World's thinnest LCD just 2.6mm thick

SOUTH Korea's LG Display says it has developed the world's thinnest LCD television panel, measuring 2.6 mm (millimeters).

The company, the world's 2nd largest maker of liquid crystal displays (LCD), said the panel uses an ultra-slim, edge-lit light emitting diode backlight system along with proprietary optical film technology.

It said in a statement the 107cm panel weighs less than 4 kilograms, making it ideal for wall-mounted TVs.

LG Display said it will showcase the product at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas early next year.

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Twitter briefly blocked by hackers

NEW YORK – Hackers briefly blocked access to the well-known Internet messaging service Twitter, steering traffic to another site where a group reportedly calling itself the "Iranian Cyber Army" claimed responsibility.

Users trying to reach Twitter early on Friday were redirected to a Web page that CNN reported had a picture of a green flag and a message that said, "This website has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army."

There was no evidence the hackers are actually linked to Iran. Web sites like Facebook and Twitter helped bring attention to the Iranian opposition in the country's crackdown after its June elections, with users posting minute-by-minute updates and amateur video.

Twitter later on Friday posted a message on its blog that said its Domain Name Systems' records "were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed." The site says it will update with more details "once we have investigated more fully."

Paralyzed man turns thoughts into sounds

Five years after a 1999 car crash left Eric Ramsey a sufferer of locked-in syndrome--essentially a conscious mind trapped inside a completely unresponsive body, not capable even to blink--he soon found himself on the cutting edge brain research.

In an attempt to permit Ramsey to communicate with the outside world, scientists implanted a device in his brain linking it directly to a speech synthesizer. After some years of practice, Ramsey can generate vowel sounds just by thinking of them.

Now, 36 months after Ramsey began the trial that partially reconnected his isolated mind to the rest of the world, the researchers who implanted the device in Ramsey's brain have revealed how they produced this nearly miraculous outcome.

Writing in The Public Library of Science, the researchers detail how their device hones in on areas of the brain related to speech, as opposed to thought or spacial reasoning. Though other systems utilized minute movement in paralyzed patients to allow them to type out words, like Jean-Dominique Bauby in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” and physicist Stephen Hawking, Ramsey's implant works much quicker by forming words a syllable at a time.

Over the course of 2 years, the researchers worked with Ramsey, giving him target vowel sounds to generate, and playing the results back to him so he can weigh his own effectiveness. By the end of the study, Eric Ramsey could exactly reproduce the target vowel sound 70 % of the time. This is an appreciably better success rate than the spelling system, which an Esquire profile from last year revealed Ramsey might no long use.

Clearly though, this system remains experimental at best. Exactly reproducing sounds is a long way from carrying on a conversation, however the scientists in charge of the study thing they will reach that level of sophistication within the next 5 years. If they do, it will be the first time anyone has conversed with Eric Ramsey since 1999.

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Climate change threatens life in Shishmaref, Alaska

When the arctic winds howl and angry waves pummel the shore of this Inupiat Eskimo village, Shelton and Clara Kokeok fear that their house, already at the edge of the Earth, finally may plunge into the gray sea below.

"The land is going away," said Shelton Kokeok, 65, whose home is on the tip of a bluff that's been melting in part because of climate change. "I think it's going to vanish one of these days."

Coastal erosion has been an issue for decades here, but rising global temperatures have started to thaw the permafrost that once helped anchor this village in place. Sea ice that protects Shishmaref's coast from erosion melts earlier in the spring and forms later in the fall. As a result, the increasingly mushy and exposed soil along Shishmaref's shore is falling into the water in snowmobile-sized chunks.

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Racist Obama image shines light on Web searching

When a racist image of first lady Michelle Obama surfaced from the ugliest corners of the Internet last week to top Google's image search results, the episode shined a spotlight on the mysterious workings of search engines.

Google placed an ad near the image, apologizing for its offensive nature. But the company resisted calls to scrub the image from its database, saying its role as a neutral tool for searching the Web means having to live with the results, whether it likes them or not.

"We have a bias toward free expression," Google spokesman Scott Rubin told CNN. "That means that some ugly things will show up."

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Activist's Web site, tweets put new face on homelessness

Fourteen years ago, Mark Horvath was in crisis. The former exec was living on the streets in Hollywood, California, where for a dollar he let people take a photograph of his pet iguana, named Dog.

