A major hurdle to producing fusion energy using lasers has been swept aside, results in a new report show. The controlled fusion of atoms - creating conditions like those in our Sun - has long been touted as a possible revolutionary energy source. However, there have been doubts about the use of powerful lasers for fusion energy because the “plasma” they create could interrupt the fusion. An article in Science showed the plasma is far less of a problem than expected. The report is based on the first experiments from the National Ignition Facility (Nif) in the US that used all 192 of its laser beams. Along the way, the experiments smashed the record for the highest energy from a laser - by a factor of 20.
Full Article (BBC - bbc.co.uk)
Peter Shah, 38, cut a hole in the roof of his wooden shed and set up his modest eight-inch telescope inside. After months of patiently waiting for the right moment he emerged with a series of striking images of the Milky Way. His photographs of a vivid variety of star clusters light years from Earth have been compared to the images taken from the £2.5 billion Hubble space telescope.
Full Article (Telegraph - telegraph.co.uk)
It’s one thing to type code that produces a “Hello World” message on your display, but quite another to make the gesture as grandly as one German programmer, who cut a wheat field in Semacode to display the classic message.
Not “No, thanks.” Not “nope.” Just “no.” clear, unambiguous, empowering “no.” But not in a mean way.
One of the biggest changes we made with the launch of the new NPR.org was offering free transcripts on the site. Ever since NPR started transcribing its radio programs in 1990, we have been selling transcripts to help defray the costs of producing them. In the old days, we used to mail out copies of the transcripts, a time-consuming and expensive process for all involved. In 2002 we added e-commerce to the transcript operation and were able to drop the prices and deliver the transcripts via email.
Mozilla has officially released Firefox 3.5, the next major version of its popular open source Web browser. Ars takes a close look at the new version and evaluates its enhancements. Support for HTML 5 video and other important emerging Web standards make this one of the most significant Firefox releases ever.
A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators. Adam formed a hypothesis on the genetics of bakers’ yeast and carried out experiments to test its predictions, without intervention from its makers at Aberystwyth University.
As I listened to David Mihelcic, CTO with the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency talk about the benefits of open source on Federal News Radio’s presentation of “Open Source Solutions - 2 Years In Review,” I couldn’t help but be impressed with just how far open source has come in the past decade. When I first got involved with open source back in 1998, it was perceived as risky (Rampant fear of the GPL and other open-source licenses), not secure (How can community development take care to lock out the bad guys?), and niche. In 2008, however, the CTO of a powerful agency within the U.S. Department of Defense boldly declares open source’s superiority as a development model.
Barack Obama’s transition site, Change.gov, is now under a Creative Commons license—specifically, the highly permissive Attribution 3.0 Unported license, which allows unfettered copying and remixing of content, subject only to an attribution requirement. Lest anyone worry that they’re wild-eyed radicals, though, the copyright policy makes sure to assert the site’s conformity with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
IBM Reveals Five Innovations That Will Change Our Lives in the Next Five Years.
Unveiled today, the third annual “IBM Next Five in Five” is a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years.
Federal district judge Dale A. Kimball has handed down the final judgment in the SCO case. The decision dismisses SCO’s latest claims, grants declaratory relief to Novell, and sustains the court’s previous judgment that SCO owes Novell over $2.54 million (plus interest) for unjust enrichment.
White lists will be on every desktop within the next five years, according to Patrick Morley, CEO of Massachusetts-based Bit9. Morley was in town to address the Dow Jones VentureWire Technology Showcase in Redwood City, Calif., on Tuesday. He stopped by CNET News afterward to discuss why he believes white listing will be important in the next few years.
The latest post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog is about disk space and is written by Michael Beck, a program manager in the core OS deployment feature team. The Windows 7 team outlined tradeoffs between disk space and a few key features, and emphasized the reliability concerns that Windows Vista addressed in Windows XP.
The European Union has finally opened its digital online library, Europeana, to the public, allowing users everywhere free access to the rich archives of EU’s 27 member states. The library includes more than 2 million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archival documents, paintings, and films from national libraries and cultural institutions, all of which have been digitally encoded and uploaded to Europeana. And that’s just the beginning; the EU plans to continue adding content over the next several years.
Adobe has released the very first alpha version of a 64-bit Flash Player for Linux. This move is part of the company’s broader plans to provide comprehensive 64-bit support for the widely-used browser plugin. Adobe expects to release 64-bit versions for all three platforms with the next major version of Flash Player.
