Weblog & Reports: News From the Web
Google might launch Drive for cloud storage soon
(PhysOrg.com) -- Google's next big move, according to the Wall Street Journal, is a cloud storage service called Drive. Hardly first to the plate, Google is simply catching up to introducing its cloud reposi ...
Walney offshore wind farm is world's biggest (for now)
(PhysOrg.com) -- The Walney wind farm on the Irish Sea--characterized by high tides, waves and windy weather--officially opened this week. The farm is treated in the press as a very big deal as the Walney ...
Humans may have helped the decline of African rainforests 3000 years ago
(PhysOrg.com) -- Large areas of rainforests in Central Africa mysteriously disappeared over three thousand years ago, to be replaced by savannas. The prevailing theory has been that the cause was a change ...
Borexino Collaboration succeeds in spotting pep neutrinos emitted from the sun
(PhysOrg.com) -- To learn more about how the sun works, scientists study particles that are emitted from it into space due to thermonuclear reactions that occur inside; by applying known physics principles, ...
Soraa LED light may dim 50-watt halogen rivals
(PhysOrg.com) -- Soraa, a Fremont, California company founded in 2008, this week launched its first product, a light that uses LEDS (light emitting diodes). The "Soraa LED MR16 lamp" is the "perfect" replacement ...
Quantum physicist explains $100K offer for proof scaled-up quantum computing is impossible
(PhysOrg.com) -- MIT researcher Scott Aaronson has certainly riled the physics community with his offer this past Friday, of $100,000 to anyone who can prove that scaled-up quantum computing is impossible. ...
Solar start-ups set new efficiency records
(PhysOrg.com) -- Although Alta Devices and Semprius make different types of solar panels, both start-ups have been breaking records in the past few days. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Alta Devices announced that ...
Haptic cube lets you feel tomorrow's temps
(PhysOrg.com) -- Will it be an invention joining a storage room of other inventions? Or kicked further up to gadget boutiques for the very rich? Or a popular gadget for many worldwide? Whatever its destiny, ...
Nicira promises virtual networks will transform networking
(PhysOrg.com) -- For the past four years, founders of the start-up company Nicira have been developing cutting-edge software that they predict will transform the networking technology underlying the Internet. ...
Slowing ocean current caused Earth to spin faster
(PhysOrg.com) -- Most people probably didn’t notice it, but back in 2009, the Earth spun around on its axis a tiny bit faster than usual, making for some slightly shorter days. It only happened for a ...
Researchers make better heat sensor based on butterfly wings
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists have long known that butterfly wings produce their iridescent colors by bouncing light around and between tiny ridges in structures made of chitin. More recently they’ve discovered ...
Team isolates nerve cells involved in storing long term memory and gene proteins associated with them
(Medical Xpress) -- A research team in Taiwan has succeeded in isolating two nerve cells in fruit fly brains that are believed to be the major players in allowing for the formation of long term memories. Furthermore, ...
A frank discussion of the power law and linking correlation to causation
(PhysOrg.com) -- Michael Stumpf a mathematics professor at Imperial College in London, and Mason Porter a lecturer at Oxford have teamed together to write and publish a perspective piece in Science regarding the in ...
New Zealand team finds early plant arrivers dominated landscape
(PhysOrg.com) -- It seems intuitive that not all plant species could have taken a foothold on land at the same time all those millions of years ago as conditions on Earth evolved to the point where they could survive; some ...
Google rumored to have built Heads-Up-Display glasses prototype
(PhysOrg.com) -- 9to5Google is reporting that they have received a tip from someone they believe to be a reliable source saying that Google is working on a Heads-Up-Display (HUD) pair of eye-glasses. The per ...