(photo by Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images, originally published at Boston.com)

If you didn’t know, Space Shuttle Discovery just returned to Earth from its final journey to space. In tribute, the folks at Boston.com, known not only for their news and journalism but for their amazing photographs in their The Big Picture series of articles.

In this week’s, we take a beautiful look at Discovery on her final voyage, from rolling up to the launch pad (shown above – the first photo in the series) all the way to its final approach and graceful return to earth. Click through to see all of the beautiful photos.

[ Boston.com - The Big Picture :: For Discovery, A Farewell Spin ]

A report from the British Royal Academy of Engineering points out that we’re using GPS for so many important things that we may run the risk of being overly reliant on a system that’s simply not built or designed to be mission critical for important business, personal, or governmental applications. The folks behind the report point out that they’re not trying to claim the sky is falling and they don’t want to spark alarm, but they do point out that a lot of people assume that the global GPS network is somehow highly redundant and highly available, and it’s really not:

Use of space-borne positioning and timing data is now widespread, in everything from freight movement to synchronisation of computer networks.

The academy fears that too many applications have little or no back-up were these signals to go down.

Receivers need to be capable of using a variety of data sources, it says.

Dr Martyn Thomas, who chaired the group that wrote the report, told BBC News: “We’re not saying that the sky is about to fall in; we’re not saying there’s a calamity around the corner.

“What we’re saying is that there is a growing interdependence between systems that people think are backing each other up. And it might well be that if a number these systems fail simultaneously, it will cause commercial damage or just conceivably loss of life. This is wholly avoidable.”

Gags aside about people having to resort to paper maps to find their way to work or their nearest bar or cafe, more and more commercial tracking and location-based systems and businesses are tied heavily to GPS as a way of plotting location, seeing multiple customers or multiple products at the same time, and even to – as the FAA is rightfully trying to do – use the system to shorten flights, keep planes away from one another, and overall improve the way air travel functions.

Still, all of these improvements are great as long as the systems that support them are robust and ready at all times. The report calls out weak signal and lack of redundancy as easily exploitable holes in the global GPS network that can be used for nefarious purposes or accidentally cause issues:

The RAEng report claims to be the first assessment of just how many applications in the UK now use GPS signals and their like, and their probable vulnerability to an outage of some kind.

It says sat-nav signals are relatively weak – equivalent to receiving the light from a bright bulb at a distance of 20,000km – and this leaves them open to interference or corruption.

Possible sources include man-made ones, such as deliberate jamming, and natural hazards, such as solar activity. Both can introduce errors into the data or simply take it out altogether.

“The key thing for us is the concept of cascade failures,” said report co-author Prof Jim Norton, the president-elect of BCS – the Chartered Institute for IT.

“This is what we characterise as accidental systems – systems that exist, but people don’t recognise they exist because they don’t understand the interdependencies. There will be a single common point of vulnerability and failure, but it’s not obvious.”

It’s an interesting point that the RAE is making, and one work considering in-depth. Are businesses using GPS too freely and openly without really paying into the system that keeps the global network alive and well? We have entire services that base their business model off of being able to see what’s happening around the world at all times, but improvements to the global GPS network – operated by multiple countries – is definitely in need of upgrades, even if it’s functional today.

What do you think? Are we, as a society, over-reliant on GPS? It’s one thing to say everyone should keep a paper map in their cars in case of emergency, but what about the commercial implications? Should companies that leverage GPS be required to pay into a GPS “maintenance fund” for improvements and upgrades? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

The summer is coming and it’s about time to start thinking about – if you haven’t already – how to keep your energy costs down when the heat goes up and you hit the air conditioner to stay frosty. Well, there are ways to stay green and stay comfortable at the same time – especially when it comes to your technology, and over at PC Mag them mention more than a few.

For example, you can always switch to greener computers if you have the cash to sink into a forklift upgrade of all of the systems in your home, but you can also snag some power-saving surge protectors, get rid of your older, power-inefficient computer gear in exchange for something more energy efficient, and more.

There are some great suggestions in the slideshow – make sure to click through and see which ones will work best for you. Me? I’m planning to snag some apps to help steer me to the best gas prices: it’s getting pretty dicey at the pump these days.

[ Lower Your Energy Costs with Tech ]

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Danny Choo’s site, and a fan of the personal brand he’s managed to build around himself as an ambassador of Japanese Culture, not to mention technology and the Web.

Well, he stumbled upon something amazing (again!) recently: a group of Japanese students who have already built their own set of powered body armor. Well – it’s not so much “armor” in the protective sense as it’s an exoskeletal frame that’s powered and moves itself as the human inside moves – think of it as a powered suit that works with the motions of the human body.

The US military and tons of high-end research agencies have been working on the tech for decades – making it smaller and lighter and easy enough for soldiers to slip on and run into battle using, or for emergency personnel and first responders to mount into and use to remove rubble from fallen buildings or earthquake stricken areas or lift vehicles and debris off of survivors. Sounds great eh?

What’s impressive is that this group of Japanese students, calling themselves Skeletonics, managed to do this with the resources they have – and they’re students. Young ones. Here’s to them – every now and again I get a reminder that out there somewhere are some good hands to hold our future.

Here’s a video of the suit they built, in action:

Head over to Danny Choo’s site to read more and see more photos like the one above!

