The Main Blog!

Scientist have nailed down how and when the Earth will cease to exist.

The sun will slowly expand into a red giant, pushing the Earth further out into space, but not far enough.

Our home planet will be snagged by the sun's outer atmosphere, gradually plunging to its doom inside the fiery stellar furnace.

1969: The publication of the first %u201Crequest for comments,%u201D or RFC, documents paves the way for the birth of the internet.

April 7 is often cited as a symbolic birth date of the net because the RFC memoranda contain research, proposals and methodologies applicable to internet technology. RFC documents provide a way for engineers and others to kick around new ideas in a public forum; sometimes, these ideas are adopted as new standards by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

One interesting aspect of the RFC is that each document is issued a unique serial number. An individual paper cannot be overwritten; rather, updates or corrections are submitted on a separate RFC. The result is an ongoing historical record of the evolution of internet standards.

When it comes to the birth of the net, Jan. 1, 1983, also has its supporters. On that date, the National Science Foundation%u2019s university network backbone, a precursor to the World Wide Web, became operational.

Weird. The Opera web browser for Wii (you know, the one that was supposed to be available at launch) will finally be ready to enter its public beta phase on December 22 -- that's Friday! -- and Opera chose to announce this momentous occasion by sending me a comic. Thanks, guys!

Nintendo announced this morning that the browser will be free until June 2007, and anyone who hasn't yet downloaded it by that time will have to pay a reasonable 500 Wii Points. And yes, it'll support Flash. Nintendo's full release after the jump.

Free Opera Internet Browser Connects the World to Wii
Starting Dec. 22, Beta Version Lets Users Surf
From the Comfort of Their Couches

Nintendo, which yesterday announced it would voluntarily exchange the straps on 3.2 million controllers for its new Wii video console, is facing a federal lawsuit brought by a Texas man who claims his $250 game was rendered useless after a flimsy wrist strap on the controller broke and sent the gizmo flying.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, perhaps the most ambitious physics experiment ever created. If all goes well with its November 2007 launch, the LHC will help answer some of scientists' most fundamental outstanding questions: What is mass? What is the invisible, near-undetectable dark matter that seems to make up most of the universe? How did any of the matter that makes up our own cells survive the big bang?

Nothing can possibly go wrong ... go wrong ... go wrong ... The truth behind the old joke is that most robots are programmed with a fairly rigid "model" of what they and the world around them are like. If a robot is damaged or its environment changes unexpectedly, it can't adapt.

Video Games and Sex. In recent years, it seems like the two have been going together like peanut butter and jelly. Grape jelly. With recent titles such as "Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball" and "BMX XXX", it's obvious that sex sells ... especially to horny little gamer geeks. Back in the day, however, this was not quite the case. Well, at least not intentionally... most of the time.

Web-based maps are handy for keeping tabs on weather and traffic, so why not for disease outbreaks, too?

The new Healthmap website digests information from a variety of sources ranging from the World Health Organization to Google News and plots the spread of about 50 diseases on a continually updated global map.

Imagine that all the people on Earth - all 6.5 billion of us and counting - could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let's not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses). Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust.

Scientists aim to reproduce miniature versions of the so-called Big Bang, which is thought to have started the universe.

To do this they will smash protons together at huge speeds along a 27km tube known as a particle accelerator.

They hope to create tiny black holes or find extra dimensions in the universe.

They estimate the possibility of accidentally destroying the planet as extremely low.

The risk is calculated at about 10 to the minus 40 - a 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance.

This will show ya how unsafe we really are. They are really easy to make and even easier to use. I'll let you know how well they work soon...

Hydrogen Technology Applications, Inc, makers of Aquygen, a combustible gas made from water that is a safe, cost-effective, environmentally-friendly alternative to and enhancer of fossil fuels.
Check out this video of them with a water fueled torch, and a car that runs on water!!
If this is true how come the governmet hasn't gotten rid of these guys yet?