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I would like to know if any of you know what time President Bush will speak about space exploration. I probably would not be able to watch it so I thought it would to be nice if you guys keep me informed and post your opinions about it.

Every so often nature surprises us by offering a simple solution to a seemingly impossible problem. Now it seems that the great scourge of the 21st century, rogue nuclear weapons, also may yield to a natural remedy--sunlight. Homeland security experts worry less about a repeat of the events of September 11 than they do the detonation of a crude nuclear weapon in a major city. Their nightmare scenario derives from two facts. The first is that the world is awash in dangerous nuclear materials. A small amount exists in the form of enriched uranium and plutonium--needed to make atomic bombs....

<p>NEW YORK - As wonderful as Internet search engines are, they have a pretty big flaw. They often deliver too much information, and a lot of it isn't quite what we're looking for. Who really bothers to read the dozens of pages of results that Google generates?</p>

In experiment that tracks subtle motions of subatomic particles called muons has found tantalizing evidence for a vast shadow universe of normally unseen matter existing side by side with ours, scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory said yesterday. The significance of the findings has been thrown into doubt by a series of mathematical errors and theoretical disagreements by physicists around the world who have been weighing the evidence for what would, if correct, rank as one of the greatest discoveries in science. The Brookhaven "g minus 2" experiment has produced extraordinarily minute observations of the gyrating muons. In a dispiriting...

Scientists tinker with displays for books, clothing, and military gadgets that are as thin as newsprint and as durable as fabric. Clothing for travelers or soldiers that alters color to fit the environment. Books that change content on request. Computer displays so thin they can be manufactured on a roll and cut to size like kitchen foil. Even paper that emits sounds or can be erased and reused thousands of times. These aren't the smart gadgets of fictional spy movies: They are applications of emerging electronic-display technologies. And some will hit the market as early as this year. Technologists hope...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Put the inventor of the light-emitting diode and the maker of the world's fastest transistor together in a research laboratory and what kinds of bright ideas might surface? One answer is a light-emitting transistor that could revolutionize the electronics industry. Professors Nick Holonyak Jr. and Milton Feng at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have uncovered a light-emitting transistor that could make the transistor the fundamental element in optoelectronics as well as in electronics. The scientists report their discovery in the Jan. 5 issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters. "We have demonstrated light emission from the...

Linus Torvalds, creator of the popular Linux computer operating system, defended his work yesterday as not always lovely but original - and certainly not copied, as a Utah company has contended. The Utah company, the SCO Group, has begun sending out a round of warning letters to large corporate users of Linux, which is distributed free. The letters, dated Friday, assert that Linux, a variant of the Unix operating system, violates an SCO license and copyright. SCO, based in Lindon, Utah, owns the rights to the Unix operating system. SCO has for months made the broad claim that Linux included...

[Computerworld] IT managers are increasingly turning to thin clients, other options in push to cut PC costs EVERY YEAR Dave Raspallo, CIO at Textron Financial Corp., found himself having to replace a third of his 1,200 PCs. But he grew tired of the cost of the annual ritual, and he began swapping out his desktops for thin clients. Forty percent of those PCs are now gone, and many more will disappear next year. "I would consider it a failure if we don't eliminate completely the use of any desktops," said Raspallo, who has a name for his project: STIMI, or...

Advanced Micro Devices has quietly trotted out a version of its Athlon 64 chip that provides a little less performance than earlier models but only costs about half as much. The new Athlon 64 3000+ runs at 2GHz, the same as the existing Athlon 64 3200+, but it only comes with a 512KB secondary cache, according to an AMD spokesman. The 3200+ features a 1MB cache. A cache is a pool of memory integrated into the processor for rapid data access. In general, large caches lead to better performance. AMD, however, prices the Athlon 64 3000+ at $218 in quantities...

MIAMI -- Herb Williams, a Palatka, Fla., dock builder and former Alaskan crab boat skipper, isn't the first guy you would peg for solving the world's energy problems. But here he sat, tropical shirt standing out at a table of button-down engineers from Miami-Dade's water and sewer plant on Virginia Key, making a plan that sounds like science fiction seem plausible. Almost inevitable. Williams' small company wants to sink a network of innovative turbines he has designed -- think of a giant fan with a hole in the center where the hub should be -- deep into the Gulf Stream...

