This month, Boeing was granted a patent for generating force fields that keep shockwaves from harming military vehicles. The Boeing Company's patent, "Method and system for shockwave attenuation via electromagnetic arc," was filed in May 2012.

"The idea is to harness electrical energy to stop or slow down the shockwaves created by explosions, which can do just as much damage as shrapnel." Boeing's plan would be to "marry a rapid explosion sensor with an arc generator to protect targets like military vehicles." Laser sources send out high-intensity laser pulses in the direction of the explosion. The laser pulses ionize the air to form a laser-induced plasma channel." The channel differs from the ambient air in density, temperature and composition. The result would be a buffer zone- different temperature, air density and other characteristics would reflect, refract, absorb and deflect at least a portion of the shockwave.

So much for browser security. Researchers who participated in the Pwn2Own hacking contest this week demonstrated remote code execution exploits against the top four browsers, and also hacked the widely used Adobe Reader and Flash Player plug-ins. The Pwn2Own contest takes place every year at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, Canada, and is sponsored by Hewlett-Packard's Zero Day Initiative program. The contest pits researchers against the latest 64-bit versions of the top four browsers in order to demonstrate Web-based attacks that can execute rogue code on underlying systems.

The final count for vulnerabilities exploited this year stands as follows: five flaws in the Windows OS, four in Internet Explorer 11, three each in Mozilla Firefox, Adobe Reader, and Flash Player, two in Apple Safari and one in Google Chrome. All bugs were reported to the affected vendors after the contest, as part of the competition's rules.

"Mars One" is the hole-in-the-wall company getting mainstream press coverage for promoting unbelievable and non-doable plans to colonize Mars by 2025. Scientists and astronomers are saying that the plan is delusional, laughable, dangerous and a huge scam. Mars One has not developed any kind of space technology that will allow the outer space travel to occur. There were no proven contracts with other companies that provide space equipment. All the people behind Mars One are just a bunch of scammers.

Last February, Mars One producers announced the final 100 finalists to be among the first six humans to live on Mars. They falsified the claims that they received more than 200,000 applicants for the contest. Roche claims that only 2,761 individuals were interested. All finalists were supposedly to undergo a few weeks of interviews and testing, but it turns out that finalists were only interviewed for 10 minutes via Skype call. They were even asked to donate to Mars One any money they earn from guest appearances. An unbelievable statement because the project was said to have cost the company 'billions of dollars'. Why would they need those small donations?

NASA and Bigelow Aerospace are preparing to launch an expandable habitat module dubbed "BEAM" to the International Space Station later this year. The 13 foot by 10 foot inflatable capsule will provide astronauts aboard the space station an extra 565 cubic feet of volume (roughly equivalent to a family-sized camping tent) that the astronauts will use for a lounge and also as a testing facility in orbit.

By choosing fabrics over metal, the BEAM module is significantly cheaper to send into orbit than a typical capsule. Expandable habitats could be a new way to dramatically increase the amount of volume available to astronauts while also enhancing protection against radiation and physical debris. In order to stay inflated, the BEAM has several layers of high-tech fabrics, which will keep the trapped air in, and keep micrometeorites and other types of space debris from puncturing its walls. These walls have already undergone intensive testing to prove their durability. Bigelow has already released two of these 'bubble capsules' into orbit. The first was in 2006, and the second in 2007. Both are still intact in orbit, and the outer skin has endured for longer than experts expected.

It is one of the most toxic substances known to man and has been used to poison kings, emperors and even prize winning racehorses. Worldwide arsenic poisoning caused by contaminated water and food is thought to harm more than 137 million people. Even low levels of arsenic poisoning can cause damage to the lungs, heart, kidneys and liver, leading to cancer, heart disease and diabetes. But scientists have discovered one small population of people living in a remote part of the Andes in north west Argentina who have developed some resistance to arsenic. They have found that over thousands of years the local inhabitants there have developed a genetic ability to metabolise the arsenic to reduce the impact it has on their bodies. They found one gene in particular - AS3MT, which is thought to play a role in arsenic metabolism - occurred in far higher frequencies compared to populations living in Columbia and Peru.

HP has become the latest "legacy" IT vendor to announce it would ship commodity switches for web-scale data centers that support network management software other than its own. HP Switches will run the Cumulus Linux OS. The company claims the approach can reduce data center operating costs by up to 68 percent. HP's competitors Dell and Juniper have already announced open commodity network switches of their own. Dell said it would ship data center switches with a Linux-based network operating systems by Cumulus Networks or by Big Switch Networks, as alternatives to its own network OS, last year. Notably, Cisco has not introduced commodity switches. The world's largest data center networking vendor has built an empire selling tightly coupled hardware-and-software bundles, and cheap open network hardware is a threat to its dominance. However, Cisco too has been slowly offering more software-defined networking/OpenFlow features and compatibility in their hardware.

