Information Technology

Halloween weather has tricked, not treated, airport meteorologists the past two years in Denver. Heavy freezing drizzle–appearing to be harmless light drizzle–has cost airlines as much as $2 million in engine damage in a single storm as jets have waited for takeoff. Now Roy Rasmussen of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has developed a new system to identify the drizzle accurately. His research has enabled airlines to revise pilot training and on-ground procedures to avoid fu

Multi-rate, ultra-short laser pulses — with wave forms shaped like dolphin chirps — offer a new approach to help optical wireless signals penetrate clouds, fog and other adverse weather conditions, say Penn State engineers.

The new approach could help bring optical bandwidth, capable of carrying huge amounts of information, to applications ranging from wireless communication between air and ground vehicles on the battlefield to short links between college campus buildings to met

The Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a real-time magnetic imaging system that enables criminal investigators to “see” signs of tampering in audiotapes—erasing, overdubbing and other alterations—while listening to the tapes. The new system,which permits faster screening and more accurate audiotape analysis than currently possible, recently was delivered to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and will be evaluated for its poss

Toll-free telephone numbers benefit everyone. It costs callers nothing to use them and organisations paying for the lines attract more callers. Recent trials in Europe suggest this same win-win concept could be successfully used with the mobile Internet.

Surfing the Internet is easy with a third-generation (2.5/3G) mobile phone. But these miracles of wireless technology are nowhere near as popular as expected. Perhaps because their users pay for every byte of data they receive,

Surfing the Web could become a much more effective experience thanks to new approaches endorsed at this year’s ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) Hypertext Conference.

In its current state, the commonly used link in a Web page allows people to search the Web and to use hyperlinks to jump from one page to another. The down side is that when people click links, pages load on top of one another and unless they can recall the route taken, it is easy to lose much of the conten

Physical browsing is a new method for providing direct access to services without the use of complicated menus or inputting long addresses; all the user needs to do is touch an object with a mobile terminal (such as a mobile phone) or point the terminal at the object. A child can call ‘Granny’ by pointing a mobile phone at the grandmother’s photo; a teenager can order a new ringing tone by placing the phone on the tone in a newspaper advertisement; a door can be opened by touching it with a mobil