Technology Update

The US Naval Observatory said Friday that New Year's Day will begin one second late due to a timing adjustment made to keep pace with the rotation of the Earth. A leap second will be added to the world's clocks just before midnight of Dec. 31, 2005 by tweaking their atomic clocks, the world's most precise timekeepers, so as to be consistent with the Earth's rotation.

Check here.

A new robot can recognize the difference between a mirror image of itself and another robot that looks just like it. Under development by Junichi Takeno and a team of researchers at Meiji University in Japan, the robot represents a big step toward developing self-aware robots and in understanding and modeling human self-consciousness.

Check here.

From new ideas about what the universe looked like after the Big Bang to the first direct observation of an exosolar planet, these are the stories the American Institute of Physics are calling the top stories of 2005. Also features the bizarre discovery of hydrophobic water and the creation of molecules that are able to walk.

Check here.

On December 15, 2005, Dr. Curtis Cooper and Dr. Steven Boone, professors at Central Missouri State University, discovered the 43rd Mersenne Prime, 230,402,457-1. The CMSU team is the largest contributor to the GIMPS project.
The new prime is 9,152,052 digits long. This means the Electronic Frontier Foundation $100,000 award for the discovery of the first 10 million digit prime is still up for grabs! The new prime was independently verified in 5 days by Tony Reix of Bull S.A. in Grenoble, France using 16 Itanium2 1.5 GHz CPUs of a Bull NovaScale 6160 HPC at Bull Grenoble Research Center, running the Glucas program by Guillermo Ballester Valor of Granada, Spain.
Dr. Cooper joined GIMPS over 7 years ago with colleague Vince Edmondson. Edmondson was instrumental in the campus-wide effort until he passed away in 2003. Cooper, Boone, and CMSU truly earned this discovery, diligently coordinating over 700 PCs!
However, Dr. Cooper and Dr. Boone could not have made this discovery alone. In recognition of contributions made by tens of thousands GIMPS volunteers, credit for this new discovery goes to "Cooper, Boone, Woltman, Kurowski, et al".
Source

In a breakthrough that brings the technology of futuristic film "The Matrix" closer to reality, scientists say they have cracked part of the brain's own computer code. A team of neurology experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say they have deciphered brain waves used in the recognition of visual images.

Check here for more.

Even through scientists have no idea what dark matter really is, they're able to see its effect on regular matter, and use this data to build a map of where it's clustered. Astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to map the dark matter in two very young galaxy clusters. Their observations lend evidence to the theory that galaxies form at the densest regions of dark matter.

Check here.

Before the end of the next decade, NASA astronauts will again explore the surface of the moon. And this time, they're going to stay, building outposts and paving the way for eventual journeys to Mars and beyond. There are echoes of the iconic images of the past, but it won't be your grandfather's moon shot.

Check here.

This site is solely focused on Electronic and Circuit Tutorial. Starting from basic stuff , it has advanced topics such Semiconductors. You can check this out since it is free.