How to Format a Hard Drive With Windows XP

If you want to format a hard drive while using or installing Windows XP, you've come to the right place. This can be very useful for clearing everything off a secondary drive or when installing a fresh copy of Windows. Formatting a computer hard drive is simple and can help eliminate viruses, storage issues and other hard-to-resolve problems.

Instructions

Step 1: When you format a computer hard drive you will lose everything that is on the drive. Therefore, it is very important to back up anything you might want later. Additionally, if you are going to be formatting and installing XP you need to make sure you have the discs for any applications or third party hardware you use since you will need to re-install your programs and drivers after re-installing Windows.

Step 2: Take a moment to think of anything that you have on the computer that you wouldn't want to lose. Generally, you probably want everything in your My Documents folder, and you also want to save things like your favorites or bookmarks from your Web browser. Remember that each user on the computer has his or her own My Documents folder, Desktop items and Favorites/Bookmarks.

Step 3: Save everything to a CD, DVD or a hard drive that you won't be formatting.

Formatting a Secondary Hard Drive


Step 1: Right-Click on the "My Computer" icon either on your desktop or in the Start Menu and select "Manage."

Step 2: A new window titled "Computer Management" comes up. Select "Storage" from the left hand side by clicking it once, then select "Disk Management(local)" from the right side by double-clicking it.

Step 3: Now in the lower part of the main frame (right side) of the window you should see a nice visual of all your hard drives. Each line is a different drive. Each box on a line (with a colored bar at the top and a size displayed in MB or GB) is a partition on the drive. Partitions are separations of space on a drive. Unless you are doing something specific that requires multiple partitions, you only want one partition per drive.

Step 4: First you must delete any existing partitions on the drive you are going to format. Do this by right-clicking on the partition's box and selecting "Delete Partition..." Since you already know that you will be deleting everything on the drive, and have already backed everything up, you can safely say yes to any warning the computer presents you with.

Step 5: If there are multiple partitions make sure you have saved everything off them since they might each have different drive letters (i.e. "D:" or "F:"). Then repeat the above step for each of them. If you only want to format one partition that is OK and you can continue to the next step without deleting the other partitions.

Step 6: The box for the drive to be formatted should now have a black bar at the top of it and should say "Unallocated" under its size (see picture). Right click on it and select "New Partition..." The New Partition Wizard comes up.

Step 7: In the New Partition Wizard click next. On the next page make sure "Primary Partition" is selected and click next. Now make the size equal to the maximum (it should already be set to it), and click next again. On the next page the computer will automatically choose the first available drive letter for the new drive. However, if you like you can choose another drive letter from the drop-down menu, and then click next.

Step 8: Finally the New Partition Wizard asks if you would like to format the new partition and if so what format. Choose "NTFS" as it is faster and more secure. Leave the "Allocation unit size" as "Default." In the "Volume label" field enter whatever name you want the drive to have. Simple is better. Avoid using spaces. Lastly, if the drive is brand new and has never been used before check the "Perform a quick format" box. If the drive has been used before leave this box unchecked. Leave the "Enable file and folder compression" box unchecked and click next. Then on the next page click finish.

Step 9: The wizard will now spend a little while formatting the drive. On old or large drives this may take a while. Do not close the "Computer Management" window until it finishes. You will know it is done when the word under the size of the drive changes from "Formatting" to "Healthy" and the name and drive letter you chose for the new drive show up. After it is finished you can proceed to use your newly formatted drive.

Formatting and Installing from the Windows XP CD

Step 1: This section explains how to reformat a drive from the Windows XP installation CD. This can be used when installing a fresh copy of Windows onto a computer. Here it is especially important to backup all of your important information because upon formatting you will lose EVERYTHING that used to be on the drive. This includes all applications and device drivers, so you must back up everything you can.

Step 2: Insert your Windows XP installation disc into your CD drive (Home or Pro--it does not matter).

Step 3: Now as you computer boots a little more it will say "Press any key to boot from CD.." press a key to do so.

