Microsoft has studied a total of 30 billion instant messages sent by over 250 million people in June of 2006, and determined that we are in fact, all linked by only 6.6 degrees of separation.http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/08/are-we-really-s.html

Have you ever wondered what the world would look like after Armageddon? Everyone has their own ideas – chaos, hell, fire and brimstone or an eerie calm where, finally, you’d be able to grab a few minutes of peace and quiet!http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/featured/tokyo-after-the-apocalypse-pics/1558

Public schools spent $8 billion on utilities in 2002, up by $2 billion from 2000. When taking diesel costs into account for school buses, the recent spike in energy costs is more daunting.http://cleantechnica.com/2008/08/06/rising-energy-costs-plunder-school-budgets/

Today the US federal government has designated over 625 square miles of mountain range as a protected habitat for the endangered Sierra Nevada Bighorn Sheep. Conservationists had to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2005 in order to have this land protected. The lawsuit stated that the Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep is threatened […]

Scientists have created the world’s thinnest balloon, made of a single layer of carbon just one atom thick. The fabric that the balloon is made of is leakproof to even the tiniest airborne molecules. It could find use in “aquariums” smaller than a red blood cell, through which scientists could peer at molecules, researchers suggested.http://www.livescience.com/technology/080811-thinnest-balloon.html

An eye-shaped camera made from a flexible mesh of silicon light-detectors marks a significant step towards creating a ‘bionic’ eye, its inventors say.http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080806/full/news.2008.1004.html?s=news_rss

In 2006, Andrew Jordan, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, together with Alexander Korotkov at the University of California, Riverside, spelled out how to exploit a quantum quirk to accomplish a feat long thought impossible, and this week a research team at the University of California at Santa Barbara has tested […]

A University of Utah study is shedding light on an important, unsolved physics problem: the relationship between chaos theory – which is based on 300-year-old Newtonian physics – and the modern theory of quantum mechanics.http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-08/uou-qcu080608.php

Traditional magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, can detect the major anatomical features of the brain and is often used to diagnose strokes and brain tumors. But advances in computing power and novel processing algorithms have allowed scientists to analyze the information captured during an MRI in completely new ways.http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/21175/

One of the lesser known cornerstones of modern physics is Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication which he published in 1948 while juggling and unicycling his way around Bell Labs. Shannon’s theory concerns how a message created at one point in space can be reproduced at another point in space. He calls the conduit . […]