January 31 2009 (Saturday)

• Tornado
  LNER Peppercorn Class A1 60163 Tornado
  60163 Tornado is a main-line steam locomotive built in Darlington, England. Completed in 2008, Tornado was the first such locomotive built in the United Kingdom since Evening Star, the last steam locomotive built by British Railways, in 1960...
  
  , a brand new £3 million main line steam locomotive
  Steam locomotive
  A steam locomotive is a railway locomotive that produces its power through a steam engine. These locomotives are fueled by burning some combustible material, usually coal, wood or oil, to produce steam in a boiler, which drives the steam engine...
  
   makes its first passenger journey in the United Kingdom
  United Kingdom
  The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
  
   (BBC)

January 17 2009 (Saturday)

• Microsoft
  Microsoft
  Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
  
   is charged by the European Commission
  European Commission
  The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union....
  
   for anti-competitive practices by including Internet Explorer
  Internet Explorer
  Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
  
   with Windows
  Microsoft Windows
  Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
  
  . (BBC)

January 16 2009 (Friday)

• Using new software scientists have designed a metamaterial
  Metamaterial
  Metamaterials are artificial materials engineered to have properties that may not be found in nature. Metamaterials usually gain their properties from structure rather than composition, using small inhomogeneities to create effective macroscopic behavior....
  
   that bends a large number of frequencies. (TechReview)

January 15 2009 (Thursday)

• A methane
  Methane
  Methane is a chemical compound with the chemical formula . It is the simplest alkane, the principal component of natural gas, and probably the most abundant organic compound on earth. The relative abundance of methane makes it an attractive fuel...
  
   burst of 21,000 tons occurred on Mars
  Mars
  Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...
  
   in late summer of 2003. This could be from rocks or microbes. (AP)
• The GEO 600
  GEO 600
  GEO 600 is a gravitational wave detector located near Sarstedt, Germany. This instrument, and its sister interferometric detectors, when operational, are some of the most sensitive gravitational wave detectors ever designed...
  
   is experiencing noise that lends evidence to the hologram universe theory; where smooth space-time we perceive breaks down into "grains". (NewScientist)

January 14 2009 (Wednesday)

• Simulations show having more than eight multi-cores decreases speed as they compete for memory bandwidth
  Memory bandwidth
  Memory bandwidth is the rate at which data can be read from or stored into a semiconductor memory by a processor. Memory bandwidth is usually expressed in units of bytes/second, though this can vary for systems with natural data sizes that are not a multiple of the commonly used 8-bit bytes.Memory...
  
   and memory bus
  Memory bus
  The memory bus is the computer bus which connects the main memory to the memory controller in computer systems. Originally, general-purpose buses like VMEbus and the S-100 bus were used, but to reduce latency, modern memory buses are designed to connect directly to DRAM chips, and thus are...
  
  . (PhysOrg)

January 13 2009 (Tuesday)

• Seventeen radio telescope
  Radio telescope
  A radio telescope is a form of directional radio antenna used in radio astronomy. The same types of antennas are also used in tracking and collecting data from satellites and space probes...
  
  s will coordinate to make a telescope the size of the Earth
  Earth
  Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...
  
   to observe three quasar
  Quasar
  A quasi-stellar radio source is a very energetic and distant active galactic nucleus. Quasars are extremely luminous and were first identified as being high redshift sources of electromagnetic energy, including radio waves and visible light, that were point-like, similar to stars, rather than...
  
  s; achieving 100x better resolution than optical telescope
  Optical telescope
  An optical telescope is a telescope which is used to gather and focus light mainly from the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum for directly viewing a magnified image for making a photograph, or collecting data through electronic image sensors....
  
  s. (PhysOrg)

January 12 2009 (Monday)

• A list of the "TOP 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors" is released by security experts. (SANS.org)
• Magnetic resonance force microscopy
  Magnetic Resonance Force Microscopy
  Magnetic resonance force microscopy is an imaging technique that acquires magnetic resonance images at nanometer scales, and possibly at atomic scales in the future. MRFM is potentially able to observe protein structures which cannot be seen using X-ray crystallography and protein nuclear...
  
   captures the first three-dimensional image of a virus
  Virus
  A virus is a small infectious agent that can replicate only inside the living cells of organisms. Viruses infect all types of organisms, from animals and plants to bacteria and archaea...
  
  . (NYTimes)

January 10 2009 (Saturday)

• CES 2009: The Palm Pre
  Palm Pre
  The Palm Pre is a multimedia smartphone designed and marketed by Palm with a multi-touch screen and a sliding keyboard. The smartphone was the first to use Palm's Linux based mobile operating system, webOS...
  
   wins Best in Show and People's Choice. (CNet)

January 9 2009 (Friday)

• A case study shows how Memristor
  Memristor
  Memristor is a passive two-terminal electrical component envisioned by Leon Chua as a fundamental non-linear circuit element relating charge and magnetic flux linkage...
  
  s could be used to create low cost, high density memory. (ArxivBlog)

January 8 2009 (Thursday)

• An artificially made RNA
  RNA
  Ribonucleic acid , or RNA, is one of the three major macromolecules that are essential for all known forms of life....
  
   molecule self-replicates and evolves. (NewScientist)
• Using the mathematical tool Morse-Smale complex a new algorithm
  Algorithm
  In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is an effective method expressed as a finite list of well-defined instructions for calculating a function. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning...
  
   has been made to extract and visualize patterns in exponentially growing data sets. (Physorg)
• A scaled up test will be done with coal
  Coal
  Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...
  
