Nature’s Top 10 Of 2006

News@nature.com’s hit lists of hot news for 2006 include “‘Vegetative’ patient shows signs of conscious thought” and “Hawking rewrites history… backwards.”

Site – http://www.nature.com

Memory breakthrough could mean smaller, faster electronics

A new alloy could lead to smaller memory chips some 500 times faster than today’s, said developers at IBM Corp. and two partners on Monday. The alloy, based on materials commonly used in CDs and DVDs, could result in a new generation of digital cameras and music players capable of storing more data using less power, the researchers said. Working at IBM Research laboratories on both U.S. coasts, scientists from IBM, Macronix International Co., Ltd. of Taiwan and Qimonda AG of Germany created a prototype non-volatile memory device that changed state more than 500 times faster than current flash memory while using half the power.

Site – http://www.cbc.ca

Top Minds Tapped by Translation Task

The past few years have shown that U.S. government intelligence goes only so far. One of the biggest challenges is recognizing vital information in foreign languages — and acting quickly on it. That’s why the military would love software that can listen to TV broadcasts or phone conversations and read Web sites in Arabic and Chinese, translate them into English and summarize the key elements for humans. But each of those steps has long bedeviled computer scientists. Perfecting them and combining them — well, that is “DARPA hard.” That means it’s difficult even by the extreme standards of the Pentagon’s next-generation technology arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Site – http://biz.yahoo.com

IBM to give birth to ‘Second Life’ business group

Virtual reality and other visual interface work is the next project on IBM’s plate, Irving Wladawsky-Berger said in an interview at CNET’s Second Life offices. Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technical strategy and innovation at IBM, led the company’s response to earlier technologies that rewrote the rules of the computing industry, such as e-commerce and Linux.

Site – http://news.com.com

The Universe In A Single Atom

As the Dalai Lama observes in this wise and humble book, dialogue between scientists and those interested in spirituality is important because science is not neutral; it can be used for good or ill, and we must approach scientific inquiry with compassion and empathy. Similarly, a spirituality that ignores science can quickly become a rigid fundamentalism. Sometimes the Dalai Lama discovers similarities between the two fields. For example, Einstein’s idea that time is relative dovetails neatly with Buddhist philosophical understandings of time. Still, His Holiness does not accept all scientific thinking as holy writ: though he is intrigued by scientific stories of origins, like the Big Bang theory, Buddhism holds that the universe is “infinite and beginningless.”

Site – http://www.amazon.com