All the great names in thoroughbred horse racing — from Secretariat to Man O’War, from Seabiscuit to Seattle Slew — they’re all related, and a team of geneticists has now traced their talent for speed back to a single ancestor. The “speed gene” that made them all so fast was apparently a genetic aberration, and it probably started with one British mare who lived in the mid-17th century.

Emmeline Hill of University College Dublin led a team that analyzed DNA in 593 horses from 22 modern breeds, … Read More → "Thoroughbred race horses all traced to one 17th century mare"

It’s not the smallest transistor out there, but the boffins at IBM have constructed the tiniest carbon nanotube transistor to date. It’s nine nanometers in size, making it one nanometer smaller than the presumed physical limit of silicon transistors. Plus, it consumes less power and is able to carry more current than present-day technology. 
via Engadget</ … Read More → "IBM builds 9 nanometer carbon nanotube transistor, puts silicon on notice"

Yeah yeah yeah, I know…I was born in Alaska. “Storm” is one of those relative terms. But yes, cool RC machine for sure. 🙂

Snow “storm”? That’s barely a light flurry. Experience a blizzard where you can’t see 10 feet away in a total white-out, and then you’ll know what a “storm” is. Cool R/C machine by the way.

– Ex-Minnesotan

On January 22, an M8.7 class flare helped cause the biggest solar storm since 2005. Airplanes had to change routes, and the power grid and satellites were affected. It also caused some of the best auroras ever seen.

This spectacular coronal aurora was captured over Fairbanks, Alaska, recorded from 1:44 to 2:11am local time on January 22, 2012. 
via Gizmodo

Read more, and check out the other six (amazing!) videos here 

If you’re like most people, you’re annoyed by passwords. You’ve got dozens to remember — some of them tortuously complex — and on any given day, as you read e-mails, send tweets, and order groceries online, you’re bound to forget one, or at least mistype it. You may even be one of those unfortunate people who’ve had … Read More → "The world’s first computer password was useless too"

Somewhere between the psychology of love and the intricacies of romance lies a vast and unmapped territory of abstract and subjective existential paradoxes. That’s precisely what New-York-based British photographer Julian Hibbard sets out to map in Schematics: A Love Story& … Read More → "Schematics: A Love Story in Geometric Diagrams"

After all the drama with the Phobos-grunt failure for Russia, it has to be a bit nerve racking to the ISS astronauts that need food, water and parts when a Russian supply ship takes off. If the ship had failed, it would be longer before fresh supply is arrived. The good news is that the liftoff of the Progress 46 unmanned ship went off without a hitch this week and the supply vessel … Read More → "Russian unmanned cargo ship on way to ISS"

If you’ve ever wanted to program a microcontroller “in the cloud,” you might want to head over to Inventor Town, an online IDE that allows you to write and compile firmware for the MSP430 series of microcontrollers.

After logging in with your Google account, you’re presented with a ‘My Projects’ page. From there, you can … Read More → "Program a microcontroller over the Internet"

TNW has a great little anecdote today: a 10-year-old kid got lost inside a computer in the 1950s. That was the time when computers less powerful than your current phone were bigger than most homes. This is his story:

In 1950, I was 10 years old, visiting the Michigan State University campus. The computer was on the ground floor, turned off, with the door open. It was perhaps half the … Read More → "A 10-year-old kid got lost inside a computer—for real"