  -digesting microorganisms converting coal into methane
  Methane
  Methane is a chemical compound with the chemical formula . It is the simplest alkane, the principal component of natural gas, and probably the most abundant organic compound on earth. The relative abundance of methane makes it an attractive fuel...
  
   for electricity or to power vehicles. (TechReview)
• Therapeutic hypothermia
  Therapeutic hypothermia
  Therapeutic hypothermia, also known as protective hypothermia, is a medical treatment that lowers a patient's body temperature in order to help reduce the risk of the ischemic injury to tissue following a period of insufficient blood flow. Periods of insufficient blood flow may be due to cardiac...
  
   is becoming more common in hospitals greatly reducing the death rate of cardiac arrest
  Cardiac arrest
  Cardiac arrest, is the cessation of normal circulation of the blood due to failure of the heart to contract effectively...
  
  . (PopSci)

January 7 2009 (Wednesday)

• Microsoft
  Microsoft
  Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
  
   releases Windows 7 beta as a free download for testing. (Wired)
• A repulsive Casimir effect has been measured between nano-materials in a bromobenzene solution. This could be used to lubricate or create ultra-low static friction for nanomachines. (NewScientist)
• The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) protocol will be implemented on .org and .gov domains initially to eliminate infiltration by malicious websites. (TechReview)

January 5 2009 (Monday)

• The Milky Way
  Milky Way
  The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains the Solar System. This name derives from its appearance as a dim un-resolved "milky" glowing band arching across the night sky...
  
   appears to be as large as the Andromeda Galaxy
  Andromeda Galaxy
  The Andromeda Galaxy is a spiral galaxy approximately 2.5 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Andromeda. It is also known as Messier 31, M31, or NGC 224, and is often referred to as the Great Andromeda Nebula in older texts. Andromeda is the nearest spiral galaxy to the...
  
  , with revised data showing our galaxy has 50% more mass than previously thought. (AP) Also, the sharpest infrared image of our galaxy was released, showing 200 new massive stars. (NewScientist)
• A new "nanohoop" molecule may allow much longer and higher quality carbon nanotube
  Carbon nanotube
  Carbon nanotubes are allotropes of carbon with a cylindrical nanostructure. Nanotubes have been constructed with length-to-diameter ratio of up to 132,000,000:1, significantly larger than for any other material...
  
   manufacturing. (PhysOrg)
• Celebrity Twitter
  Twitter
  Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
  
   accounts were hacked. (CNet)
• The Perspex globe will simulate how insect
  Insect
  Insects are a class of living creatures within the arthropods that have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body , three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes, and two antennae...
  
  s see, navigate and learn; but it can also be used for surveillance, lighting and robots. (PhysOrg)

January 3 2009 (Saturday)

• Mars
  Mars
  Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...
  
   rovers Spirit
  Spirit rover
  Spirit, MER-A , is a robotic rover on Mars, active from 2004 to 2010. It was one of two rovers of NASA's ongoing Mars Exploration Rover Mission. It landed successfully on Mars at 04:35 Ground UTC on January 4, 2004, three weeks before its twin, Opportunity , landed on the other side of the planet...
  
  and Opportunity
  Opportunity rover
  Opportunity, MER-B , is a robotic rover on the planet Mars, active since 2004. It is the remaining rover in NASA's ongoing Mars Exploration Rover Mission...
  
  celebrate their 5th anniversary. (BBC)

January 2 2009 (Friday)

• University of Michigan
  University of Michigan
  The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
  
   research has found that being in an urban
  Urban area
  An urban area is characterized by higher population density and vast human features in comparison to areas surrounding it. Urban areas may be cities, towns or conurbations, but the term is not commonly extended to rural settlements such as villages and hamlets.Urban areas are created and further...
  
   setting can have significant negative impacts on memory, mood, self control and concentration; and that even brief encounters with natural settings can lead to improvements. (Boston)
• Nanodiamonds indicate comet
  Comet
  A comet is an icy small Solar System body that, when close enough to the Sun, displays a visible coma and sometimes also a tail. These phenomena are both due to the effects of solar radiation and the solar wind upon the nucleus of the comet...
  
   impacts on Earth
  Earth
  Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...
  
   created a sudden cooling period 12,000 years ago, making large mammals like mammoth
  Mammoth
  A mammoth is any species of the extinct genus Mammuthus. These proboscideans are members of Elephantidae, the family of elephants and mammoths, and close relatives of modern elephants. They were often equipped with long curved tusks and, in northern species, a covering of long hair...
  
  s extinct and starting a new ice age. (SciAm)
• Samples as small as 75 nanometers in diameter can be trapped or moved using light. This could be applied to lab on a chip applications. (PhysOrg)