Today marks the 50th anniversary of Sputnik 1, the very first man-made satellite placed in geocentric orbit around the earth, and probably the first significant encroachment of man into space - testing the waters of the final frontier.

With no prior announcement, and coming literally out of the blue, the launch of Sputnik by the USSR took everyone by surprise - particularly the terrified American public, who panicked at the idea that their communist foe's technology could be more advanced than their own.

Here's an interesting thing - long after the idea of a "perpetual motion machine" was generally accepted to be an impossible dream, it turns out that not only is someone still chasing it, but they're claiming to have made one, too.

Is anyone else terrified by the idea of wireless electricity?

The news that scientists at MIT are successfully pioneering "witricity" scares me to death for some reason - I just don't like the idea of it. Using resonance techniques (and a two foot receiving coil) the system has been proven to power gadgets wirelessly over a distance of up to 7 feet, paving the way for a battery-free utopia where all our gadgets are kept topped up wireless networks at home and away - but something about the idea of this kind of energy resonating about the place feels me with suspicion...

Chip maker Intel have pushed the bounderies of chip making by announcing that they will be starting manufacturing of processors using transistors just 45 nanometres wide. Previously anything smaller than the current standard of 65nm had issues with performance due to current leaking. However using high-k metals, a sort of substitute for silicon, this issue was solved. With a substitute found chances are processors are about to get a lot faster.

-Giz