Universal to trial DRM-free tunes
Vivendi's Universal Music Group, the world's largest music label, said it will test the sale of songs from artists such as Amy Winehouse, 50 Cent and the Black Eyed Peas without customary copy-protection technology. The company said in a statement it will allow the sale of thousands of its albums and tracks available in MP3 form without copy-protection software, known as digital rights management (DRM), over a trial period. Universal's test-run marks a departure from the music industry's common practice, with most major recording studios insisting that music sellers use DRM technology to curb online piracy. Universal said: "The experiment will run from August to January and analyse such factors as consumer demand, price sensitivity and piracy in regards to the availability of open MP3s." Vendors including Google, Wal-Mart and Amazon.com will participate in the DRM-free trial, Universal said.

NBC Universal-News Corp. project attracts deep-pocketed investor
The joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. to bring their television shows and movies onto the Internet still lacks a Web site. It still has no name. It has also yet to announce a clear mission that persuades the large number of skeptical observers that real-world rivals can cooperate online. But the company, known only by the working name of "New Site," now has some deeper pockets. Providence Equity Partners, a media investment firm based in Rhode Island, has invested $100 million for a 10 percent stake in the joint venture, people with direct knowledge of the deal said Wednesday. The investment will allow the companies to accelerate the introduction of their service and the transfer of NBC and Fox films and television shows into Internet-friendly video formats. Adding Providence as a partner also spreads the financial risks of the networks and will no doubt make the venture more palatable to the boards at General Electric and the News Corp., which, respectively, own NBC and Fox. Providence is led by Jonathan Nelson, who sits on the boards of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Music Group and the Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network. He has a long history of investing in media properties like local newspapers, television stations and cable networks. More recently, Providence has invested in new media ventures like NexTag, an online comparison shopping site, and WhitePages.com. Providence Equity Partners and News Corp. declined to comment on the deal, which sets a value on the joint venture of $1 billion.

Social networks for dogs, bikes & sneakers
A San Francisco native who loves the beach, parks, running and dancing, Marco has easily made connections over the Internet, racking up 5,200 on his profile. Not bad for a 4-year-old Miniature Schnauzer. Marco is just one of thousands of dogs with a Web profile on Dogster.com, an online community featuring pet photos posted by owners along with pooch videos, diaries and travel tips. Dogs not your thing? Cat people can go to Catster.com; car lovers can put their ride on Boompa.com, and there's Sneakerplay.com for those who are crazy about ... well, sneakers. Obsessed with your bike or motorcycle? Give them a profile on Velospace.org or Motortopia.com. These are just some of the sites dubbed "passion-centric" or "object-oriented" communities, a niche alternative to the most popular social sites like Facebook.com or MySpace.com, which draw a wide audience with millions of students and young professionals. About 11,000 members are now part of the community, which has galleries, contests, a blog and a forum where people can talk about fashion, shopping, basketball or anything else.

Terabyte hard drive for laptops
Fujitsu has developed a hard disk manufacturing technology that will cram 1.2 Terabytes (TB) of data – or 1,200GB – on to a standard laptop drive. Average laptop hard drives currently on sale have capacities of around 160GB. Even today's high-end laptops have drives of 250GB capacity, a fifth the size of the drive Fujitsu is proposing. The achievement involves an improvement in hard disk platter design first reported in January, which can yield a storage density of 1TB/sq in using one-dimensionally aligned alumina nano-hole patterns with 25nm pitch. Now, Fujitsu has successfully created ideally 'ordered' alumina nano-hole patterns for isolated bit-by-bit recording on a large disk area by establishing an innovative fabrication process, and confirming the basic read/write capability in each individual nano-hole of the patterned media using a flying head on a rotating disk. Using perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) processes, the patterned alumina nano-hole media was fabricated using nano-imprint lithography, anodic oxidation, and cobalt electro-deposition at a nano-hole density of 100nm pitch – suitable for reading by currently available head technology.

Google starts charging for storage
Google has begun charging users for additional storage once they fill their free allowance, according to a blog post by one of the company's lead software engineers. Price plans start from $20 a year for an extra 6GB and run to $500 a year for 250GB. Google account holders can buy storage here. The service is designed as an overflow to the storage provided free by individual Google services - 1GB with Picasa, and 2.8GB with GoogleMail - and will soon be usable by other services such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets as well. If users subscribe for extra capacity, their Google services will all share a single pool of additional on-line storage once they exceed their free allotment.

