Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, October 11, 2002

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Scientists unveil mummified dinosaur find: "Scientists have unveiled the mummified remains of a 77 million-year-old dinosaur at a paleontologists' convention in the US." [Google Technology News]

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Three Win Nobel for Work on Suicidal Cells: "An American and two Britons won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine yesterday for their discoveries of how healthy cells are instructed to kill themselves." [Google Technology News]

Quick review of Mathematica 4.2 -- Comment()
I updated my quick review of Mathematica 4.2 with some additional material. This program is nice, but the price is high.

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Deep Fritz Forces Draw with Kramnik: "Deep Fritz kept its chances alive by forcing a tough draw with world champion Vladimir Kramnik in the crucial game four of the eight-match "Brains in Bahrain" series on Thursday." [Google Technology News]

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Gene therapy for Parkinson's shows promise in rats: "A new gene therapy tactic appears to protect the brain cells damaged in Parkinson's disease when given to rats with a Parkinson-like condition, according to researchers." [Reuters Health eLine]

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Quantum Transistor May Put a New Spin on Spintronics: "The ubiquitous transistor may go from common to quantum sooner than later if physicists in China and Canada succeed with a design that puts a whole new spin on spintronics -- the burgeoning application of an electron's spin to chips, circuits and, eventually, a revolutionary line of consumer electronics." [osOpinion]

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Supersize IT: From Megabytes to Petabytes: "A deluge of digital data in life sciences and astronomy has scientists at Johns Hopkins University and Microsoft concluding that the titan of supersized data storage, the petabyte, may be as commonplace as the megabyte in less than a decade." [osOpinion]

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Nuclear Research Supercomputer 'Q' To Get Bigger, Faster: "A newly constructed simulation facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is putting $93 million and 30 teraOps [^]- 30 trillion floating point operations per second [^]- to work for nuclear and other research. The Nicholas C. Metropolis Center for Modeling and Simulation houses "Q," one of the world's largest and fastest supercomputers." [osOpinion]

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'Cell' Supercomputing Chip Closer to Completion: "The initial design phase for IBM's mysterious new chip architecture, known as Cell, has ended and is now in the hands of engineers, company officials said. A supercomputer on a chip, Cell is a joint project of IBM, Toshiba and Sony. It is expected to be more than 100 times faster than a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4 chip." [osOpinion]

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Creating the Poor Man's Supercomputer: "It costs less to make a cluster computer out of a group of personal computers or workstations than to buy a supercomputer to perform enormous mathematical tasks. But, getting all those machines to talk to each other presents challenges of its own." [osOpinion]

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Researchers Claim New Chip Technology Beats Moore's Law: "A Princeton University researcher and his team have claimed a new method can increase the density of transistors on silicon chips 100-fold while decreasing the cost of the production process. The new technology is called 'laser assisted direct input.'" [osOpinion]