British scientists have developed a new breed of hard drive that uses not spinning discs, but rather a rectangular platter and millions of moving data heads to read/write data. In theory, this could mean transfer speeds of 500 MB/s.

Register Hardwaresays that The Hard Rectangular Drive (HRD), developed by DataSlide, is roughly 4x faster than current HDDs, and uses the same process to manufacture CPUs for the data heads. Piezoelectric actuators are used to scan the data heads and access specific parts of the magnetically-encoded platter. At any one time, 64 data heads are able to simultaneously transfer data. It also only uses 4W of power, which makes it half as power thirsty as a SSD.

The current technology consists of a single platter in a 3.5-inch drive, though it will be possible to stack platters in the future. [Register Hardwarevia Fast Company]

You know Tron Guy, that chubby embarrassment in a Lycra suit? Apparently, he was making enough scratch to own a plane that matched his outfit. Sadly, the economy has made his lifestyle a little less sustainable, so he's selling it.

Seriously, this guy owns a private plane. To be fair, he made most of his money via his day job as a computer programmer, not via his night job as a poster child for a complete lack of self-awareness.

But hey, his loss is your gain! If you want a single prop airplane with a custom Tron paintjob and a thick odor of sweat and cheese curls, it's currently at $22,600 on eBay. [eBay via Underwire]

The caption says: "Our intern starts today. We figured we'd start her off with a little prank." I don't see how this is funny. It looks like our interns' cubicles. [Flickr—Thanks Alice]

Every time I've seen these Jansen walkers—usually driven by the wind, sometimes on electricity—they have crept the hell out of me. This one is solar powered, and it creeps me just the same.

One day someone will put AI on these, add razor blades to each leg, and the whole thing is going to end up badly. [Makezine]

Seriously. I don't.

This is Funchal Airport's runway, in the Island of Madeira. It was one of the most dangerous in the world because its runway was just too short for large airplanes. It had to be extended and engineers had two options: Extend the ground base with extra soil and concrete, or build a platform on top of 180 230-foot pillars. The answer just looks spectacular.

And probably as safe as it is scary. [Premier Holidays via Dark Roasted Blend]

The Japanese take their crane game prizes seriously. Case in point: Taito's new line of T-Style crane games features a mini shredder, an AC circulator, a mini fridge, mini tv antenna, mp3 speaker and this USB chocolate cooler.

What do we get in our crane games? Stuffed animals or something? These devices actually have a function—and Space Invaders chocolates sound delicious. [Taito via Impress via Craziest Gadgets]

We reported earlier that it looks like the new MacBook Pros have had their hard drive controllers downgraded. Now, Apple has released a new firmware update to jack those speeds back up.

It's called the MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.7. Check it:

MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.7 addresses an issue reported by a small number of customers using drives based on the SATA 3Gbps specification with the June 2009 MacBook Pro. While this update allows drives to use transfer rates greater than 1.5Gbps, Apple has not qualified or offered these drives for Mac notebooks and their use is unsupported.

You'll still need an SSD to take advantage of these speeds, but if you really want to do that, now it looks like you've got the option. If you're not planning on swapping in an SSD, you don't need to worry about this firmware update. [Applw via MacRumors]

This may sound like something out of Iron Man, but it's very real. Don Ingber has developed a machine that uses an electromagnet to suck sepsis-causing bacteria out of the blood.

In lab tests, Ingber's team mixed donor blood with the fungus Candida albicans, a common cause of sepsis, and added plastic-coated iron-oxide beads, each a hundredth of a hair-width in diameter and covered with antibodies that seek out and attach to the fungus. Next they ran the mixture through the dialysis-like machine, which uses an electromagnet to pull the beads, and any pathogens stuck to them, from blood into a saline solution. The device removes 80 percent of the invaders-enough so that drugs could knock out the rest-in a couple of hours.

He still has to perform testing on animals to make sure it doesn't, you know, kill things, but it all looks quite promising. If it works for this bacteria, he's hoping to jigger the process to pull cancer cells from the body or harvest stem cells. [PopSci]

The Palm Pre can't shoot video. But what if it could shoot something better than video, natively? You know, like stop motion animation?

By holding the Pre's spacebar, you can take about one photo per second—that's pretty fast for a mobile. Continue holding and these photos just keep shooting. Stitch the shots together in an editing program and there you go, the Palm Pre can shoot stop motion (video) clips.

And while the example video is by no means remarkable in its execution, there are surely a few Pre owners out there who could figure out an entertaining use for the undisclosed function. [prelcentral Thanks Jeremy!]

In case you haven't noticed, T-Mobile came to their senses and brought Catherine Zeta-Jones back as their spokesperson. Naturally, this has me thinking: cagematch. Which cellphone provider spokesperson is your favorite?