Microsoft Live SkyDrive
Microsoft launched its Live.com online storage solution, called SkyDrive. SkyDrive, has a ho-hum interface and gives a measly 500 MB of storage. Files can be private, shared or public. It will likely get a lot of non-early-adopters to try out online storage for the first time, but as Richard MacManus points out, there is a lot of competition in this space. Microsoft enters the market late with a product that is not as good as the competition. Still, kudos for launching before Google’s storage product. And not a peep from Yahoo, which is still offering a 90’s era product that weighs in at 25 MB of storage capacity.

DARPA finalises urban challenge contestants
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced the 36 teams selected to take part in its Urban Challenge contest. The contest will see cars controlled solely by computers navigate through urban environments, with prizes of $2 million for first place, $1 million for second, and $500,000 for third. The contest follows on from DARPA's Grand Challenge, which saw computer controlled cars race on a 175-mile desert course. That race was won by a team from Stanford University on the second attempt after no vehicles completed the first race. The chosen teams will compete in the Urban Challenge National Qualification Event (NQE) scheduled for October 26-31 and the top 20 teams from the NQE will move on to the Urban Challenge final event on November 3. The contest will take place at the George Air Force Base in Victorville, California. The cars must operate autonomously on the course and obey California traffic laws while performing manoeuvres such as merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles and avoiding moving obstacles.

NASA: astronauts do not fly drunk
There is no evidence to support allegations that NASA astronauts have been flying drunk, NASA said this week. The space agency has been reviewing the last 10 years of missions, and says it has turned up nothing to suggest that crews have been hitting the bottle before missions. This is despite earlier reports that astronauts were allowed to fly on two occasions when doctors considered them dangerously drunk. The allegations were made in a report by a panel of health experts, called in after former astronaut Lisa Nowak was arrested and charged with attempted kidnapping. The idea was a review of the health and screening policies would determine whether or not NASA should be keeping a closer eye on its crews. Instead, it threw even more unflattering light on the agency, during what should probably be described as its annus horribilis. Griffin said it was his responsibility to investigate the allegations, but added that he would be "extraordinarily surprised" if there was any substance to the claims.

China to map 'every inch' of the moon
China has announced plans to map "every inch" of the surface of the Moon as part of its ambitious space-exploration program. The NSA (National Space Administration) also made no bones about China's commercial interest in space, telling reporters that the Moon holds the key to future generation of energy. Ouyang Ziyuan, head of the first phase of lunar exploration with plans to collect three dimensional images of the Moon. And deeper plans to exploit the vast quantities of Helium-3 thought to lie buried in lunar rock. There are altogether 15 tons of helium-3 on Earth, while on the Moon, the total amount of Helium-3 can reach one to five million tons. Helium-3 is considered as a long-term, stable, safe, clean and cheap material for human beings to get nuclear energy through controllable nuclear fusion experiments. Human beings can finally use such energy material to generate electricity, then China might need 10 tons of helium-3 every year and in the world, about 100 tons of helium-3 will be needed every year. The country's space programme is split into three phases - the first is "circling the Moon", the second "landing on the Moon", and the third "returning to Earth". Earlier this year, the Chinese space agency outlined plans to launch the first probe in the second half of 2007. It has now also given a few more details of its plans for phase two, which will see an unmanned rover land on the lunar surface in 2010 and "meticulously" survey the area in which it lands. A sample-return mission is slated for 2012.

Time travel possible
An Israeli scientist claims that it may be possible to build a time machine at some point in the future. He pooh-poohs such doubters as Steven Hawking who claim that if time travel were possible, people from the future would already have visited us. In a paper in prestigious science publication Physical Review, Professor Amos Ori, of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, expounds a theory utilising a loop constructed in an empty, doughnut-shaped region of spacetime enveloped by a sphere of normal matter. The distortion of spacetime is simply created by a nearby black hole, enabling a traveller inside the doughnut to travel in time. Ori claims that the simple reason we have yet to be visited by folk from the future is than it would be impossible to travel back in time to a point before the spacetime doughnut had been created. This removes at a stroke one of the great philosophical arguments about going back and killing your own grandfather before you were born and thus ceasing to exist so you couldn't go back and kill him in the first place. But in the case of travelling to the future, everything in the universe is already capable of travelling into the future and we all do it without even noticing. When I leave my house to go to the pub, I travel ten minutes into the future. Were it to take me nine minutes, a paradox would be created whereby I met my future self coming into the pub a minute later and would be forced to buy myself a round. This is, of course, impossible. But not all objects travel in time at the same speed. The Taliban travel considerably slower than most people and are now some 800 years behind the rest of the world.

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