A jellyfish that could potentially live forever. Able to regenerate its whole body, cell by cell, is the only example in nature. Now if only we could work out how to get our bodies to do that.. Get to 50 and regress 30 years..

The Curious Case of the Immortal Jellyfish | Discoblog | Discover Magazine.

UFO files | Newly released files from The National Archives.

Lots of strange things people have discovered that have defeated science. The Dropa Stones also feature (even though that’s a known myth) as well as a hammer found inside 400 million year old rock, even though the first modern humans are accepted by science of existing only 200,000 years ago.. Very strange.

The 10 most amazing unexplained artifacts | ZME Science.

A great list of some of the craziest materials that will be commonplace in the future. The most amazing, developed oddly in 1931, is the aerogel – 99.8% is actually just empty space, making it a great insulator. It makes you wonder why it isn’t in common use everywhere.

Check out the list to see other amazing materials, and some of their possible uses in the future..

Accelerating Future » 10 Futuristic Materials.

And that’s where the film ended. What happened next? How could they retrieve the gold? Well the Royal Society decided to put that question to the general public, in the hope of finding the answer – and at the same time get everyone’s grey matter working.

And that it did – although they were expecting only a few entries, they were inundated with over 2000! Ranging from the bizarre to intrinsically detailed. And the winner? Well the official results will be announced Friday, but I can tell you that The Register thinks a computer consultant will win after he noticed unused space on the coach towards the front. Members of the crew could make their way away from the gold and that would be enough to counter-act the weight. One member of the team could then retrieve the gold. I’m sure everyone will agree we will all be better off when the question is finally answered!

The new champion, consisting of 284 Cray supercomputer cabinets, will be able to crunch an amazing 1.64 Petaflops – 1,640,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second. Tested so far up to 1.3 Petaflops, the team at Oak Ridge National Lab are hoping to crank the machine up to it’s full potential soon.

Specification:

45,000 Quad Core Opterons (AMD), 362 Terabytes of RAM (that’s 370,000 Gigabytes!), 10 Petabytes of storage (or 10,485,000 Gigabytes)

Performance:

578 Terabytes per second Memory bandwidth, 284 Gigabytes per second bus bandwidth (to move data around the system)

All in all an impressive machine which will knock the current champion, Roadrunner (at 1.34 Petaflops), off the top spot when it’s up to speed. Read The Register article, and also check out the top 500 supercomputers on Wikipedia (soon to be updated I’m sure!)

I know the title has probably got you interested, and I’m pretty sure the story will open your eyes too.

British company, P2i, have announced today their latest technology that makes materials waterproof at a molecular level. Unlike other types of solutions, their “Ion Mask” plasma surface enhancement technology [sic] will penetrate an object completely, without altering the look or feel of it. So you could technically treat a piece of paper with it, tear it into small pieces, and each piece would remain waterproof.

Current sectors the innovation is being aimed at are footwear, and textiles, but there is also talk of the inventors being in the early stages of testing with electrical items. Just think of how revolutionary that would be!

A truly water-cooled PC, or any other electrical system, without the need for noisy fans – cutting down on costs and repairs. Your computer keyboard could be fully treated with the technology – and if you spilt your coffee in it, simply unplug and stick in your dishwasher. But even better, it could mean diseases that breed on keyboards would be a thing of the past, as your electrical devices also get a “weekly wash.” Any electrical equipment that would need to be outside (street lamps, traffic lights, billboards, big screen TVs in stadiums etc.) wouldn’t need any special housing to keep the weather off, reducing costs. Even things like undersea research would be more effective, if the material didn’t react to the salt in the sea. This could really be a revolution in how we use things in the future!

For more information and to see some of the other projects P2i are involved in, visit their website.

Capable of diving to depths of 6km, and a range of 1000km, the AutoSub6000 will be primarily exploring undersea volcanoes. It amazes me how these boffins can set up an undersea vehicle, program it like an expensive BigTrak, and send it on it’s way to do it’s job – completely without human intervention. For a full list of specs, for the terminally geeky, download the pdf.

Google Earth is soon to release a plug-in that will allow 3D content from the Google Earth archives to be displayed within your browser window – rather than using the stand-alone Google Earth app. The plug-in currently supports, in it’s Beta form, Firefox 2 and IE6/7.

This is a move, I think, that spells the end for the application, that has always seemed to fit strangely with the rest of Google’s ideals. The concept of cloud computing is lost a little when you have a clunky OpenGL app that needs to be fired up every time you want to find a location. To be honest I always use Google maps as I find it easier just for this reason. To me it looks as though Google realise this and are moving Google Earth over to a browser-only platform.

Much like Google Israel, Google UK has also gone dark for Earth Hour. In an effort to help promote the use of energy conservation in the home, Earth Hour aims to get people to turn off their lights for just 1 hour between the hours of 8-9pm. Do your bit and see if you can survive for a whole hour in the dark. [SHOW ME]