Step 4: The CD will load up a blue screen and then spend a while loading files it needs. When it is finished it will list a few options, mainly "Press ENTER to set up Windows XP." Press Enter or Return.

Step 5: Now you will be at a screen to select where to install Windows to. This is where you can delete old partitions and format drives. The box in the bottom half of the screen shows all your drives and the partitions that exist on them. Use the Up and Down arrow keys to highlight your "C:" partition and press the 'D' key (if all that shows up is "Unpartitioned space" and you have no C: or D: partitions, skip this step). On the next screen press the 'L' key to finalize deleting the partition.

Step 6: Now you are back on the screen to choose where to install Windows. The box on the lower half of the screen should no longer show a partition but simply have an entry "Unpartitioned space xxxxxMB." Select this with the arrow keys and press the 'C' key to create a partition on the drive. The next screen tells you the minimum and maximum sizes the partition can be and lets you pick the size. The default size is the maximum, but double check that the number entered is the maximum and hit enter.

Step 7: Now you will again be back at the choose where to install Windows screen. But this time you will have a partition that looks something like this "C: Partition1 [New (Raw)]xxxxxxMB." Highlight this entry and press enter.

Step 8: The next screen lets you choose which file system to format the drive with. Choose NTFS as it is faster and more secure. If the drive is brand new and has never been used before then use one of the options that ends in "(Quick)." Or, choose one of the lower down options. Use the arrow keys to select the proper one and press Enter or Return.

Step 9: From here you are all set and the installation of Windows will proceed starting with a format of your drive. This will take a while (over half an hour) so you can take a little break.

Tips & Warnings

YOU MUST BACKUP BEFORE FORMATTING OR YOU WILL LOSE DATA YOU NEED.

How to Make Custom iPhone Ringtones for Free

So you bought an iPhone. You love the phone and all its features, but wish you didn't have to pay for your songs twice to get a ringtone. There are plenty of songs in your music library, but no way to make ringtones from any of them. Or is there? Actually, with a little bit of trickery (nothing illegal), you can create ringtones from any one of your non-DRM songs in your iTunes library easily and for free. This works on both Mac and Windows PCs.

*Please note: There may be differences among all the possible combinations of iTunes versions and operating system versions (see Tips for a way to work around the syncing issues).

Things You'll Need:
•iTunes
•Mac or Windows computer
•Non-DRM song (i.e., one not bought from the iTune`s Store).

Instructions

Step 1: Open iTunes.

Step 2: Find the song that you want to make into a ringtone.

Step 3: Listen to the song and find the part of it you want to use. The chorus may be a good place to start.

Step 4: Write down the start and stop times of the clip.

Step 5: Right-click the song and select "Get Info."

Step 6: Click the "Options" tab.

Step 7: Type in the start time of your ringtone in the text box next to "Start Time" in the minutes:seconds (i.e., 2:01) format.

Step 8:

Type in the end time of your ringtone in the text box next to "Stop Time." Make sure the ringtone is no more than 40 seconds long.

Step 9: Click "OK."

Step 10: Right-click your song again and select "Convert Selection to AAC." Wait for iTunes to convert your song. It will create a duplicate version.

Step 11: Right-click the ringtone and select "Delete."

Step 12: Click on the "Keep Files" button.

Step 13: Find the file. It's usually in your User folder under "Music > iTunes > iTunes Music" and under the band's name. It will have an extension of m4a.

Step 14: Replace the m4a extension of your ringtone with m4r. You can either double-click slowly to rename your file, or right-click and select "Get Info" on a Mac or "Rename" on a Windows PC.

Step 15: Click "Use .m4r" or the PC equivalent when the system warns you that the change may affect the use of your file.

Step 16: Double-click the ringtone file. ITunes will automatically add it to your ringtones folder in your iTunes Music Library.

Step 17: Connect your iPhone and sync your ringtones.

