Wednesday nights on NBC are looking up this Fall. The peacock has green-lighted the remake of Bionic Woman - ”Better. Stronger. Faster.”

If you’re not familiar with the original series that lasted 3 seasons in the mid 70’s, it’s the tale of a woman, Jamie Sommers, who must endure cyborg implants and sensory circuits in place of both legs, an arm and ear resulting from a parachuting accident. She then puts her new super human capabilities to good use, working undercover for the gov’t as a spy battling everything from fembots to BigFoot.

However, this time around the part of the heroine won’t be played by Lindsay Wagner but instead by the very promising and very hot Michelle Ryan. Even more promising is the series will be brought to us by the folks that delivered Battlestar Galactica and it will be filmed in Vancouver, BC (home of BSG, SG-1, SG Atlantis, etc…).

Few more details:
Cast: Michelle Ryan, Mae Whitman, Miguel Ferrer, Chris Boweres, Yun Lee, Molly Price
Synopsis: Remake of the 1970s Lindsay Wagner vehicle, with the new Jamie Sommers working as a bartender before the big accident and operation.
Exec producers: David Eick, Glen Morgan, Michael Dinner, Jason Smilovic, Laeta Kalogridis
From: NBC Universal
Network: NBC, 9 p.m. Wednesday

Trivia:

Do you recall the name of the agency that patched up and employed Jamie Sommers? It was OSI (Office of Scientific Information), the same secretive unit that employed Steve Austin - The 6 Million Dollar Man.

Astrophysicists try to weigh a black hole
MSNBC
Astronomers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have developed an alternative weighing technique. They examine the spinning disk of hot gases that black holes gobble up from neighboring stars-also called the accretion disk.

Windows firewall squeezes into USB key
LinuxDevices
Yoggie Security Systems has squeezed a complete hardware firewall for Windows systems into a USB key sized form-factor. The “Yoggie Pico” runs Linux 2.6 along with 13 security applications on a 520MHz PXA270, a powerful Intel processor popular in smartphones and other high-end consumer devices.

Solar Powered Mobile Phone
SlashGear
If you?re looking for a phone that you don?t need to recharge constantly, you might want to check out what?s going on at the China Beijing International Expo 2007.

Science of the Silver Surfer
SciFi
Quantum physics teaches us that the vacuum of empty space isn’t really empty at all but pervaded by an enormous energy reservoir called the Zero Point Field. If the Silver Surfer is able to tap into this energy source?essentially cooling off the entire universe by a tiny amount every time he lifts a finger?it would explain an awful lot about his abilities.

Use of Animal Forensics on the Rise
Physorg
The killer had left his mark all over the crime scene. Grayish-tan hairs lay strewn on the ground below the old willow tree on Marylin Christian’s Loudoun County farm, inches away from where her beloved cat Cody was found dead.

China preparing for cyberwarfare
ZDNET
An annual report on China?s military capabilities reveals that the country is eying cyberweapons, network attacks and other plans to wage information warfare. The report from the Department of Defense outlines China?s overall military strategy and touches on some aspects of information warfare

Search for alien life to go round-the-clock
MSNBC
The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute plans to have 42 radio astronomy dishes up and running in northern California by the end of 2007, which will enable it to scan the heavens for alien radio waves on a continuous basis.

Top 10 New Features in Windows Server 2008
BetaNews
The abilities to consolidate servers, to manage hardware more effectively, to remotely manage hardware without the graphical traffic, and to radically alter the system security model, could present a more compelling argument for customers to plan their WS2K8 migrations now, than the arguments for moving from Windows 2000 to Server 2003.

Most of you probably know that some percentage of the gasoline your vehicle consumes is a gasoline/ethanol mixture, in the United States ethanol is about 10% of that mixture.

Ethanol can be produced from any biological feedstock (corn, barley, wheat) that contains substantial amounts of sugar or materials that can be converted into sugar (starch, cellulose). In particular, corn contains starch that can relatively easily be converted into sugar. Many larger ethanol producers use a wet-milling process to make corn, which also yields products such as high-fructose corn sweetener.

One challenge with ethanol in order to bring the operational costs down is that the inedible parts of the corn (’biomass’) are wasted, not converted to fuel. Converting those leaves and stalk is a pretty expensive process.

Livescience is reporting on genetic engineers at Michigan State University that have genetically tailored corn plants to manufacture the appropritate enzymes in their own tissues and will help reduce costs in the conversion process from biomass to ethanol.

A patent has already been issued. Hopefully we can see our dependency on fossil fuels drop due to this sometime in the next decade.

Link

More info:

• Ethanol Information
• What’s your environmental footprint?
• International Chemical Safety Card 0044

Everyone give finger snaps for our geeky brother, Steve, for nailing the last WIT picture of a DC power port from a PSP.  Groovy, man!

I don’t know about you guys, but sometimes I feel like I’m spinning my wheels when it comes to stumping the lot of you!  Well, I’m gonna make things a bit more interesting now.  I want to try something new, so here goes.  Whoever correctly guesses today’s WIT, will get the honor (woohoo! :P) of writing the NEXT WIT post, and choose the picture for everyone to guess about. 

So keep that in mind, folks, as you strain your noggin on the wonders I now bring before you….

The first picture is a macro closeup, the second a step further back, and the final image is a final hint.  These are all pictures of the same thing!  Imagine that ;)  Comments!

Seen by C|Net UK at the Cannes Film Festival.

So I searched the interweb and found this little add-on called Seg-Signs:

Has the cute little Segway finally found its niche as a mobile advert?

Don’t hold your breath, though I sincerely do believe there’s a future in this kind of mobile technology (as in Personal Transporter, not Smartphones).

Maybe it’ll really take off when the Human Machine Interface enables you to plug your brain into the device for control. Naw, it’s probably the cost, when it costs hundreds of dollars instead of thousands of dollars, then it’ll be super popular.