Uphill water could be cool for chips

Water that travels uphill could in future be used to cool computer chips according to joint US and Australian research. Heiner Linke and colleagues from the universities of Oregon and New South Wales have succeeded in getting liquid droplets to move across horizontal surfaces and travel uphill. The phenomenon was achieved by heating an etched brass surface so that it is considerably hotter than the liquid's boiling point. ...more

Microsoft working on virtual wireless

Microsoft is developing Virtual Wi-Fi software that will enable a single Wi-Fi equipped device to simultaneously connect to multiple wireless networks. The technique, described as a 'virtualisation architecture for wireless LAN cards', creates virtual wireless cards each of which can be configured differently to connect to separate networks. Moreover once the device is connected to more than one network, it can then act as a bridge or router to extend the network's range. ...more

SCO announces new products for SCOx Initiative

SCO has released the first set of products surrounding its web services project which was announced in April under the name of SCOx Initiative. The company has announced a number of new products including the SCOx WebFace development environment, Ericom PowerTerm Host Publisher and the SCOsms Web Services and SCObiz Web Services APIs. SCOx is a technology framework, aimed at the development and delivery of inter and intranet applications. ...more

Yahoo forms consortium to digitise world's archives

Internet portal Yahoo! has finally made its response to the Google Print initiative. Together with Hewlett-Packard and Adobe, a number of the world's top libraries and archives have come together to form the Open Content Alliance. Initially, the material for the archive will come from the University of California, the University of Toronto, the British National Archives, O'Reilly Media, Inc. ...more

The Robot takeover is gathering pace, says UN

There is a buying boom for robotic devices according to a survey published by one of the United Nation's Economic Commissions. "Never before have the United States and the European Union invested in so many industrial robots in a single year," said Jan Karlsson in a report in The New York Times. Karlsson compiled the data for the World 2000 Robotics survey. ...more