Researchers Achieve Quantum Teleportation Over 10 Miles of Empty Space

Scientists in China have broken the record for quantum teleportation, achieving a distance of about 10 miles, according to a new study in Nature Photonics. That's a giant leap from previous achievements.

The feat brings us closer to communicating information without needing a traditional signal transmission.

Although it's called teleportation, no matter is really moved. Rather, the quantum state of one object is transferred to another object.

It works by entangling two objects, like photons or ions. The first teleportation experiments involved beams of light. Once the objects are entangled, they're connected by an invisible wave, like a thread or umbilical cord. That means when something is done to one object, it immediately happens to the other object, too. Einstein called this "spooky action at a distance."

Until now, this has only been achieved with particles that are at most a couple hundred feet apart. And those distances have been accomplished with fiber channels, which help preserve the photons' state.

In the latest experiment, researchers entangled two photons and zapped the higher-energy one through a special 10-mile-long free-space tunnel, instead of a fiber one. The distant photon was still able to respond to the changes in state of the photon left behind, an unprecedented achievement.

It worked because the team "maximally entangled" the photons, using spatial and polarization modes, according to Ars Technica. About 89 percent of the information was maintained, also an improvement over previous experiments.

The work was done at the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale and the Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei.

Though a 10-mile teleportation is impressive, there's still a long way to go before information can safely be sent this way. Photons are good at transmitting information, but ions are better at allowing manipulation, which would be necessary for encryption.

You Built What?! A Real Iron Man Suit

A Real Iron Man The material Le used for the armor is thin but takes stress well. “You can throw it against the wall, and it won’t even be damaged,” he says.
Anthony Le, 25, has been a fan of Iron Man since he was a kid, but when he heard that the comic-book superhero was hitting the big screen in 2008, he was inspired to build his own Iron Man suit. That version was more of a costume, but his new one, finished just in time for the movie’s sequel, edges much closer to the real thing. With its dent-proof exterior, motorized faceplate and spinning mock Gatling gun, his take on the movie’s War Machine suit could easily frighten a supervillain.

Le, a fitness consultant, studied some concept sketches of the suit posted on the Internet. He used thin, high-impact urethane for the armor, cutting it into plates and joining them with some 1,500 rivets and washers. He sculpted a clay helmet mold and then used a liquid resin mix to create the final product. But that was just cosmetic work. He also added a small servo motor that opens the faceplate, as in the movie, and built a gun out of pipes and a motor. LEDs in the eyes and chest-plate further add to the illusion.

Le plans to wear the suit to the movie and already has quite a following, especially at sci-fi conventions. “I’m kind of hard to miss,” he says.

How It Works
Time: 1 Month
Cost: $4,000+

WEAPONRY
Le built a replica of the machine gun on the suit’s shoulder out of PVC pipes and other materials. He added a small motor and belt drive to make the cylindrical gun spin like the real thing. To activate it, he presses a button in the palm of the suit’s glove. He says the gun could also be converted into a paintball shooter.

POWER
Le built an LED-based replica of Iron Man alter ego Tony Stark’s arc reactor for the chest, but unlike the movie version, it doesn’t actually power the suit. Instead, all the LEDs and the motors that drive the gun and the faceplate have their own batteries hidden within the suit’s large frame.

CONTROLS
Inside the chestplate, Le added a hands-free button that activates the helmet. When the faceplate is open, he just stands up and points his arm forward, causing his chest to press against the button, triggering the servo motors in the helmet to close the mask. This, in turn, switches on the red LEDs set inside the eye openings, which are large enough for him to also see out of. To open the mask up again, he presses another button.

BACKUP
Le says he focused on the War Machine suit, donned by Stark’s buddy Jim Rhodes in Iron Man 2, in part because “it just looks more hardcore.” But he also built a new-and-improved replica of the suit that Iron Man himself wears in the film, the Mark VI. That version also has the LEDs and motorized faceplate but, alas, no cannon.

Largest-Ever Study On Cancer and Cellphones Finds "No Increase in Risk"

But the long-term effects of prolonged cellphone use require further study—and will spark fresh controversy.