[ Danny Choo :: Skeletonics ]

Over at the Open Innovation experiment, there’s a pretty awesome article discusses what the future of screen technology in computing and high-tech devices may look like in the coming years. After all, we’re becoming more and more used to thinner and lighter displays in a wide range of devices, especially mobile phones and media players which are all remarkably thin yet feature high-resolution, capacitive touch panels that are light, small, crisp, and still interactive. Display technology has come leaps and bounds from only a few years ago, when maximum affordable screen sizes were 17″ and 19″ CRTs and phones still had tiny LCDs and touch sensitivity was a far-off dream.

So what does the future hold? Well, the folks participating in the Open Innovation Experiment had some great ideas, including transparent large displays, super-flexible displays like rolling curtains that can be expanded when needed, screens that can be instantly stitched or attached to one another for larger or smaller views as needed, even inflatable displays that can be expanded anywhere.

Head over to see them all, and check out the video (above) for a closer look at what some of the participants thought the future should look like.

[ Laughing Squid :: The Future of Screen Technology ]

When I stumbled on SolarBeat, I thought it would be cute and quaint and simple, and it’s all of those things, but at the same time it’s a remarkably mesmerizing little web app that puts the motion of the planets to simple notes so you can hear the music the solar system makes as planets orbit the sun. You’ll hear tons for Mercury in rapid succession, but you’ll have to wait a long long time to hear the dull tone of Neptune or Pluto (no longer a planet!) making a full orbit.

As you listen to the music, you can watch the counter at the bottom of the page to see the number of “years’ on each of those planets pass by. It’s pretty remarkable to note see that the time required for Pluto to get around the sun once is too long on Earth for any human being to live long enough to see one full Plutonian year. The longest-lived human may see a year on Uranus, but they’d have to live long to do so. It’s remarkable.

[ SolarBeat ]

A friend passed this along to me earlier today – the Martin Jetpack is a real device; works (as the video shows) fairly well, and gives the controller incredible control over their flight. The jetpack is made by the Martin Aircraft Company, a company with a history of experience in flight, so this isn’t your usual crazy-guy’s-garage style of jetpack you’re probably used to seeing videos of. Apparently, the jetpack is even self-righting, so if something happened and you let go of the controls, you wouldn’t crash – it would just right itself and hover in-place.

You could have one, if you want one bad enough! You just have to sit on a 12-month waiting list before you have the opportunity to spend $90,000 to get one!

[ Gearlog :: You, Too, Could Own a Working Jetpack for $90,000 ]

Amelia Earhart is one of my favorite people. Seriously, when people ask that hokey question of “if you could go back in time and meet any person in history who would you meet,” she’s up there on my list. She’s an amazing person, an incredible character, and a woman whose very nature was made of bravery, courage, guts, and brilliance. She was a dominating combination of power, brains, and willpower – one that I think only comes along once every several generations. I could only wish to be half the person she was.

That being said, he final resting place, and what happened to her on that round-the-world flight has been shrouded in mystery for decades, and I admit that part of that mystery is what enthralls me about her. What happened to her exactly – whether she went down in the pacific or wound up on some island or managed to survive somewhere somehow for the rest of her days – is one of the greatest mysteries of our time.

And now some researchers believe they’ve found where her final resting place may have been found, and the theory is that she managed to crash land on an uninhabited island off of a reef in the pacific, and she and her navigator likely survived and died on that island from any number of reasons that would bring down a castaway – hunger, dehydration, injury, infection, and so on.

Personally, it’s not as glamorous as I would have liked Amelia to go, but she was more than aware of the risks with every action she took. That and the fact that this is still a theory, and the mystery still lives on. But if you want to read the going theory, head over to Discovery below to read more about it; it’s really really compelling.

[ Discovery News :: Earhart's Final Resting Place Believed Found ]

Over at H+, there’s an interesting article that runs down some of the cyborg exoskeleton technologies that we’ve heard about in recent years but haven’t seen much more of than a few promo videos and loose articles over. There are some pretty awesome videos of the Japanese and American versions of the exoskeleton as well.

The premise of the story is that these types of exoskeletons could soon become as common or more common than bicycles: of course they have to be extraordinarily affordable for that to come anywhere close to reality, and right now considering their cost they’re only being considered for operations where people need the body augmentation, like soldiers on the battlefield, police in riot gear or violent areas, firefighters and rescue personnel who need the strength to lift heavy objects or rubble off of people, and so on.

That being said, it’s an extraordinarily amazing concept, and the fact that you can easily lift heavy objects and run long distances and take steep climbs with minimal exertion on your body while wearing an exoskeleton like this makes the premise more than incredible on its own. I’m sure we’ll see these in regular use either by the military or by first-responders in the next couple of years.

[ H+ Magazine :: Cyborg Exoskeletons May Soon Become as Common as Bicycles ]

Sustainable energy is always good stuff, and being the leading producer of wind energy in the world shows that finally, energy companies in the United States are serious about taking this technology into the mainstream. Even so, a dismal percentage of America’s power demand is supplied by wind, but it looks like the numbers are only going up, and that’s good news.

Investing in renewable energies and technologies is definitely the way forward, and leaving behind older, dirty technologies that exploit natural resources and leave our home, our planet, barren and lifeless is probably the last thing we all want. Here’s to hoping the trend continues and that we really do see a revolution in green tech. Wind energy is just the beginning, and the US is sitting on enough land and varied climate zones to really make wind power a significant part of our energy profile.

[ Treehugger: USA is the Number One Biggest Wind Energy Producer ]