Science Daily points the way for the next information revolution. Not using electrons, but light itself:

The merging of two technologies under development — plasmonics and nanophotonics — is promising the emergence of new “quantum information systems” far more powerful than today’s computers.

The technology hinges on using single photons — the tiny particles that make up light — for switching [...]

Marine biology from the Diesel Age. Crowded organisms, barely visible through the equipment. (And I’m talking about the researchers.)

Photo from NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Historical Photo Archives, the Sette Collection.

MSNBC (among other sources) reports on the amorphous, multiform, shuddering things that live and ooze in a crawling chaos across the deepest ocean floor:

Gigantic amoebas have been found in the Mariana Trench, the deepest region on Earth.
During a July 2011 voyage to the Pacific Ocean chasm, researchers with Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and National [...]

Must’ve been something to see. The Telegraph gives a new picture of what it was like when hundreds of dinosaurs went a-walking:

The journey would have taken place on a seasonal basis as the 20-tonne, 23-metre long beasts trekked together across vast distances.

The discovery was made by Henry Fricke, head of the geology department at Colorado College, whose work [...]

Lando. Lando Calrissian. Cloud miner. Sounds like a great space opera profession, doesn’t it? But National Geographic is talking about exploiting the atmosphere for fuel:

…[S]cience has long known that it’s possible to recombine carbon from CO2 with hydrogen from water to make hydrocarbons—in other words, to make familiar fuels such as gasoline. The problem, ironically, has been [...]

The Daily is reporting on a revolution. DIY researchers are leaving the academy to take a punk rock approach to science:

Three years ago, [Mackensie] Cowell and his counterpart Jason Bobe, director of community outreach for the Personal Genome Project at Harvard Medical School, founded a movement called Do-It-Yourself Biology, which brings hobbyists to genetics. From its first meeting [...]

SONG: “Move It Close to You.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on “Mind-guided robotic arm lets paralyzed man touch girlfriend”, CBS News, 10 Oct 2011, as used in the post “Touching robot fingers”.

ABSTRACT: It’s funny – whenever I play this song with just an acoustic guitar, it kind of [...]

The artist and writer William Beebe is better known for his deep sea explorations than his wattle portraiture. He studied at Columbia, but spent too much time exploring and collecting specimens to earn a degree there. Instead, he became a lecturer and employee of the Bronx Zoo. In 1916, he set up a research station in South America [...]

New Scientist looks at where and how business happens – and reveals that out of 37 million global companies, it’s only a very few who call the shots:

the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a [...]