Hasta La Gadget!

Internet public enemy number one, Julian Assange was arrested today, after turning himself over to British police. But it wasn’t the Australian’s whistleblowing that brought him down–rather the WikiLeaks founder was arrested on charges of non-consensual sex filed by two women in Sweden over the summer.

According to London police, Assange is “accused by the Swedish authorities of one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape, all alleged to have been committed in August 2010.”

Assange had been in hiding since the recent release of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables. The 39-year-old one-time hacker has denied the charges, with his lawyers referring to the charges as “a political stunt.”

WikiLeaks, meanwhile, is maintaining business as usual. The site wrote on its Twitter page, “Today’s actions against our editor-in-chief Julian Assange won’t affect our operations: we will release more cables tonight as normal.”

I’m not talking about computer viruses here, but the biological kind. A team of researchers at the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering and College of Agriculture and Natural Resources (still reading?) has managed to harness and exploit the self-renewing and self-assembling properties of viruses in order to build a new generation of small, powerful, and highly efficient batteries and fuel cells.

The researchers started with the rigid, rod-shaped (no jokes, please) Tobacco mosaic virus, which looks like uncooked spaghetti under an electron microscope (how that spaghetti got under a microscope, I’ll never know). TMV is a plant virus that plays hell with tobacco, tomatoes, and more. Anyhoo, in the lab researchers have been able to harness the characteristics of TMV to build tiny components for lithium ion batteries. They can modify the TMV rods (no jokes, please) to bind perpendicularly to the metallic surface of a battery electrode and arrange the rods in patterns. Then, they coat the rods with a film that acts as a current collector. The result increases the electrode’s surface area and its capacity to store energy. So think about that the next time a virus has your own internal battery feeling depleted. 

There are certain career paths in which the possibility of being bitten by a dog is something of a calculated risk. Working at a pet shop or a kennel, for one. And then there’s also the mail carrier, a position that’s famous for being in the crosshairs of suburban canines.

Flight attendants, on the other hand, have had a pretty easy time of it, when it comes to being bitten by animals on the clock. That all ended when a passenger’s dog got loose on a Phoenix-bound flight from Newark, NJ and bit a flight attendant, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing in Pittsburg. Once on the ground again, passengers were taken off the plane, as the crew searched for the dog. No word on how severe the bite was.

According to US Airways’ policy, passengers can bring a small animal on a flight in an “escape-proof” carrier for a one-way fee of $100.

This is of the weirder files to come out of WWII. The July 23rd 1945 issue of LIFE magazine detailed a secret Nazi plan to concoct a giant space mirror or magnifying glass that would concentrate solar rays to burn whole cities or oceans (Google books link).

Kind of like a super-sized version of using a magnifying glass to burn ants.

In Germany last month, U.S. Army technical experts came up with the
astonishing fact that German scientists had seriously planned to build a
“sun gun,” a big mirror in space which would focus the sun’s rays to a
scorching point at the earth’s surface. The Germans, the Army reported,
hoped to use such a mirror to burn an enemy city to ashes or to boil
part of an ocean.

Plausible schemes to build a station in space were
engineered on paper long before the war. European rocket enthusiasts,
including Dr. Hermann Oberth, who may have been the designer of the V-2,
had planned to use the space station not as a weapon but as a refueling
point for rockets starting off on journeys into space. … The only major
obstacle: constructing a rocket powerful enough to reach a point where a
space station could be built. If the modern German scientists had been
able to make such a rocket, they might have ben able to set up their sun
gun. Whether the sun gun would have accomplished what they expected,
however, is another matter.”

Even if the Nazis would have maintained power long enough to create a space Reich, it appears this dream of a city-destroying sun gun was far from practical.

Since the sun appears in the sky as a disk and not as a point, the best
any optical system can produce is an image of this disk. At very short
focal lengths, the image is small and hot but as the focal length is
increased the image becomes progressively bigger and cooler. At the
distance the Germans proposed to set up their mirror (3,100 miles) the
image of the sun cast on the earth would be about 40 miles in diameter
and not hot enough to do any damage.

via Blastr