Privacy advocates worried about x-ray scanners making their way around U.S. airports may be surprised to know the technology is also making its way onto America’s streets.

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In an ambitious application of 21st century technology brought to bear on a first century wonder, the Israel Antiquities Authority and internet search giant Google Tuesday announced a plan to digitize the Dead Sea Scrolls and make the entire collection available to the public online.

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They’re tracking a college student in Silicon Valley. He’s 20, partially Egyptian, and studying marketing at Mission College. He found the tracking device attached to his car. Near as he could tell, what he did to warrant the FBI’s attention is be the friend of someone who did something to warrant the FBI’s attention.

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If you went to MIT you might be able to answer that question thanks to the work of grad student Ming-Zher Poh, who has found a way to tell your pulse with just a simple webcam and some software.

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The adult-entertainment industry is in a tailspin, shattering the notion that it is one of the few recession-proof industries. The slump is especially stinging because technology — which helped adult-entertainment enterprises reap riches through innovations such as video streaming, webcameras and online payments — is contributing to the misery.

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Two significant and closely related trends in enterprise computing this year are the growth of Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and social computing. By most accounts, both are gaining ground quite rapidly while still not being used for core business functions or mission critical applications in most large firms, at least not yet.

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Few exhibitors at Macworld Expo put their products’ reputation on the line as much as MacSpeech did in its booth last week.

MacSpeech, of course, makes MacSpeech Dictate, a voice recognition program that lets you use your voice to input text. The middle of a busy trade show floor hardly seems like ideal conditions for demonstrating a speech-to-text program, but MacSpeech gave Expo attendees a live demonstration throughout the week. A presenter was constantly at the booth, wearing a headset and demonstrating the various features of MacSpeech Dictate, while the program ran on projected screen behind him, writing out his every word in real time. Every phrase spoken during the presentation was written out as text, using MacSpeech Dictate’s advanced voice recognition software, with surprising accuracy.

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LET’S face it: power cables are unsightly dust-traps. PCs, TVs and music players are becoming slicker every year, but the nest of vipers in the corner of every room remains an ugly impediment to true minimalism.

Then there is the inconvenience of charging phones, MP3 players and PDAs. A minor hassle, admittedly, but it is easy to forget to top up the batteries and before you know it you have left the house with a dead gadget. Wouldn’t life be simpler if power was invisibly beamed to your devices whenever you walked into a building with an electricity supply? Wireless communication is ubiquitous, after all, so why can’t we permanently unshackle our electronics from power cables too?

Poor transmission efficiencies and safety concerns have plagued attempts at wireless power transfer, but a handful of start-ups – and some big names, like Sony and Intel – are having another go at making it work. The last few years have seen promising demonstrations of cellphones, laptops and TVs being powered wirelessly. Are we on our way to waving goodbye to wires once and for all?

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Tesla Motors, by filing on Friday for a long-awaited initial public offering, has unleashed a flood of facts and figures about its business, strategy, future plans and more than a few challenges.

In the hours after the 7-year-old startup first filed its prospectus with the SEC, we laid out the company’s financials, noted the significance of this IPO as a test for the VC model in the green car biz and pulled out some fun facts from the filing (including plans for a big gap in Roadster sales after 2011). Here’s 12 more things you should know about Tesla’s current and future business that are tucked into the S-1 filing — from what happens if the startup’s deal with Lotus doesn’t get extended to why Tesla thinks it has the lowest-cost battery pack on the market:

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