Alexander is testifying before Congress as part of his confirmation as the new head of US Cyber Command. In that position, he will oversee the protection of the US data infrastructure. In his answers to questions from Congressmen before tomorrow's in-person testimony, Alexander said that the US has responded to threats against the country in cyberspace, but declined to get into specifics. He also added that while military law doesn't specifically authorize a country to retaliate with a cyber-attack, the law implicitly condones the use of retaliatory cyberwar.

In general, Alexander's testimony reflected a policy that treats a computer the same as a rifle in a military context. For him, it's a weapon, and faces the same deterrent, legal, technical issues as a fighter plane, nuclear bomb, or sharpened stick. However, it should be noted that Alexander also gave extensive classified testimony that no doubt went into more specific detail about the US's cyber-deterrence and offensive capabilities.

Still, what Alexander did reveal is mostly new information for the general public, and with live questioning set to begin tomorrow, we should end this week knowing far more about US cyber policy than we began it.

[Associated Press]

The panels, made by the Dutch company Sustainable Dance Club, compress by 0.4 inches every time they are stepped on, and a motor converts that mechanical energy into electrical power. According to Sustainable Dance Club, a person dancing on one of the tiles can generate between 2 and 20 watts, depending on their weight. Toulouse plans to install the panels in the city center, and test them out for two weeks.

However, the fine chaps over at the Register have done some math, and concluded that the panels can't possibly provide enough power to light the streets. Based on their calculations, even if every resident of the city spent an hour walking every day through a city where every square inch of sidewalk absorbed their energy, it wouldn't provide enough energy to light the streets or significantly offset the cost of lighting them.

So sure, a large city filled with skinny people may not be the best place to implement this technology. But transport this tech to Huntington, West Virginia, where pedestrians probably generate two or three times the power per person of the average Frenchman, and maybe you could start producing some real power.

[The Guardian, and The Register]

The researchers start by printing out a flat sheet of titanium hydride. Normally, this material is too rigid to fold, but the printing process imbues the "ink" with a number of solvents that soften it up enough for manipulation. In the case of the crane, it took 15 steps to go from a flat sheet to a finished bird.

This material is malleable enough to fold, but strong enough to retain its shape once the folding process is complete. Additionally, titanium hydride can be treated after folding to become pure metallic titanium. That way, a potential medical device could be folded into the desired shape, and then transformed into a substance that the body wouldn't reject.

The scientists have just begun to explore the implications of this technique, so it might be a while before a doctor actually uses a stent or implant created by folding titanium hydride. However, Japanese legend holds that if someone folds 1,000 origami cranes, a real crane will grant their wish. So all the researchers need to do is fabricate 999 more of these, and just wish for a practical application for this technology to arrive within a year. Easy!

For now, the robot only walks in straight lines, but Todo is working on future versions that automatically greets people and naturally avoids objects in its path. More than simply showing off his own amazing ingenuity, Todo hopes his robot serves as an inspiration to other Africans to pursue science, math, and engineering.

But, once again, don't take my word for it! In the video below, check out Todo's robot in action, and hear in his own words the inspirational power of his little bot.

[BotJunkie]

The device itself consists of a tank holding a mixture of harvested skin cells, stem cells, and nutrients, and a computer-controlled nozzle that places the cells exactly where they need to go. The spray works similar to a color printer, first spraying down a layer of fibroblast skin cells as a substrate, and then blasting on a layer of protective keratinocyte cells. Both sprays also contain a slurry of some undeveloped skin cells.

In initial tests on wounded lab mice, burns treated with the cell printer healed in two weeks, compared with the usual five weeks skin grafts take to heal. Additionally, the mice with the printed-on skin showed less scarring and more hair regeneration, as the sprayed-on stem cells better incorporated themselves into all the various cell types of the burned flesh.

Successful mouse tests have driven the Wake Forest scientists onward to tests with pigs, whose skin more closely resembles that of humans. After the tests with pigs conclude, the doctors can finally move on to human trials, and eventual FDA approval. Additionally, the Wake Forest team is working with the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine to utilize this technology on the battlefield, to print shut bullet wounds and blast damage.

[Reuters]

"In theory we can connect thousands of layers in a very straightforward fashion," Stan Williams, and scientist at HP, told the BBC. "It could provide a way of getting a ridiculous amount of memory on a chip."

Memristors improve on transistors in three key ways. First off, they allow the same device to serve as the processor and the memory. Right now, computers need separate devices for memory (such as solid state flash memory or regular magnetic hard drives) and processing (the computer chip itself). By eliminating the communication time and energy between those different parts of hardware, a memristor system would work far faster, and with far less energy, than a traditional computer.

