime minister of Canada” and demand the teenager’s return.

Footage of Khadr’s Guantánamo interrogation was released this week by his lawyers, in the hope it would spur the government into bringing him into the Canadian justice system.

Sooner or later, Canadian voters will have to move beyond their just repugnance over the national corruption of previous governments – and recognize the Harper government as not only backwards on domestic issues; but, harmful and reactionary on a global scale.

State police say they have solved a mysterious eastern New Mexico shooting death that was similar to a shooting depicted in a 2003 “CSI” episode. In both cases a revolver was found tied to balloons in an apparent effort to make the weapon float away.

Authorities determined that Thomas Hickman committed suicide after an investigation that included a detective renting a copy of the episode…

At first, investigators suspected homicide when Hickman, 55, of North Richland Hills, Texas, was found dead March 15 along U.S. 84 southeast of Santa Rosa, his mouth covered by duct tape…

“There were similarities in the episode, where a character did tie helium balloons to a gun and hoped it would float away,” Anglada said.

Medical investigators ruled the death a suicide, Anglada said, and additional evidence led detectives to conclude the scene had been intended to look like a homicide.

They also found he held a life insurance policy that would pay his wife $388,000 or double that amount if his death was accidental.

Of course, trying to commit suicide and make it look like a murder – you don’t get many chances to practice.

Guitar Hero has turned millions of people into rock stars with plastic guitars. But can they shred on a Nokia?

The answer is a resounding yes.

Cellphone carriers are rolling out a mobile version of Activision’s rock music game, and customers are subscribing at a pace that could make it the most successful console-to-cellphone crossover game in history. As the cellphone rapidly emerges as the next computing platform, cellphone games would seem to be a natural application…

As of May, the latest period for which M:Metrics provided data, Guitar Hero’s mobile version ranked at No.9, but it had climbed from No.85 in three months. It will go further. Hands-On Mobile, which adapted the game on behalf of Activision, said it would introduce Guitar Hero III Backstage Pass, a new version of the game for Sprint and AT&T customers with other carriers to follow.

I’m not a gamer. I can only comment that improving technology for gamers improves it for everyone.

Web browsing should get faster. Richer colors and a lot more detail will magically appear. All’s right with the world.

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There are certainly much cheaper ways to see London, but few can be as serene as to glide over the capital 1,000 feet above the ground at 30mph in an airship.

Laid out below you are the great landmarks: the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace and the Thames, glittering in the sun.

But it is the small details that strike you most: the neat back gardens with their children’s trampolines and paddling pools, the tennis courts and cricket pitches in the parks, the dog walkers and an early morning swimmer gliding across an open-air municipal pool. All the green spaces too – can south London really have all those trees?

The flight is so gentle in the gondola that it is like eavesdropping on London as it wakes and goes about its business…

Had William Wordsworth been around yesterday, he would not have had to change a word: “The city now doth like a garment wear/ The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,/ Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie/ Open unto the fields, and to the sky;/ All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.”

I know the special feeling. The particular, slow quiet of passing over the habitation and naturescape below – from trips in a hot-air balloon. The Zeppelin adds directionality and choice.

It’s a transportation mode worthy of inclusion and expansion into our choices.

Washington lawyer Jim Robinson is a former assistant attorney general and once served as a U.S. attorney in Michigan. Jim Robinson, a D.C. attorney, is on the U.S. watch list by mistake and wants his name removed.

He’s an American citizen who holds a high-level security clearance from the U.S. government. He’s a onetime law-school dean, a husband and a grandfather.

And he’s on the U.S. government’s anti-terrorism watch list, which gets him delayed or stopped every time he tries to board a commercial airliner…

Among those added to the list recently is CNN Investigative Correspondent Drew Griffin, who learned of his new status in May. Griffin has done critical reporting on the agency, but TSA spokesman Chris White says that any connection between the two events “is absolutely fabricated…”

Barry Steinhardt, ACLU technology director, says the list is so secretive yet so shoddily put together, it’s hard to tell if how it is being used — or abused.

“The truth is, we don’t know how much is bureaucratic ineptness or how much is political retaliation,” he said.

The FBI says this is just a “side effect of our efforts to fight terrorism.” Do you think it makes anyone safer?

Does it make you safer?

NOAA-supported scientists from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and Louisiana State University are forecasting that the “dead zone” off the coast of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico this summer could be the largest on record.

The researchers are predicting the area could measure a record 8,800 square miles, or roughly the size of New Jersey. In 2007, the dead zone was 7,903 square miles. The largest dead zone on record was in 2002, when it measured 8,481 square miles.

The dead zone is an area in the Gulf of Mexico where seasonal oxygen levels drop too low to support most life in bottom and near-bottom waters. This low oxygen, or hypoxic, area is primarily caused by high nutrient levels, which stimulates an overgrowth of algae that sinks and decomposes. The decomposition process in turn depletes dissolved oxygen in the water. The dead zone is of particular concern because it threatens valuable commercial and recreational Gulf fisheries.

Research indicates that the nearly tripling of nitrogen levels into the Gulf over the past 50 years from human activities has led to a dramatic increase in the size of the dead zone. Various models are useful in evaluating the influence of nitrogen loads and other factors on the size of the dead zone. The LSU model has a strong track record of accurately predicting the dead zone’s size.

Know-Nothings and other politically correct copouts will have to rework their rationales a bit for this one. First, record-keeping has been detailed for over a half-century – and is consistent with earlier anecdotal evidence. Second, the compounds threaded through this wasteful disaster are uniquely human-designed and often modified for agribusiness.

And waste is truly what we’re concerned with. This ain’t especially rooftop detritus, folks. It’s over-applied and mis-applied fertilizer and pesticides in combination with poorly treated human waste. It should be dumped into the Potomac so tourists visiting our government treasures might get a whiff of the Heartland, too.