Internet giants, such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, which operate massive data centers around the world, have found it more effective to design their own hardware and have so-called "Original Design Manufacturers," the likes of Taiwan's Quanta and Foxconn, manufacture it for them. The trend has created a problem for incumbent IT vendors, such as HP, Dell, IBM, and Cisco, which found themselves competing with contract manufacturers of their products for the same high-volume deals. Facebook, through its Open Compute Project, offers design specs and has spread awareness about cost effectiveness of this IT procurement model. There is now growing interest in low-cost commodity hardware among enterprises who are not necessarily Internet giants, creating a new threat to the incumbents' market share.

Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have developed a pair of telescopic contact lenses with 2.8x magnification. Really just a pair of super-tiny aluminum telescopes, the contacts are still only about 1.5 millimeters thick, and feature 1 mm-wide channels or pores that allow the required breathability - maintaining airflow. This last part proved to be one of the biggest challenges, requiring years of experimentation.

While the contacts do all the work, they currently require polarized glasses to turn the magnification on or off. That said, the researchers are working towards an on/off capability - activated by winking. "We think these lenses hold a lot of promise for low vision and age-related macular degeneration (AMD)." But will a wider and more general user-base be interested in contact lenses that covertly give them super-human telescopic vision?

The pay-TV industry has reported its worst 12-month stretch ever. Ratings for both cable and the broadcast networks are down. There has been negative ratings growth on broadcast and cable TV since September 2011. The number of U.S. households is still growing, but fewer households have TV because they are watching video on mobile devices instead. The amount of video viewed on mobile devices is going through the roof. About 40% of all YouTube traffic comes from mobile.

Broadband internet was supposed to benefit from the end of cable TV, but it hasn't; people are also unplugging from broadband internet service. Most are likely utilizing free wifi hotspots provided by businesses, campuses and some cities. Fifty-seven cities in the U.S., including Los Angeles, offer free wifi; anyone within range of a hotspot can avoid the monthly fees.

Cable TV ratings are in an historic slump, but revenues are still rising because companies are charging the dwindling number of customers more in subscription fees. Those higher prices are "part of the problem" that pushes out poor subscribers - losing the TV business even more eyeballs. This is having a counter-intuitive effect on TV ad sales: prices are going up. It's still really difficult to gather a large, mass audience in any kind of media. That scarcity makes TV's dwindling-but-still-big audience increasingly valuable... for now. Ad dollars are likely to follow that shift in the long run.

Isn't it strange how all the high-end smartphones with keyboards have disappeared? There isn't a desirable smartphone with a keyboard on the horizon. The original Motorola Droid was the phone that started the Android phenomenon, yet the Droid 5 never materialized.

For years, buying a smartphone with a keyboard has meant settling for less than the latest and greatest technology on the market. There hasn't been a top-tier smartphone with keyboard since the Samsung Epic 4G set the bar in August, 2010. The carriers treat sliders as messaging phones for teens rather than tools of pros, and adjusted their asks and advertising respectively. There's also the myth that there's an Android phone out there for everyone. The differences in Android phones were huge. Slide-out keyboard, small screen, large screen, slim or bulky. Now it seems like phones are all merging into the same basic design principle; slim with a huge screen, leaving a market gap that any competitor could jump into, much the way Android did when the one-size-fits-all iPhone dominated.

When Android came along and smartphones began to take off, handsets with keyboards did very well for Sprint. The Samsung Moment, the EVO Shift, the Epic 4G: "We sold multimillions of those," said Kaufman. When Sprint asked customers whether they'd buy a physical keyboard the next time around - not so long ago - 75 percent of existing QWERTY users said they would. "We went out and built the LG Mach and the Photon Q. It was a big party and nobody came." So much for surveys. "Half of your customers buy the iPhone [...] boom, take them out of the equation." In addition, "the market has moved to everyone buying iconic phones... people see the advertising, they walk in, they want to buy a Galaxy S III."

You might be thinking a slide-out keyboard is old technology, but there are advantages. People can type much faster and error-free on hardware keyboards. Being able to see everything on screen is a huge plus, and playing games is infinitely more enjoyable with tactile, mechanical buttons.

As a devout user of physical QWERTY keyboards, I'm pretty sure I'm screwed.

Lenovo, the world's largest PC manufacturer, has apologized for security flaws in the malware they pre-install on consumer laptops, and attempted to issue instructions on how to fix a flaw that fatally compromised user security. The company was forced to issue a second set of instructions after security experts said that following its first set would do nothing to patch up the security holes the adware created. But even the second set is "incomplete", according to researchers, and leaves users of the popular Firefox browser vulnerable.

Sadly, while apologizing for the security hole the software opens up, they are standing by their pre-installed malware, saying "this tool was to help enhance our users' shopping experience". The software bombarded affected users with pop-up adverts and injected more ads into Google searches. Security experts say it also left a gaping security hole on every computer, in the form of a self-signed root certificate. That certificate was used by the software to inject adverts even into encrypted websites, but its presence has the side-effect of making affected Lenovo computers trivially easy to hack with a "man in the middle" (MITM) attack, in which a hacker uses the certificate to pretend to be a trusted website, such as a bank or e-commerce site. The "man in the middle" can then steal information passed over the internet, even while the user believes they are safely browsing with encryption turned on. Filippo Valsorda, who created the Badfish tool for determining if a computer is affected by the software, has offered instructions for how to remove it from that browser as well.