Closeup of a silicon surface pockmarked with holes, designed to slow light passing through it.
This “slow light” waveguide, designed by a team led by Yuri A. Vlasov of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson
Research Center, a crucial component of an optical computer.
New Scientist has a quick round-up of what they consider to be the ten […]

Until now, scientists were only able to peer inside transparent amber stones.
Opaque amber conceals insights into life forms from tens of millions of years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. But until now, the animals preserved inside the opaque “stones” have remained tantalizingly hidden.

 
China is preparing an arsenal of rockets and aircraft to protect the Olympics opening ceremony from rain, hoping to disperse clouds before they can drench dignitaries at the roofless “bird’s nest” stadium.
Officials believe there is a 47% probability of rain during the August 8 opening ceremony and a 6% chance of a heavy downpour and […]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPeWwSiAXr0

This one is crazy. NBA star Kobe Bryant is a spectacular jumper, but his insurance company would never let him do a stunt like this. In this Nike ad, Bryant executes a perfectly timed leap over a speeding Aston Martin DB9 Volante.
 

The setup certainly doesn’t make it sound positive: The Redbird Reef off the coast of Slaughter Beach, Delaware is a dump site for retired New York City subway cars, and there are already nearly 700 of them on the ocean floor. Before you cry foul, consider the words of Jeff Tinsman, the Delaware Department of […]

 
Conventional chemotherapy can wreak havoc on healthy tissue, causing painful side effects, and it’s not always effective. Nanotechnology-based methods to deliver these drugs only to cancerous cells have shown promise, but they don’t work for all cancers. Now a handful of research groups are developing more-complex approaches that use microscopic carriers to deliver a variety […]

This is a bedroom furniture project named Dreamscape, comprising of one King size bed and two sets of bedside cabinets. The King size bed comes with two bed storage drawers whilst the two sets of bedside cabinets has three drawers, one of which has a secret concealed compartment under its top. This is one design […]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEjoga1yrn0

Nicknamed “The Door to Hell”, this place is situated near the small town of Darvaz in Uzbekistan. Ever since the geologists ignited the site so that no poisonous gas will come out, the cavern has been burning for the last 35 years without stop. Second video after the jump.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXBeu7o9uUM

Here’s a YouTube clip of Marcel W. Helland playing one of the world’s rarest musical instruments (only 25 or so exists): the contrabass saxophone. As you can see, it’s quite large (about 6 foot 4 inches or 1.9 m tall) and heavy (45 lb. or 20 kg).

Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, presented his survey at the RSA Conference, which opened Monday in San Francisco. The survey ranked the top 11 botnets that send spam; by extrapolating their size, Stewart estimated the bots on his list control just over a million machines and are capable of flooding the Internet […]

The good people at Buffalo Technology have created a massive amount of storage that fits in the palm of your hand - 1TB to be specific. To put this into perspective, the U.S. Library of Congress Web Capture team has claimed that as of May 2007, the Library has collected 70 terabytes of data.

 
It’s hard to translate the original text from Russian, even with bablefish, but the best we can glean from it, these gentlemen paid to go on a hunting trip and just happened upon this beast.