And so far, only readers of Gizmodo and Engadget are treated to a correction.

Every publication, no matter how careful, makes mistakes. It’s part of the business. Traditionally, newspapers like to bury them a few pages in, placing corrections in a bottom corner somewhere.

But at least they’re there. This incident, though, is more of a case of piggybacking gone awry. Not that piggybacking isn’t standard fare in the news industry. It is, and it happens with the best of publications. Compare these two articles, for instance.

See, happens all the time.

Credit for unraveling the Nissan paint mystery goes to Darius at YoungGoGetter.com, who painstakingly traced the "news" back to its origin after receiving comment from Nissan that they’d only heard of the new technology.

Sure enough, it was one misinterpreted and slightly altered sentence at NextEnergyNews that started it all:

This revolutionary new paramagnetic paint is a technical wonder and is viewed by Nissan and other auto companies as an amazing innovation that would draw huge traffic to dealerships and will make it easier for consumers to get the exact option level they want on a car without the sacrifice of their favorite color.

Which, by the time it reached Wired, became:

Nissan Developing Color-Changing Auto Paint

With similar so-far uncorrected variations at Daily Tech and MobileMag.com.

But what’s most humorous about Darius’s investigative blogging is the publications’ use of the same image of a Nissan car with only the colors altered. Your choice: black, white and red; black and red; silver and black; or green and black.

More time was spent fiddling with the image than actually researching the blog posts, it appears.

So what’s the moral to this humorous tale? Darius nails it:

Bloggers and readers should do more to research the facts and original sources before jumping to the publish button. How else will we establish blogging as a credible, journalistic endeavor?

Yes, indeed. The salty, veteran journalists out there are laughing their butts off.

That may sound like a line from a press release, but it was written by Tuan Nguyen, a blogger for DailyTech.

Nguyen was extremely optimistic about the chip’s potential; CTOs may want to pay attention.

A key material in the project was Indium Phosphide, which, according to Wikipedia, “is used in high-power and high-frequency electronics because of its superior electron velocity with respect to the more common semiconductors silicon and gallium arsenide . . . . Indium phosphide also has one of the longest-lived optical phonos of any compound with the zincblende crystal structure.”

“Intel researchers were able to integrate Indium Phosphide into traditional silicon chip manufacturing techniques, thereby creating a silicon-Indium Phoshide hybrid chip – one that could process traditional electrical signals and transmit laser light,” Nguyen wrote. “The laser light generated by an HSL chip could be used to transmit data and thus power other silicon photonic devices . . . ”

“Intel said that HSL could bring along terabit-capable transmission processors that are low cost and easy to produce,” he continued. “Computers would be a multitude more powerful than those we use today.” It shouldn’t come as a surprise, though, that “the technology . . . is still a number of years off.”

It seems like remarkable products and technologies are always, according to their developers, just ten or fifteen years down the road.

Nguyen seemed to realize this, but wasn’t at all cynical about the silicon hybrid laser chip.

“The application potentials for HSL chips are truly exciting,” he wrote.

“The industry in general has been talking about laser or light based electronics for a number of years already. With the development from a company like Intel – and hopefully others like AMD – the industry is getting the right push it needs.”

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.