Hasta La Gadget!

Microsoft’s hardware research team today unveiled what it has deemed “Mouse 2.0”: five mouse prototypes aimed at taking advantage of the push toward multi-touch computing, jumpstarted with the introduction of Windows 7. The five mice are still in early concept stages. Each takes a different approach to multi-touch through a complete rehaul of the standard desktop mouse.

All five designs were demoed in a video released online today by the research team. The first mouse highlighted was the FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection), a curved multi-touch design. Microsoft explains: “[The mouse] applies the principle of Frustrated Total Internal Reflection to illuminate a user’s fingers, and uses a camera to track multiple points of touch on its curved translucent surface.”

The Orb Mouse, meanwhile, is aimed largely at gamers. The demo in the video showcased the way it interacts with a first-person shooter. Says Microsoft: “Equipped with an internal camera and a source of diffused infrared illumination, it can track the user’s hand across the [entirety] of its hemispherical surface.”

The Cap Mouse is designed for augmenting GUI features. “[The mouse] uses a matrix of capacitive touch-sensing electrodes to track the position of the user’s fingertips along its surface.”

Arguably the coolest of the bunch, the Side Mouse requires minimal contact with the user’s hand. Rather it uses the company’s proprietary SideSight technology to detect finger and hand movements around the device.

The final mouse, the Arty Mouse, is a bizarre little peripheral aimed at 3D manipulation. Says Microsoft: “[The mouse is] equipped with three optical mouse sensors to track the individual movements of the wrist, thumb, and index finger.”

You can watch the full low-budget video over at the Microsoft Research site.

So, watcha’ running there on your desktop? Quad core? Octo core? Got that liquid cooler pumping away? Please. You are so behind the curve. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (they’re what sits between the US Department of Commerce and the Weather Service) has just announced their latest big iron supercomputer. Mere mortals will quiver!

The new supercomputers, based on IBM Power 575 Systems, are four times faster than the previous system, with the ability to make 69.7 trillion calculations per second. Higher computation speed allows meteorologists to rapidly refine and update severe weather forecasts as dangerous weather develops and threatens U.S. communities. Billions of bytes of weather observations are fed into the system each day, including temperature, wind, precipitation, atmospheric pressure, and other oceanographic and satellite information taken from the ground, air, sea and space.

Considering the big fight to get augmented reality apps onto the iPhone, the concept of “Terminator-style” AR contact lenses seems little more than a pipedream, but that’s exactly the technology laid out by Babak A. Parviz, a bionanotechnology expert at the University of Washington, in Seattle–references to killer robots from the future and all.

“These lenses don’t give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet,” writes Parviz. “But we have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology.”

Parviz goes on to detail the possibilities of such a technology, which, he points out, even in a simple state could be rather useful,

Even a lens with a single pixel could aid people with impaired hearing or be incorporated as an indicator into computer games. With more colors and resolution, the repertoire could be expanded to include displaying text, translating speech into captions in real time, or offering visual cues from a navigation system. With basic image processing and Internet access, a contact-lens display could unlock whole new worlds of visual information, unfettered by the constraints of a physical display.

Killer robots from the future rejoice.

The £30 million supercomputer in Exeter, Devon was designed to predict the weather. It turns out it the massive machine may also be able to change the climate. The UK-based Met Office, which owns the machine revealed recently that it may be one of the biggest sources of pollution in the country.

The machine requires 1.2 megawatts to run. That, as The Daily Mail points out, is enough energy to power a whopping 1,000 homes. The Met Office outputs a mind-boggling 12,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide every year, 75-percent of which can be attributed to the supercomputer.

A spokesman for the company called the machine “vital” to British meteorology, adding, “We recognize that it is big, but it is also necessary. We couldn’t do what we do without it. We would be throwing ourselves back into the dark ages of weather forecasting if we withdrew our reliance on supercomputing, it’s as simple as that.”

“Star Trek” had one of the largest franchise presences on the Comic Con showroom floor, thanks in no small part to the recent cinematic reboot of the perennial favorite sci-fi series. It’s a resurgence that Roddenberry Productions is more than happy to capitalize on.

Run by “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry’s son, Rod, the company has a number of projects aimed at prolonging “the Roddenberry vision.” The company was largely present to promote its new sci-fi comic “Days Missing,” and, interestingly, the Roddenberry Dive Team, which explore a largely undiscovered frontier.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Rod for a few minutes to discuss the company and learned, among other interesting things, that Gene’s son didn’t really watch “Star Trek” growing up, and was instead more interested in action series like “Starsky and Hutch.” “I think it was over my head,” he admitted.

Rod enjoys the series now, of course, having recognized that, ultimately, the show was more an examination of contemporary social issues than just regular old sci-fi. And now the company that he’s taken over from his parents is focused on attempting to maintain that legacy.