First Report from Grokker Inside Hearing: IBM Wins Both Motions to Compel Friday, December 05 2003 @ 02:30 PM EST Our first report from a Groklaw volunteer, sam, who attended the court hearing is that IBM won both of its motions to compel and SCO's motion was set for a later date. Here is what sam is telling us, and it's subject to further information and confirmation as more news arrives. We have several attending and I'll do a followup, but this is the first word. Here is what sam is telling us: "Just returned from the hearing. "Needless to...

22nd Edition of TOP500 List of World’s Fastest Supercomputers Released MANNHEIM, Germany; KNOXVILLE, Tenn.; & BERKELEY, Calif. – In what has become a much-anticipated event in the world of high-performance computing, the 22nd edition of the “TOP500” list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was released today (November 16, 2003). The Earth Simulator supercomputer retains the number one position with its Linpack benchmark performance of 35.86 Tflop/s (“teraflops” or trillions of calculations per second). It was built by NEC and installed last year at the Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, Japan. The list of cluster systems in the TOP10 has grown...

Missile Defense Boost-Phase Contract Awarded The Department of Defense announced today that the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has awarded a contract to Northrop Grumman Space and Mission Systems Corp. for the development and testing of a concept for the Kinetic Energy Interceptor (KEI) program designed to intercept and destroy a ballistic missile in its boost/early ascent phase, which is the period of flight lasting from three to five minutes after a ballistic missile is launched. The contract awarded today is approximately $4.5 billion over the next eight years. This is the MDA’s first capability-based development and test contract, and it...

By MICHAEL KANELLOS Staff Writer, CNET News.com Intel said it has produced chips with the 65-nanometre manufacturing process, a strong sign the company will continue to keep pace with Moore's Law. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker announced Monday that it has made Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) cells, a type of memory, with the 65-nanometre process and will start to mass-manufacture chips on the process in 2005. The nanometre figure refers to the average size of features on chips produced with the process. Most PC microprocessors on the market today are made on the 130-nanometre process, and manufacturers are just...

Korea to build 100M bps Internet system Infrastructure will offer telecom, broadcasting and Internet access from a variety of devices By David Legard, IDG News Service November 18, 2003 South Korea plans to build a nationwide Internet access infrastructure capable of speeds between 50M bps (bits per second) and 100M bps by 2010, the online edition of the Chosun Ilbo daily newspaper reported Tuesday. The infrastructure will be known as the broadband convergence network (BcN) and will offer telecommunications, broadcasting and Internet access from a wide variety of devices, the paper said, quoting the Ministry of Information and Communication. Construction...

<p>The first leg of an ultra-high-performance network will go live this week in what its backers call the most important networking experiment since Arpanet, the military network that laid the foundation for the Internet.</p> <p>The National LambdaRail is the biggest, fastest network ever undertaken for scientific research.</p>

Microsoft placed a $250,000 bounty on the respective heads of the MSBlaster and So.Big virus writers as part of a $5 million program it launched here on Wednesday with the FBI, Secret Service and Interpol to fight cybercrime. The reward program, sponsored by Microsoft and backed by those law enforcement agencies, represents the first major partnership between the private sector and government officials to hunt down, capture and prosecute hackers and virus writers.At a press conference today at the National Press Club in Washington, Microsoft's top attorney pledged to press prosecution of suspected virus writers and reward those who turn...

The nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way has been revealed. It is so close that the Milky Way is gradually consuming it by pulling in its stars. But it will be few billion years before it is entirely swallowed up. The previously unknown galaxy lies about 25,000 light years from Earth and 42,000 light years from the centre of the Milky Way, beyond the stars in the constellation Canis Major. It is twice as close to the centre of our galaxy than the previous record holder, the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, which was discovered in 1994. Geraint Lewis, at the...

Microsoft Corp. on Monday began selling new voice recognition and control software to allow mobile phone and handheld computer users to control most functions of their phones without fiddling with tiny controls. Microsoft Voice Command will be sold as a $40 add-on for the Windows Mobile Pocket PC software for personal digital assistants and the Pocket PC version for mobile phones, the world's largest software maker said. Microsoft, trying to move its software beyond the desktop and into living rooms and mobile devices, said the new voice control software will make it easier for users to access information and functions...

The Sun cut loose with three severe flares in less than 24 hours through Monday morning, bringing to nine the number of major eruptions in less than two weeks. Scientists have never witnessed a string of activity like this. Colorful aurora are expected to grace the skies at high latitudes and possibly into lower portions of the United States and Europe over the next two or three nights. Satellites and power grids could once again be put at risk. Early Monday, Paal Brekke, deputy project manager of the SOHO spacecraft, was still digesting the significance of the three additional outbursts...