Rock Band 3 confirmed for holidaysHarmonix and MTV Games are getting the band back together, with Electronic Arts handling distribution once more.
Online dating finally recognized by restaurant guideA new restaurant guide has a section specifically dedicated to the difficult area of online dating. Its author believes only certain very specific places are suitable for an online date.
Pink Floyd sues EMI over iTunes paymentsOne of the most imposing (and wealthiest) bands of all time sues EMI over online royalties. EMI is reportedly arguing that an album-unbundling ban applies only to physical products.
How to Build a $1000 Fusion Reactor in Your Basement<p>Most college freshmen fill their dorm rooms with clothes, books, and electronics. Thiago Olson also brought his fusion reactor. But Vanderbilt University drew the line: No do-it-yourself reactors in the dorm! Instead, his device was housed in a nearby laboratory.</p>
<p>Olson’s project was motivated by the challenge of doing fusion—and by the same promise that has inspired thousands of physicists over the past half century. Nuclear fusion is the energy source that powers the sun; if channeled correctly, it could become a major source of clean energy here on Earth. Fusion occurs when the nuclei of two atoms are forced so close to each other that they bind together, releasing a great deal of energy in the process. Because positively charged nuclei forcefully repel each other, though, high temperatures are needed to bring about a union. Most fusion reactors are therefore enormous machines, like the $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility that recently opened in California.</p>
<p>Olson and a small cadre of other amateur nuclear engineers have found a simpler way. They are creating home-grown reactors, welding and wiring the devices in their backyards, garages, and basements (much to the alarm of neighbors). The hazards to the community are slim, the main ones being heavy use of electricity and short-range radiation that can be of risk to the “fusioneers” themselves.</p>
Numbers: Railways, From Amtrak to TGV to China<p>43: Percentage of American freight that moves between cities by rail, the Association of American Railroads reports. One train can carry the same load as 280 trucks. Freight trains can move a ton of cargo 457 miles on a gallon of fuel, versus 130 miles for a full-size tractor trailer.</p>
<p>1: Percentage of all passenger intercity trips of more than 50 miles made by rail in the United States. Ninety percent of them are by car, 7 percent by air, and 2 percent by bus.</p>
World's Tiniest Scale Can Weigh Individual Molecules<p>Physicist Michael Roukes and his colleagues at Caltech have developed a microscopic device that can measure the mass of a single molecule in real time. Chemists use such sensitive weighings to help determine the chemical identities of unknown substances. The Caltech team says that its system could eventually allow scientists to analyze thousands of different proteins in a matter of milliseconds using much smaller samples than before.</p>
Forget Putting CO2 Under Rock—Let's Turn It *Into* Rock<p>While the Obama administration hashes out plans for cutting future carbon emissions, engineers are quietly working on schemes to deal with carbon by putting it back where it came from: underground. The concept of storing carbon in rock—known as geologic carbon sequestration —has been dogged by concerns about cost, stability, and environmental impact. But recent findings suggest that it could be an effective way to clean up the carbon mess.</p>
Discover Interview: The Man Who Builds Brains<p>On the quarter-mile walk between his office at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and the nerve center of his research across campus, Henry Markram gets a brisk reminder of the rapidly narrowing gap between human and machine. At one point he passes a museumlike display filled with the relics of old supercomputers, a memorial to their technological limitations. At the end of his trip he confronts his IBM Blue Gene/P—shiny, black, and sloped on one side like a sports car. That new supercomputer is the centerpiece of the Blue Brain Project, tasked with simulating every aspect of the workings of a living brain.</p>
<p>Markram, the 47-year-old founder and codirector of the Brain Mind Institute at the EPFL, is the project’s leader and cheerleader. A South African neuroscientist, he received his doctorate from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and studied as a Fulbright Scholar at the National Institutes of Health. For the past 15 years he and his team have been collecting data on the neocortex, the part of the brain that lets us think, speak, and remember. The plan is to use the data from these studies to create a comprehensive, three-dimensional simulation of a mammalian brain. Such a digital re-creation that matches all the behaviors and structures of a biological brain would provide an unprecedented opportunity to study the fundamental nature of cognition and of disorders such as depression and schizophrenia.</p>
<p>Until recently there was no computer powerful enough to take all our knowledge of the brain and apply it to a model. Blue Gene has changed that. It contains four monolithic, refrigerator-size machines, each of which processes data at a peak speed of 56 teraflops (teraflops being one trillion floating-point operations per second). At $2 million per rack, this Blue Gene is not cheap, but it is affordable enough to give Markram a shot with this ambitious project. Each of Blue Gene’s more than 16,000 processors is used to simulate approximately one thousand virtual neurons. By getting the neurons to interact with one another, Markram’s team makes the computer operate like a brain. In its trial runs Markram’s Blue Gene has emulated just a single neocortical column in a two-week-old rat. But in principle, the simulated brain will continue to get more and more powerful as it attempts to rival the one in its creator’s head. “We’ve reached the end of phase one, which for us is the proof of concept,” Markram says. “We can, I think, categorically say that it is possible to build a model of the brain.” In fact, he insists that a fully functioning model of a human brain can be built within a decade. Markram spent some time with DISCOVER to explain how.</p>
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