The new line of LED lightbulbs being manufactured by Cree will hit stores in the US in the early Spring. While LED lighting is by no means new, these bulbs are among the first to combine a reasonable price with a substantial degree of light. This may be the first bulb to make LED lighting a legitimate alternative for homeowners, and early reviews seem positive.

There are a number of benefits to using LED lighting – they are the most energy efficient form of bulb, they are long-lasting, and use no toxic substances (for example mercury). LED lighting also has the advantage of attaining maximum brightness immediately, and emits light that is much more pleasing to the eye than that of fluorescent bulbs.

Thus far, LED purchasers have always had to choose between dropping $20-$30 on a bulb, and purchasing a light so dim it’s useless. These bulbs are affordable at under $10, and they are the equivalent of a 40W regular bulb. 60W equivalents are also available for just $3 more. Both bulbs provide a warm and pleasing glow that you are sure to enjoy.

Further advantages of LED lighting include their lower heat production – even after being left on for a while the bulbs are just warm, not hot. They do not produce any buzzing sound as is often the case with fluorescent lighting or odd smells as some other bulbs tend to produce. There is no filament in  LED lights, making these bulbs much more durable compared to incandescent bulbs. You won’t see energy star or the box yet – that’s still in the works, but these bulbs are super-efficient.

$10 a bulb may still be a little too much for many to consider replacing every light in your home, but this may be another stride forward in making LED lighting a more common household product.

When it comes to digital purchases, rights management is a hot topic. In order to prevent piracy, some products are designed to no longer function after certain conditions have been met – have you ever considered what this might result in if it was a practice not limited to just the digital world? A Swiss design team did, and made a chair that put the idea into practice. They designed the chair in such a way that it can only be used eight times. How did they go about this?

Their first idea was to have it literally self-destruct using gunpowder – not only did this not work well, but there was a genuine possibility of someone getting their backside blown off so they changed their method. The final result was a chair with wax joints filled with nichrome, a wire used in heating applications.

A warning system knocks to let you know how many sittings have been used each time a person stands up – it then counts down starting from eight, and after the final use the nichrome heats up. This melts the wax, and the chair falls apart in less than a minute – so don’t try to sneak in one last sitting, or you’ll end up sitting on the ground!

This chair was built for a competition involving creative deconstruction, but it also makes an interesting point about rights management – if companies tried to implement physical rights management to limit use and theft of their products, it would be costly to them and an outrage to the consumer.

The issues with the latest SimCity game show that digital rights management can also have detrimental effects by upsetting users and costing developers money, all the while damaging their reputation – this self-destructing chair makes a unique metaphor!

It’s happened to the best of us – sometimes we get careless with our technology and it ends up in the drink. Whether you’ve dropped your phone in the toilet, or spilled your glass on your tablet, here are some tips that may help you keep your gadgets working.

First of all, turn it off immediately. The liquid itself doesn’t fry your gadget – it’s shorting out you have to worry about, so getting the electric off as quick as possible is key to limiting damage. In fact, if you can get to the battery on your device, the best way to save it is to yank that battery right out as fast as you can. Don’t try to turn it back on – that’s pretty much the worst thing you can do to a wet gadget!

Secondly, you need to get all the components to dry thoroughly, and the best way to do that is to disassemble them. Take everything that is supposed to come off of your device apart from the casing to the SIM card, and leave it all apart to dry.

Now it’s time to help the drying process along – if you have a tiny vacuum for your electronics, you can use that to suck up any excess moisture. Could you use your mouth in lieu of a vacuum? Of course, but I wouldn’t recommend it if your item fell down the toilet – it’s more of a soda spill remedy!

After that, it’s time to leave it to dry. Want to dry everything out faster? You can put your item in a bowl of rice – you’ll recall that a cup of rice soaks up over a cup of water while cooking. You know what’s even faster? Crisped rice cereal – it will soak up water just like milk. You may even hear the popping sound as it works its magic. This is about a two day long process, so fight the temptation to rush it. Now it’s time to see if your patience has paid off – reassemble everything and give it a try. Hopefully you will have saved your device.

Are there any other methods out there? Once a roommate of mine dropped his phone in a bucket of soapy water – my brother recommended soaking it in rubbing alcohol over 90% in volume. Alcohol doesn’t conduct electricity like water does and isn’t as corrosive, so it shouldn’t cause any additional damage, especially since you’ve hopefully yanked the battery out immediately.

In the meantime, it will suck up all the water (imagine the hangover your phone would have!) – don’t leave it in the alcohol for too long or you may strip the coating off of your device. Then give it time to dry (the alcohol could still do a little damage). This might work like it did for my roommate, but it isn’t such a good option for your device itself.

Don’t use anything with heat on your device or you will damage the components -that’s why your device has an auto-shutoff if it gets too warm. You may stop the water damage but cause other damage that will still render the device useless. Also, don’t shake your device to dry it – it won’t get the water out any faster, and it may move it into parts of the device that are tougher to dry.

Researchers recently set a new precedent in the computer science community by using a supercomputer to determine the noise output of a jet engine traveling at supersonic speeds. This unique computer harnesses the power of over 1.5 million processors, and not only did the research performed garner important data that will help engineers make less noisy aircraft engines, but it also demonstrated the incredible possibilities of using million plus core computers to create fluid modules.

During takeoff and landing, high powered aircraft produce more noise than just about any other man-made source. This makes hearing damage a real threat for ground crews, even if they are wearing state-of-the-art hearing protection devices. Furthermore, such noise pollution also affects property value in surrounding communities, and is aggravating to those who have to deal with it on a regular basis.

It therefore stands to reason that engineers are concerned with quieting these engines, and one method they are looking into is the shape of the nozzles. To help with this, computers are being used to simulate the noise production of various designs. Computers with thousands upon thousands of cores break down computation into smaller amounts, in order to allow different parts of the simulation to be worked on simultaneously, resulting in faster data production.

So why not just jump straight to millions of cores and get the job done even faster? Unfortunately, at some point the number of processors starts to present other issues that actually slow things down. That’s why this latest research was so important – not just to engineers but to computer scientists too.

As with other massive supercomputers, this one has been dubbed with a name – Sequoia. Once the premier supercomputer in the world, this IBM machine earned its name from the massive redwood trees of California – now it is being used to study jet noise and other propulsion systems.

Security in cloud computing has become a hot topic, after a number of banks across the United Sates have become victims of hacking. The project of shoring up these defenses is being handled by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is a division of the DoD.

Another project DARPA has been a part of is the development of a means to make identity online more secure. Passwords are convenient, but have never really been a foolproof form of security – DARPA’s initiative involves trying to come up with a way for a computer to identify its user by his or her overall behavior.  As if that wasn’t a large enough monster to slay, they are now trying to tackle cloud computing issues.

The problem with cloud security is the number of clients that are involved – the security of the whole system is at the mercy of the least secure client, and this changes how the defenses need to be approached. Before, the idea had always been to build up a wall around data that needs to be secured – that was great until we moved the data to the cloud, where is can be accessed from so many different directions. Hackers just hop over or break through the shortest or weakest wall.

DARPA is hoping to implement a sort of community watch program in which security becomes a team effort – clients look after each other and lend defensive resources to one another to ward off attacks against weaker clients. The issue then however becomes about the protection of data from two groups – we don’t want to let hackers get into the community, but when security is being shared there needs to be a means of securing data from other cloud clients as well.

As the web becomes more interconnected, it is becoming more and more vital to see the Internet as its own world, and cloud computing as a series of individual systems operating within that world. This means that just as we all need to work together to protect the planet and individual communities therein, we also need to work together to protect ourselves online.