Second, memristors can be much smaller than transistors. Quantum mechanics limits how tiny transistors can be, a limit that current technology is rapidly approaching. Memristors would allow computer chips to continue getting smaller past that point, all without resorting to exotic tricks like graphene chips or quantum computing.

Lastly, unlike transistors, which only work linearly, memristors can form three-dimensional networks. This added dimension exponentially expands the number of connections, and thus the power, of a memristor computer. In fact, the 3-D network capability of memristors is so profound that Leon Chua, the man who first theorized the existence of memristors in the 1971, believes that this technology could enable the creation of electronic brains. "We have the right stuff now to build real brains," he told the Times.

Hewlett Packard has already created a few simple devices that run on memristors as proof of concept, and they think that they can have the first working models capable of replacing some current computer parts within three years. However, with memristors enabling chip development for decades past where transistors would have hit their physical limit, the true value of this advance may not be realized for years to come.

[BBC News, and The New York Times]

As it stands now, the deal involves the leasing of Chinese bullet train technology to General Electric. GE claims that 80 percent of the train components would be manufactured in the US, with China providing the technical know how and the other 20 percent of parts. To build the parts, GE may convert a joint GE/Toyota plant in Fremont, California that's currently slated for closure.

In recent years, China has outpaced the US in high-speed rail technology, and has even begun to challenge early adopters like Europe and Japan. China has already built 4,000 miles of high-speed rail at home, and will add another 1,200 miles to its system this year. Like in other rail projects initiated by the China Government, China would foot the bill for a significant portion of the construction.

Naturally, the project is far from a done deal. California is also entertaining offers from Japan, Germany, South Korea, Spain, France and Italy, and China has yet to prove it can maintain its low costs and speed production times in countries with strict labor and environmental protection laws. However, with China also proposing to connect Beijing and London with bullet trains within the next ten years, already building similar bullet train systems in Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, and hoping to build similar high-speed rail routes to Germany, Iran, and the Czech Republic, China is poised to be the world's go-to manufacturer of futuristic trains.

[The New York Times]

The Fire Department christened their boat "the 343", after the number of firemen and paramedics who died on 9/11. The 343 is 140 feet long and weighs 500 tons, making it the largest fireboat in the world. The boat has a decontamination shower, pressurized cabins, and specially designed air filters that allow the crew to deal with dangerous chemical spills, a capability conspicuously lacking from the current fleet. The ship's hoses can spray 50,000 gallons of water per minute, which is the equivalent of 50 city fire trucks, and carries 3,600 gallons of fire-dousing foam. The 343 can make 18 knots (20 miles per hour), and costs $27 million.

Unlike the giant NYFD boat, the NYPD boat is only 45 feet long and built for speed, reaching 45 knots (52 mph) with their Rolls-Royce Kamewa water jet engines. The police's new craft will automatically right itself if capsized, allowing it to deploy farther out to sea than anything in the current fleet.

As highlighted by last year's plane crash in the Hudson river, patrolling a coastal archipelago like New York City means cops and firemen need to get wet. With these new boats, New York's finest will finally have the advanced tools they need to keep the City's island population safe now, and in the future.

[The New York Times, via Fast Company]

Is online delivery a viable future for inconvenient old paper mail?

In the program, the volunteers will have images of all their letters viewable on a computer or phone, and then optionally physically delivered later on. The postman will still arrive twice a week to deliver the scanned letters, as well as any packages. Additionally, the postal service will filter out junk mail for the volunteers, essentially adding a spam filter to physical mail.

Itella, the state-owned company that operates Finland's postal service, has vowed that employees will not read the letters, that all sorting and opening will occur in specially secured facilities, and that employees will sign strict confidentiality agreements. 126 families and 20 businesses have already signed up for the service, which will begin on April 12th.

Itella stresses this program is only an experiment designed to discover what types of snail-mail the Finnish people feel comfortable receiving in this fashion. However, despite the small size, experimental nature, and high security of the program, some Finish citizens have already begun drawing comparisons between Itella and Communist-regime security services.

A similar service, Earth Class Mail, already operates commercially in the US, and claims to serve tens of thousands of users. Whether Itella can replicate Earth Class Mail's success remains to be seen. But given the high level of technical savvy amongst the Finnish population, as well that citizenry's more robust trust in the responsibility of their government, Itella's scanning program may very well be the future of mail.

[Samaa]

Unlike most computer chips, which use transistors made of silicon, the NIST spray-on computer chip utilizes an organic semiconductor, called poly(3-hexylthiophene), or P3HT. By spraying the P3HT over a deposited circuit architecture of gold and silicon, the NIST team can lay down vast swaths of electronics quickly and cheaply.

The NIST scientists admit that translating this breakthrough into a concrete new technology will prove challenging. However, once the technique is perfected, it can result in very significant price drops for both solar panels and large display screens.

[Physorg.com]