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The Internet 2 consortium announced that its updated infrastructure is ready to go online and provide an initial capacity of 100 Gb/s to researchers and educators.

(click to enlarge)

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Gadgets from powerful laptops to iPods owe their existence to the discovery.

France’s Albert Fert and Germany’s Peter Gruenberg won the 2007 Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for a breakthrough in nanotechnology that lets huge amounts of data be squeezed into ever-smaller spaces.

The 10-million Swedish crown ($1.54 million) prize, awarded by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, recognized the pair for revealing a physical effect called giant magnetoresistance.

Nobel prize winner Albert Fert of France poses in an office at the CNRS (Scientific Research National Center) in Paris, October 9,2007.

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A global, geo-spatial map of the global internet.

(how international cities are connected)

The Chris Harrison project has created a series of maps that show the geographical structure and distribution of the Internet. At the site you can view a global, geo-spatial map of the global internet. The visualizations were put together using data from the Dimes project.

One visualization shows the density of Internet connections worldwide while the other displays how international cities are connected. Detailed Maps of Europe and North America are included as well. It’s amazing how skewed the distribution is — beyond Australia, New Zealand, and parts of South-East Asia, the southern hemisphere has only a peppering of connectivity.

Officials at LAX are introducing a bold new idea into their arsenal: random placement of security checkpoints. Can game theory help keep us safe?

Anxious to thwart future terror attacks in the early stages while plotters are casing the airport, LAX security patrols have begun using a new software program called ARMOR, to make the placement of security checkpoints completely unpredictable. Now all airport security officials have to do is press a button labeled “Randomize,” and they can throw a sort of digital cloak of invisibility over where they place the cops’ antiterror checkpoints on any given day.

Click for more on LA Airport Uses Random Numbers to Catch Terrorists »

An innovative propulsion system that could significantly shorten round trips from Earth to Mars (from two years to only six months!) and enable our spaceships to reach Jupiter after one year of space traveling.

Click for more on New Nuclear-powered Spaceship Design Revealed »

The tricorder from Star Trek was a pretty fancy piece of equipment. Wave it around, let it make an odd whistling sound for a few seconds, and it could tell you almost anything, from the presence of nearby life forms to the chemical composition of a particular rock.
It might seem far-fetched, but Marc Reisch at Chemical & Engineering News reckons some very similar devices might soon become a reality.
Reisch writes that many scientific instrument makers are working hard to make portable and rugged versions of mass spectrometers, infrared spectrophotometers, ion detectors and other devices. He presents an interesting survey of the field - X-ray fluorescent analysers, flash luminescent analysers, ion detection units and more. You name it, it seems someone is trying to fit it into a convenient hand-held device.
A lot of the push has come from terrorism fears, Reisch says, as military and law-enforcement officials look for ways to spot explosives, chemical weapons and contaminants more effectively.
“If God made it, we can test for it,” says Richard Begley of PerkinElmer, a Massachusetts-based instrument maker . “A day will come when people will want to know the details of what is in the water they drink, the air they breathe, and the food they eat.”
First we had flip-up cellphones that looked like Star Trek communicators; then Bluetooth earpieces that look a lot like the earpiece Lieutenant Uhura wore. Soon there will be tricorders too. As the 21st century progresses, life increasingly imitates Star Trek.

Source: newscientist

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time.
According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second.

One of the researchers told New Scientist magazine: “For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of.”

Source:  Indefatigable Blog