Cody Taylor

Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google and widely recognized as one of the “Fathers of the Internet” last week said that the issues facing the Internet today are as complex as they were pre-Internet.

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goran72 sends in a story out of the Chicago AAAS meeting contending that Earth-like planets with life-sustaining conditions may be spinning around stars in our galactic neighborhood — we just haven’t found them yet. “‘So I think there is a very good chance that we will find some Earth-like planets within 10, 20 or 30 light years of the Sun,’ astrophysicist [Alan Boss]… told his AAAS colleagues meeting here since Thursday. … The images from those new planets, he added, should identify ‘light from their atmosphere and tell us if they have perhaps methane and oxygen. That will be pretty strong proof they are not only habitable but actually are inhabited. I am not talking about a planet with intelligence on it. I simply say if you have a habitable world. … Sitting there, with the right temperature with water for a billion years, something is going to come out of it. At least we will have microbes,’ said Boss.”

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PShardlow writes “I have recently been asked to propose two projects for a 1st year undergraduate teaching laboratory in the summer term this year. These are projects that a pair of students will spend 36 hours working on, and as such can be quite in-depth. A good project would include something they can build, something they can measure, and something they can calculate. Previous projects have included cloud chambers, a Jacobs ladder, a laser Doppler speed camera, laser sound detection, smoke rings, and physical random number generators. This is an opportunity to really inspire students into the joy that can be experimental physics — but it only works if we demonstrators propose interesting projects. So I ask the Slashdot community for suggestions of fascinating projects to do, things that are relevant to today’s physics problems but could feasibly be completed by a pair of first-year undergraduates in 72 man hours.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.