I was particularly interested in learning about the Interphone project, a collection of 13 different national studies coordinated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the World Health Organization.

Interphone is the largest completed analysis to date of brain tumor (glioma and meningioma) risk in relation to mobile phone use. When I was writing my piece, none of the scientists I interviewed could or would say much about the study, since it had yet to be published. So not much about Interphone ended up in my story. But when I asked one source familiar with the study’s progress what we would learn once the results appeared, this person said: “We’ll learn how to do better studies.”

Well, the Interphone study has finally appeared and, unfortunately, my source was right.

The paper, published this week in the International Journal of Epidemiology, concludes: “Overall, no increase in risk of either glioma or meningioma was observed in association with use of mobile phones. There were suggestions of an increased risk of glioma, and much less so meningioma, at the highest exposure levels … However, biases and errors limit the strength of the conclusions we can draw from these analyses and prevent a causal interpretation.”

This result is in line with the majority of other published studies, which also observed no increased risk of brain tumors in association with cell phone radiation and cite biases and errors in those studies that do show a correlation. But the publication of the Interphone results does not address the two main concerns of those who believe cell phone radiation may have an impact on human health: namely, that the effect of long-term exposure, especially on children, is still unknown and that brain tumor rates alone are not the proper metric by which to measure risk.

Methodological failings—especially recall bias; i.e. people incorrectly remembering past cell phone use—have long plagued research on this topic. The Interphone authors once again cite bias as preventing any firm conclusions about the effects of long-term use: “The possible effects of long-term heavy use of mobile phones on risk of brain tumors require further investigation,” the paper states, “given increasing mobile phone use, its extension to children and its penetration world-wide.” To that end, the IARC will carry out a comprehensive review of all published epidemiological and experimental evidence and the European Union will fund MobiKids to investigate the risk of brain tumors in childhood and adolescence.

Studies like Interphone and MobiKids take a long time to conduct and, of course, by the time they are finished the technology has already moved on, which raises doubts about the usefulness of the results. Since Interphone was launched, for example, cell phone usage has increased dramatically but radiation levels from cell phones have decreased.

Plus, the scientists who believe there could be a risk from cell phone radiation believe that risk could involve the immune system as a whole rather than a direct cause-and-effect relationship between radiation and brain tumors. So many of these scientists suspect studies like Interphone don’t give the full picture.

One thing is clear, though: After Interphone, opinion will be just as polarized and passions will run just as high as before Interphone.

Many people ridiculed the very idea of risk from cell phone radiation, and accused Per Segerbäck, a Swedish former telecoms engineer who suffers from electro-hypersensitivity (EHS) and whom I profiled in the piece, of inventing his condition. Several EHS sufferers wrote back, explaining their condition and citing studies that suggest it’s real.

Segerbäck’s daughter even responded with a comment of her own: “Maybe you never heard anyone say anything bad about your dad, but … reading you comments made me cry … I'm sorry if you don’t understand the illness, but I promise you that a lot of people has it. But please do not think that he is just making this up. That breaks my heart.”

I do not believe Segerbäck invented his condition, but I am not able to cite a study that provides a scientific explanation for it either. There is evidence to suggest possible mechanisms for a health effect from cell phone radiation; these are outlined in my story. None of the scientists who did this research and whom I interviewed for my story said their work ‘proved’ that cell phones have an impact on human health. They all did say, however, that the evidence merited further research—which is exactly what the IARC is saying.

Research into the potential health effects, if any, of cell phone radiation is so hotly contested in part because the technology is relatively young, but also because the research itself is so difficult to carry out.

I don’t know if cell phone radiation has an effect on human health, but I do know it’s not good science to dismiss the unproven as impossible. In fact, we could do a lot worse than to take Segerbäck’s own advice: “Be careful, weigh the evidence, and make your own decision".

Hacking the 21st-Century Auto

Today’s cars may seem too sophisticated for tinkering, but the DIY auto movement is thriving, yielding designs and innovations too radical for mass production. Here are four awesome examples of modern garage-guy ingenuity.