"I was sitting by the Chinese theater with my iguana, surrounded by Asian tourists, with my head down, thinking, 'How am I going to get out of this?' " said Horvath, whose nickname was the "Lizard Man of Hollywood Boulevard."

Last month, Horvath returned to Hollywood Boulevard, this time as a featured speaker at the 140 Characters Conference, a Twitter-inspired gathering attended by movers and shakers in social media. Horvath told the audience how he uses an arsenal of social networking sites - Twitter, Facebook, Whrrl, MySpace, YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr - to illuminate the plight of the nation's homeless.

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'Pulp Fiction' Oscar winner appears to be tweeting from jail

An inmate wrestles with his fear, boredom and remorse.

He is subjected to random strip-searches as a fellow inmate espouses conspiracy theories about the jailhouse food and another is busted with a hidden ball of black-tar heroin.

The alternately bleak, wry and amusing scenes, described in a series of journal-like entries, would fit comfortably in the work of Academy Award-winning screenwriter and director Roger Avary.

But they may be based on fact, not fiction. These 140-character snippets have been popping up for more than a month on what friends acknowledge as the Twitter account of Avary, who is serving a year in a California jail for vehicular manslaughter.

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Atlantis crew returns home safely

The space shuttle Atlantis glided to a picture-perfect landing Friday morning under bright, sunny skies at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The seven-person crew returned after an 11-day mission to deliver key spare parts to prolong the life of the international space station.

The original six-member crew, with flight engineer Nicole Stott - who launched in August - returned amid sunny, clear Florida weather

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Jet-powered Ford guns for 300 mph

Joe Wilkins knew there was only one way to give his supercharged, alcohol-injected Hemi-engined hot rod more power: Put a jet engine in the trunk.

"It started as a hobby and turned into a monster," said Joe Wilkins, the motor madman behind what might be the wildest 1939 Ford ever built. He's an inventor and defense department contractor, and the idea of goosing the Ford's ability to turn heads and shred tires came when he bought a used gas turbine engine.

"I got hooked on the simplicity and power that this thing produced, and I decided one day I want to put it in a car."

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Is your date a 'stud or dud?' Ask your phone

If that dreamy blind date seems too good to be true, or the guy at the bar with a martini and a pencil-thin moustache looks a little sketchy, the truth about them - or at least some of it - could be found on your phone.

Designers at a pair of companies say their new applications for smartphones can tell you in real time whether someone is married or divorced, has a criminal record, has filed for bankruptcy or has any number of potential red flags in their past.

Using Google to search for information on a prospective romantic partner is standard practice for many single people in the digital age. But these new apps, combined with the growth of smartphones and wireless networks, now allow for quick background checks on the go, potentially before a date is even over.

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Koreans make plastics without fossil fuel chemicals

A team of South Korean scientists have produced the polymers used for everyday plastics through bioengineering, rather than through the use of fossil fuel-based chemicals.

It is believed that the technique may now allow for the production of environmentally-friendly plastic that is biodegradable and low in toxicity.

The research focused on Polylactic Acid (PLA), a bio-based polymer which holds the key to producing plastics through natural and renewable resources. Polymers are molecules found in everyday life in the form of plastics and rubbers.

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Google OS: the end of the hard drive?

Google today unveiled more details of Chrome OS, a lightweight, browser-based operating system for netbooks.

With a strong focus on speed, the Chrome OS promises nearly instantaneous boot times of about 7 seconds for users to login to their computers.

"We want Google Chrome OS to be blazingly fast ... to boot up like a TV," said Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management for Google.

The first Chrome OS netbooks will be available in late 2010, Pichai said. It will not be available as a download to run and install. Instead, Chrome OS is only shipping on specific hardware from manufacturers Google has partnered with. That means if you want Chrome OS, you'll have to purchase a Chrome OS device.

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How Microsoft blew it with Windows Mobile

Microsoft Windows continues to dominate the PC market with a 90 percent market-share stronghold, but when it comes to smartphones, Microsoft is getting beat up worse than a mustachioed villain in a Jackie Chan movie.

Windows Mobile has lost nearly a third of its smartphone market share since 2008, research firm Gartner reports. Windows Mobile had 11 percent of the global smartphone market in the third quarter of 2008, according to Gartner, and last quarter Windows Mobile's market share plummeted to 7.9 percent.

Meanwhile, Apple's global market contribute grew from 12.9 percent to 17.1 percent, and RIM saw a rise from 16 percent to 20.8 percent, according to Gartner's figures.

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