KLM's magnificent whale of a flying machine

Having managed to catch the animation flick Battle for Terra on a super-long flight to San Francisco recently, KLM's Spruce Whale brings to mind the blue mammals innocuously flying around planet Terra's stratosphere. Now, it looks like we could have our own metallic "Jonah and the whale" machines cruising the skies at a hard-to-imagine 1,000km/h (given its less than streamlined figure), while ferrying 1,500 passengers in its belly.
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First glimpse of iRobot's putty-like ChemBot

We're getting a first glimpse of that shape-shifting ChemBot we first told you about last year, and well, it looks like the love child of a beating heart and a wad of Silly Putty.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the US Army Research Office awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to iRobot to create the flexible military bot. The maker of the Roomba and Scooba, along with University of Chicago researchers, showed off the oozy results at the Iros conference (the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) in the US this week.
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FleXpeakers for some seriously flat-out sounds

We've all heard about the coming of flexi screens and superslim displays, yada yada, for years. But what about speakers that are just as paper-thin and bendable? Now, that's a technology to get your inner geek pumped up, so to speak. Developed by Taiwan's Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and announced in April, it's worth an encore here as we await its coming. The lightweight fleXpeaker manages to stay razor-thin by packing arrays of tiny speakers together to produce high-fidelity speaker systems of almost any size. The good: This consumes so little power, it's a change from all those power-hungry gizmos out there. The bad: The frequency response is said to reach at least 20KHz, but won't go below 500Hz, which means you'll still need a blocky subwoofer.
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Future batteries to go nuclear

Has nuclear energy been given a negative reputation, thanks to the militarization of this technology? Jae Kwon, assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Missouri, seems to think so. His research team believes the micronization of consumer devices is reaching a limit due to the size of the power source and thinks the future of batteries lies in splitting the atom.

They have been working on a penny-sized power supply which uses a liquid semiconductor. This prevents the radioactive decay from affecting the structure, which is a problem with solid semiconductors. Despite the potential upsides, we feel the real work is in countering the demonized image of nuclear technology in the minds of the masses. Even then, we won't recommend putting anything remotely linked with nuclear power in the front pants pocket.

Via University of Missouri

Intel's Light Peak optical links may debut next year

In September, Intel showed off Light Peak as if it were the latest hot idea out of the labs. But the fiber-optic communication technology could well be coming to a computer near you next year, rather than in some distant sci-fi future.

A Taiwanese optical networking company, Foci Fiber Optic Communication, is well along the path of selling Light Peak cables and other fiber-optic components.

"We plan to have our pilot run ready by the end of November 2009, and ready to be in mass production in the beginning of year 2010," said Janpu Hou, the company's vice president of business development.
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