1. Manufacturing and Design
The Rally Fighter from start-up Local Motors is a burly, menacing vehicle no major manufacturer would ever include in its standard lineup. With its 33-inch tires, 20 inches of suspension travel and rugged inner skeleton, the street-legal desert racer is too niche for mass production. But Local Motors knows that this beast is exactly what a small subset of buyers wants. How? Those buyers designed it.

The company was co-founded in 2007 by former Marine and Harvard Business School graduate Jay Rogers on the notion of combining the crowd-sourcing and DIY movements with staid auto manufacturing. Amateurs and professionals submit designs to Local Motors’s Web site, and users vote on the winners in a monthly contest. If, among other factors, a vehicle generates enough buzz that the company thinks it could sell at least 500 of them, the engineers fine-tune the design to make it feasible. Then Local Motors sets up a micro-factory—think automotive plant meets semi-pro DIY garage—where buyers build the car themselves under guidance from the company’s instructors for an estimated $50,000. “We’re not trying to make cars for soccer moms,” Rogers says. “We’re trying to make cars for people who are really deeply interested in automotives. Local Motors can bring these low-volume, highly desirable vehicles to market.”

The Rally Fighter is the first to move from the site to the street. Local Motors has 77 orders for the car so far, and it plans to build them, appropriately, in the desert: Phoenix, Arizona. Contest winners have also included a Miami Roadster for speed lovers (which would be built in Miami) and a hydrogen vehicle designed for San Francisco.

Before builders show up, they will watch an instructional DVD at home: basic pre-training for the less handy. “They need to know the difference between a socket wrench and an Allen wrench,” Rogers says. Next, the customer will come in with up to two “build partners” for consecutive three-day weekends of work—roughly 60 hours in total. At the start, their Rally Fighter will simply be a welded chassis waiting for parts (pre-molded body panels will also be ready, but unmounted). Up to four groups of customers can be overseen by a single builder/trainer. Rogers describes these Local Motors employees as a mix of teacher, engineer and garage buddy—as he puts it, “personable folks who love sharing knowledge about cars.”

Customers get a set of tools and start assembling: front and rear axle and suspension first, then fuel tank and filler neck, the brake and accelerator pedals, the master brake cylinder and the brake lines. The builder/trainer monitors each step, making sure that the work is done properly, but he steps in only when necessary. Rogers says the work won’t require master-mechanic expertise. Customers will prep the engine—possibly a clean-diesel from either BMW or Mercedes—mount the engine, transmission and driveshaft, and install the radiator, hoses and fans. And this is just the halfway point. The Local Motors engineers will do some higher-skill work in the days between each customer’s session, and the next weekend will be a blur of finishing touches, including doors, wheels and tires, and setting the vehicle ride height and other adjustments. At the end of it all, the customer drives out in his very own desert racer. (The cars will be street-legal, but because they’re considered custom vehicles, they won’t need to pass National Highway Traffic Safety Administration crash tests.)

For someone like Jay Zuppardo, who has Rally Fighter No. 30 reserved, this sounds more like fun than work. He can’t wait to get inside the micro-factory and prep his Fighter for the desert. “I could go buy a Jeep or an FJ Cruiser, but it’s not going to do what the Rally Fighter is designed to do. I want that car,” he says, “and I want to get involved in what it takes to shove it down the line.”



Customers get a set of tools and start assembling: front and rear axle and suspension first, then fuel tank and filler neck, the brake and accelerator pedals, the master brake cylinder and the brake lines. The builder/trainer monitors each step, making sure that the work is done properly, but he steps in only when necessary. Rogers says the work won’t require master-mechanic expertise. Customers will prep the engine—possibly a clean-diesel from either BMW or Mercedes—mount the engine, transmission and driveshaft, and install the radiator, hoses and fans. And this is just the halfway point. The Local Motors engineers will do some higher-skill work in the days between each customer’s session, and the next weekend will be a blur of finishing touches, including doors, wheels and tires, and setting the vehicle ride height and other adjustments. At the end of it all, the customer drives out in his very own desert racer. (The cars will be street-legal, but because they’re considered custom vehicles, they won’t need to pass National Highway Traffic Safety Administration crash tests.)

