Iddo Genuth writes "Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics recently won a contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to design quieter, more energy efficient, and more environmentally friendly commercial airplanes. The two-million-dollar contract from NASA is just an initial step in bringing green technologies to the sky."

ancientribe writes "A hardened operating system used in the B1B bomber and other military aircraft has now been released commercially, after receiving the highest security rating by a National Security Agency-run certification program. Green Hills Software's Integrity-178B operating system was certified as EAL6+, which means that it can defend against well-funded and sophisticated attackers." The company is not saying how much the OS would cost a potential customer: "The system and its associated integration and consulting services are custom solutions." Both Windows and Linux are EAL 4+ certified, which means they can defend against "inadvertent and casual" security breach attempts.

holy_calamity writes "Engineers at Polytechnic University Brooklyn have discovered that digital snaps shorn of any metadata still reveal the make and model of camera used to take them. It is possible to work backwards from the relationships of neighboring pixel values in a shot to identify the model-specific demosaicing algorithm that combines red, green, and blue pixels on the sensor into color image pixels. Forensics teams are already licking their chops."

The Wall Street Journal has a look at global warming research using rubber duckies. The toys have been employed in tracking ocean currents since 1992; but recently NASA robotics expert Alberto Behar released 90 yellow rubber ducks into the melt water flowing down a chasm in a Greenland glacier. "Each duck was imprinted with an email address and, in three languages, the offer of a reward. If all goes well, Dr. Behar hopes that one day they will emerge 30 miles or so away at the glacier's edge in the open water of Disko Bay near Ilulissat, bobbing brightly amid the icebergs north of the Arctic Circle, each one a significant clue to just how warming temperatures may speed the glacier's slide to the sea."

An anonymous reader notes that TorrentFreak is reporting: "French record labels have received the green light to sue four US-based companies that develop P2P applications, including the BitTorrent client Vuze, Limewire, and Morpheus. Shareaza is the fourth application, for which the labels are going after the open source development platform SourceForge. ... Putting aside the discussion on the responsibilities of application developers for their users activities, the decision to go after SourceForge for hosting a application that can potentially infringe, is stretching credibility beyond all bounds." SourceForge is Slashdot's corporate parent.

1sockchuck writes "If you had 100,000 servers, would you put them on top of a former nuclear fuel facility? One of the world's largest web hosts, 1&1 Internet, is building a new data center on a site in Hanau, Germany previously used by Siemens to produce mixed oxide rods made from enriched uranium and plutonium. The site has been cleaned up, and 1&1 is converting it into a 'green' data center powered by renewable energy and using free cooling to save on air conditioning costs."

Reader Cowards Anonymous writes with this excerpt from Good Gear Guide: "Colombia will become the second country to use the One Laptop Per Child Project's (OLPC) XO laptops running Microsoft Windows XP in schools after signing an agreement for pilot programs in two towns. Schools in the towns of Quetame and Chia will be outfitted with the small green XO laptops developed by the OLPC. The pilot programs are expected to expand over time."

frogger writes "China is not new to censoring the Internet, but up until now, BitTorrent sites have never been blocked. Recently, however, several reports came in from China indicating that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay had been hijacked. The sites became inaccessible, instead redirecting to the leading Chinese search engine Baidu."

narramissic writes "Starting on Monday, researchers from Nokia and UC Berkeley will kick off the Mobile Millennium project. The researchers hope that thousands of volunteers will download a free Java program that figures out by their movement and location when they are driving, and then transmits that information to the project's servers, which then crunch it into a Bay Area traffic map. 'The whole concept here is that if everyone shares just a little bit of what they're seeing ... then everyone can benefit by seeing the conditions ahead of them,' said Quinn Jacobson, a research leader with Nokia in Palo Alto."

Tjeerd writes "Because the 'green revolution' is accelerating, I felt it was time to get involved. Last week I started with buying a portable solar energy charger for my mobile phone. But soon I was thinking of also recharging my Asus Eee netbook with a portable solar energy recharger. I found things like the Portable Power Pack, Foldable Solar Chargers, and the Solar Gorilla. The Solar Gorilla looks quite interesting and might be able to recharge my netbook and fits nicely in a rucksack. But I would like some real-life feedback. If you have experience with these or other portable solar devices, what has worked for you?"