Face Detection on Digital Camera

Fujifilm today said that it will ship its Finepix S5 Pro digital SLR camera in early 2007. The camera will provide a resolution of 12.1 megapixels and introduce a face recognition feature: According to the manufacturer, the feature can detect up to ten faces in one image and will allow users to zoom in facial detail, for example whether eyes are open or closed.

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NXP Semiconductors

Royal Philips Electronics has decided to launch their semiconductor division as an independent company backed by a consortium of private investors where Phillips will retain only 20% of interest. This new company, called NXP, has sales over 5 billion euro, 37k employees and more than 25k patents. The campaign website, describes the vision and mission of this brand-new, top-ten electronics company.

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Tesla Motors

Imagine a 100% electric car that is more powerful, fast and beautiful than most cars you know. A car that can accelerate to 100km/h in 4 seconds, faster than a Ferrari, and travel 1 mile for 1 cent. This is not a dream anymore, thanks to chairman of Tesla Motors, Elon Musk and others like Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It's little bit pricy now, but it is the future...

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Kevin Mitnick's website hacked

Kevin Mitnick, an ex-hacker or the renown cracker specialized in social engineering techniques is certainly a prominent figure in IT Security. His life made the Hollywood screens and he is now, known as a person who is building his professional reputation by offering a variety of services in the IT Security field.

A group of Pakistani crackers vandalized the websites of 4 different Kevin Mitnick's ventures, in what it looks like to be a focused personal attack. The sites defensivethinking.com, mitsec.com, kevinmitnick.com and mitnicksecurity.com have been defaced with offensive messages.

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Viewer Created Content

Introduction at www.current.tv starts with "Current is a cable and satellite television network.." They enable viewers to select videos that everyone can watch. Selection is mainly by voting. Nice concept, but if you have time to play!

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Photosynth turns photo collections into 3D virtual reality

Microsoft's new project Photosynth, is a collobaration between Microsoft and the University of Washington. Basically, the application organize a large collection of non-structured photos and place them in a virtual world which can be explored/navigated easily. A paper has been published about the application in August 2006. Photosynth is planned to be available for download in the second half of 2007. Demo videos are available at the official project page.

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Biometric Vending Machine

Imagine a summer day: you are thirsty and want to get a soda, you approach a device at the corner of the corridor, the device looks at you through its camera and welcomes you (!), you press a button on the touch-screen and get your soda. No coins, no cards, even no need to reach your wallet. Well, this is not a science fiction, the device is now a reality thanks to a group of graduate students at University of California San Diago and also thanks to their prof pressing for a course project... :)

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Ancient Egypt King possessed glass from outer space?

Among King Tutankhamun's treasures, an eloborate necklace contains beetle shaped yellow gem dated back BC1300s. Recently, it has been understood that this is actually glass. But how could King Tut had glass is still unknown.

At extreme temperatures, like 1800 degree celcius, glass can occur and only events like atomic bomb explosions can produce such heat resulting a thin layer of glass. However, for the thickness of King Tut's beetle, power of thousands of atomic bombs are necessary. A possibility, scientists consider is, large meteor hits; but there's no proof of such hit at that time period in Egypt.

Since, there's no Earth based source for such high temperatures, scientists believe the source of the gem in King Tut's necklace is from outer space...

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Computer game tests telepathy

In an interesting research project, computer technology is put to work. Researchers at Manchester University have created a virtual world to test for evidence of telepathic links between 100 people in what is being described as the most objective study undertaken so far.

The test is carried out using two volunteers who could be friends, work colleagues or family. They are placed in separate rooms on different floors of the same building to eliminate any possibility of communication. During the experiment participants view a random selection of computer-generated objects. These include a telephone, a football and an umbrella. The person in the first room sees one object at a time, which they are asked to concentrate on and interact with. The person in the other room is simultaneously presented with the same object plus three decoy objects. They are then asked to select the object they believe the other participant is trying to transmit to them.

The results of the experiment are expected to be published early in 2007. And, although experimenters reported that they have not intended to prove or disprove telepathy, this will study certainly add a scientific dimension to the discussion.

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Microsoft acquired Winternals

Microsoft today announced the acquisition of Winternals Software, a privately held company based in Austin, Texas, that provides Windows®-based enterprises with systems recovery and data protection solutions in addition to offering a freeware tools web site called Sysinternals.

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