For someone like Jay Zuppardo, who has Rally Fighter No. 30 reserved, this sounds more like fun than work. He can’t wait to get inside the micro-factory and prep his Fighter for the desert. “I could go buy a Jeep or an FJ Cruiser, but it’s not going to do what the Rally Fighter is designed to do. I want that car,” he says, “and I want to get involved in what it takes to shove it down the line.”



2. Efficiency
RETRO-ELECTRIC
Three years ago, rock legend Neil Young drove his 1959 Lincoln Continental to the shop of Wichita, Kansas–based super-mechanic Johnathan Goodwin and asked him to turn it into a hybrid. Goodwin had already made a name for himself by converting Hummers and other trucks (including Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Jeep) to biodiesel and boosting fuel economy from 12 to around 25 miles per gallon. The result of that meeting, the Lincvolt, should be on the road this summer. (Young recently dedicated an album, “Fork in the Road,” to his new love.) A 150-kilowatt electric motor, powered by lithium-ion batteries, pushes the three-ton Lincoln down the road. But the real heart of the car is an engine under the hood that can run on biodiesel, diesel, ethanol or other fuels. When the batteries run low, that generator recharges them on the fly, so there’s no need to pull over and plug in. Goodwin estimates that the car will exceed 70

mpg.



3. Power
GREEN, SHMEAN
Adding horsepower to a modern computer-controlled car isn’t really a home-garage job anymore—today’s tuners have to be hackers. That’s where shops like Heffner Performance come in. Among other mods, the Sarasota, Florida, company alters customers’ cars to add more power. A recent project is a souped-up Audi R8. At 420 horsepower, the factory model falls a little short, according to company president Jason Heffner, so he and his team added twin turbos that boost horsepower to 625. “The trickiest part was sorting out the electronics,” he says. Ten years ago, he explains, the engine controller just ran the engine, but now the airbags, brakes, traction-control systems—they all communicate with one another. When you modify the engine, Heffner says, “all the aspects of the car need to work hand in hand.”




4. Intelligence
iCAR
Stealing Australian Jonathan Oxer’s 2004 Mazda RX-8 would freak out any thief. That’s because Oxer can turn the engine on and off, lock and unlock the doors, check the car’s performance, and use GPS to track its progress on a Google map, all from a Web browser on a computer or smartphone. Oxer began his 18-month-long effort to boost his car’s intelligence because he hadn’t seen anyone else build a car-puter accessible 24/7, from anywhere in the world. He mounted a stripped-down computer in the trunk, ran USB cables through the car to connect the computer to the diagnostics system, soldered another connection to the stereo’s circuit board, and added 3G mobile broadband, which gave him online access and turned the car into a hotspot. Now he’s swapping the computer for a power-sipping microcontroller that should run for weeks and recharge when the car is running.

Coming Soon: a Synthetic Brain Built from Tens of Thousands of Smartphone Chips

If you like to think of the processor running your smartphone as the nerve center of your device, wait until you see what Steve Furber's got in mind. The computer engineer, probably best known for his work on the BBC Micro and ARM microprocessors, has begun construction of a 1-billion-neuron simulated brain made from thousands of the widely available chips used most commonly in e-book readers and smartphones.

While other brain sims, like IBM's Blue Brain, use high-powered supercomputers to mimic the computing power of the human brain, Furber thinks that if we really want to recreate the brain synthetically, we need a more practical, affordable, low-power approach.

As such, he's building Spinnaker -- for Spiking Neural Network Architecture -- out of a chip that flopped as a follow-up to the BBC Microcomputer but that is now used in all kinds of mobile devices. A Taiwanese firm is churning out the chips, each of which will contain 20 ARM processing cores, each of which can model 1,000 neurons. By that math, Spinnaker needs 50,000 total chips at minimum to reach the 1-billion-neuron goal.

