HTC Thunderbolt gets 26 Mbits/second!

Yep, 26 Mbits/s. That's the amazing download speed I was able to get on my friend's HTC Thunderbolt running on Verizon's 4G LTE network. We were at Rosamunde in San Francisco's Mission district, with four out of four bars of signal strength. The upload speed was 5 Mbits/s.

The RoboEarth Project and The Rise Of The Machines

The field of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence seems to have been making significant progress these last couple of years. A few months ago, IBM's Watson supercomputer was able to beat the two best human players at Jeopardy. It is capable of understanding questions formulated in normal English language on a variety of fields like science, history or popular culture, and come up with an answer in less than a second.

The Skylon Spaceplane

British Aerospace company Reaction Engines Ltd is working on a design for a Single Stage To Orbit (SSTO) Spaceplane called Skylon that will take off and land horizontally from a runway, just like a normal plane. This concept has been studied several times already in the past, with projects such as the U.S.'s National Aerospace Plane (see my previous post) or the British HOTOL, but all encountered technological problems that they could not solve. 

SFPark iPhone app shows Real-Time Parking Availability in San Francisco

As you may or may not know, San Francisco's SFPark Project has been installing state-of-the-art park-meters and sensors on the ground that can tell if a car is parked in the spot. This information is transmitted wirelessly to their central server. Now this information is available to everybody on-line on the sfpark.org website, or with the SFPark iPhone app. It displays a map showing each street block color-coded depending on the approximate number of spots available.

The Saga of NASA's Heavy Lift Launcher

Last week, after years of studies and negotiations, NASA finally released a preliminary design for the new rocket that will replace the space shuttle. The new rocket will be a Shuttle-Derived Heavy Lift Vehicle, meaning that it will make maximum use of existing Space Shuttle components. Basically they will keep the Space Shuttle External tank and two Solid Rocket Boosters unchanged, remove the space shuttle, take the shuttle's three main engines and put them and the bottom of the External Tank, and put the cargo on top of the External Tank. This design is pretty much the solution proposed by the DIRECT team last year, called the Jupiter launch vehicle.

Giant 'straddling bus' rides above traffic

The Chinese are building a giant tramway that rides on stilts high enough so that it can ride over cars on busy streets, avoiding traffic jams. Cars will also be able to drive under them so as not to be stuck behind them when they are stopped at a bus stop.

Captain Kirk doesn't trust the VSS Enterprise

Virgin Galactic is proceeding with tests of its first SpaceShipTwo sub-orbital spacecraft, the VSS Enterprise, that will carry private, paying passengers on a short, 6 minutes flight to space. On October 10, 2010, it successfully completed its first glide flight dropped from the WhiteNightTwo mother ship, and company officials say that they are on schedule to start commercial operations in 2011.