Google

Google has chipped in a US$168 million investment in what will be the world's largest solar power tower plant. To be located on 3,600 acres of land in the Mojave Desert in southeastern California, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) will boast 173,000 heliostats that will concentrate the sun's rays onto a solar tower standing approximately 450 feet (137 m) tall. The plant commenced construction in October 2010 and is expected to generate 392 MW of solar energy following its projected completion in 2013. Read More

Last week, Google announced Gmail Motion, a system which promised motion control for the company's free webmail service using a computer's built-in webcam and some nifty spatial tracking technology. Using Gmail Motion users would be able to not only control Gmail actions but also compose emails using gestures that would be translated into common phrases. It was of course an April Fool's Day joke, but Evan A. Suma, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Southern California's (USC) Institute for Creative Technologies, immediately set to work in demonstrating that the technology to run such a system already exists. Read More

Last year Google announced plans to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the U.S. that will deliver Internet speeds of one gigabit per second (1 Gbps) via a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service. After receiving submissions from nearly 1,100 cities, the Internet giant has now revealed it will build its first ultra high-speed network in Kansas City, Kansas. Read More

Google has announced that its Nexus S Android smartphone will shortly be available on Sprint's WiMAX/4G network. The curvaceous device benefits from a Super AMOLED display that's said to offer an HD-like multimedia experience, Samsung's application processor, a couple of cameras and a decent helping of onboard memory. The Sprint deal comes with the added sweetener of Google Voice support, which holds the promise of using one number for numerous phones. Read More

One of the big advantages of driving fossil fuel-powered vehicles is that it's easy to find a place to fill up. In the more than a century since the world's first purpose-built gas station was built in St. Louis, Missouri in 1905, a massive worldwide infrastructure has emerged to keep our vehicles running. As automakers make the move to electric vehicles, early adopters are faced with a lack of infrastructure to keep batteries charged, however, the number of public EV charging stations is steadily growing and Google is now doing its bit to help make tracking them down easier by adding EV charging station location information to Google Maps. Read More

Google has announced a collaboration with 17 of the world’s most acclaimed art museums that lets people view over 1,000 high res artwork images and 17 "gigapixel" images while taking a virtual stroll through their galleries using “Street View” technology. While nothing can beat seeing a work of art in person, the Google Art Project could be the next best thing for those without the time and money to pop on a plane and trade elbows with crowds of tourists looking to catch a glimpse of what some of the best museums have on offer. Read More

Google doesn't have a lot of competition in the search world – it rose from obscurity in the late 1990s to its current position of utter dominance on the back of its clever results ranking algorithm; Google is the megalithic entity it is today, because for the last decade people have chosen its results over MSN, Yahoo and other search options. And now it seems Microsoft's new(ish) search competitor, Bing, is copying Google results in order to make its own search results better. In an embarrassing sting operation, Google claims it has proven that Bing is taking Google search results and displaying them as if they're coming from the Bing engine – and you'd have to imagine the guys at Google are absolutely delighted. Read More

You may have Facebook friends who have done the “Here are the top words from my Facebook status messages!” thing, where it lists the words they’ve most commonly used in telling the world about their lives. Interesting as that may or may not be, imagine something similar being done with four percent of all books ever published. That’s what a team of researchers from Harvard University, Google, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the American Heritage Dictionary have done. The resulting dataset is made up of the full text of about 5.2 million books, 72 percent of that text being in English, with French, German, Chinese, Russian, and Hebrew making up the rest. Analyzing that dataset, a practice that the researchers call “culturomics” (a play on genomics), has revealed some fascinating things about the history of our species. Read More

Google has answered the call of students of anatomy who would find something like the Autopsy Table or the Visualization Table a useful addition to the educational arsenal, but who can't afford the huge price tag. Although still very much in the experimental stage, the Body Browser allows users to slice through layers of skin and tissue of a three dimensional model of a human body using virtual knives, and explore the various systems that make us tick. Read More