While Furber and company wait in Manchester, UK, for the chips to begin arriving, they've cobbled together a pared-down, 50-neuron version for testing. That model can already control a Pac-Man-like video game, and Furber's first goal once he gets working on the real deal is to teach Spinnaker to control a robotic arm. This, of course, is a precursor to his teaching it the full range of tasks required to control a humanoid body.

Coaxing a non-brain into acting like a real brain is no small task, but Furber is eager to get started on the teaching phase. He aims to have a 10,000-chip version working -- and learning -- before the end of this year.

Cheap New Metal Catalyst Can Split Hydrogen Gas From Water at a Fraction of the Cost

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it can be difficult and costly to get at the raw gaseous stuff, at least in the kind of commercial volumes that could sustainably fuel a hydrogen economy. But researchers at the DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have made a substantial leap toward a hydrogen-based future by devising a cheap, metal catalyst that can split hydrogen gas from water.

The ability to pull apart H2O molecules into their constituent atoms is, of course, the key to creating a hydrogen-based energy economy. If we can do so in a cheap and energy efficient manner, we could potentially turn Earth's vast supply of water into our own vast supply of cheap, clean power.


But most hydrogen gas on earth comes packaged as natural gas -- a carbon-based fuel -- or packed into water, which can be split into oxygen and hydrogen through a process called electrolysis. Electrolysis requires a good deal of electricity, but if renewable fuels generate that power the process can be carbon neutral. What it can't be is cheap; electrolysis requires a catalyst to split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas, the most common of which is platinum, which retails at some $2,000 per ounce.

Seeking to drive the cost of electrolysis down to more reasonable levels, the Berkeley Lab team devised a high-valence metal they're calling Mo-oxo for molybdenum-oxo (PY5Me2, for you chem. geeks out there). The catalyst requires no additional organic additives or solvents, can operate in neutral water (even if it's dirty) and works with sea water -- meaning we could literally be looking at oceans of cheap energy. Best of all: Mo-oxo is about 70 times cheaper than platinum.

Don't expect to see Mo-oxo splitting seawater into large volumes of hydrogen gas right away. The research is still preliminary and the Berkeley team is just getting into some of the more exciting chemistry. They're looking for additional similar metals that might generate hydrogen gas at even higher efficiency, so by the time this kind of tech is commercialized we may have found an even better catalyst. In the meantime, Mo-oxo marks a sort of corner-turning for water electrolysis. Any great shift to non-carbon fuels is ultimately going to be driven by economics, and finding less expensive ways to generate hydrogen gas is integral to kicking off that sea change.

Brain Scan Dismissed by Brooklyn Judge as Court Evidence

Caution has prevailed in a Brooklyn judge's ruling that refused to admit brain scan evidence in an employer-retaliation case. But advocates of using brain scans as high-tech lie detectors will get another shot in an upcoming federal case in Tennessee, Wired reports.

The brain scans of a witness did not even undergo the typical hearing that determines admissible scientific evidence in New York state court. Instead, the judge agreed with the defense attorney that human juries, not fMRI machines, have the duty to determine if they think a witness is telling the truth.

That should be some comfort to some neuroscientists who have criticized what they see as the overselling of functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) and other brain scan technologies. Even companies marketing fMRI lie detectors, such as No Lie MRI in California and Cephos in Massachusetts, have only reported accuracy rates from 75 to 98 percent.

But the court drama is just warming up for brain scans, because Wired notes that a court in the western district of Tennessee will soon hear arguments about possible use of fMRI evidence in a federal case.

That new scenario involves a U.S. attorney charging a psychiatrist with seeking to defraud Medicare and Medicaid in his contracting and billing. The good (?) mind doctor has accordingly submitted to a brain scan to prove he had no intention of defrauding the government. We're sure that Law & Order has already covered this scenario -- but if not, expect to see that parade across your TV screens in the near future.