NASA officials hoped an opening in the cloud cover would allow space shuttle Discovery to lift off Thursday for the first night launch in four years, starting a complex mission to rewire the international space station.

Clouds Likely to Delay Shuttle Launch - New York Times

Good afternoon and welcome to the amazing world of bats! BCI's mission is to teach people the value of bats, to protect and conserve critical bat habitats, and to advance scientific knowledge through research. All this while using a win-win beneficial solution that will benefit both bats and people. We invite you to explore our comprehensive website and learn more about these unique animals and why we need to protect them.

We can't stop here... this is bat country!

Welcome to Bat Conservation International

In the continuing quest to see if humans can outpace their electronic creations, the humans have lost another, perhaps decisive, round.

Once Again, Machine Beats Human Champion at Chess - New York Times

Some of the people working on the design of NASA's new Ares I launch vehicle want to delete the requirement to recover and reuse the rocket's first stage. The reason: the weight of hardware required to make recovery possible - and practical.

NASA To Evaluate Non-recoverable First Stage for Ares I Launch Vehicle | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference

When I started interviewing programmers in 1991, I would generally let them use any language they wanted to solve the coding problems I gave them. 99% of the time, they chose C.

Nowadays, they tend to choose Java.

Now, don't get me wrong: there's nothing wrong with Java as an implementation language.

...

Instead what I'd like to claim is that Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers. It may be a fine language to work in, but that's not today's topic. I would even go so far as to say that the fact that Java is not hard enough is a feature, not a bug, but it does have this one problem.

The Perils of JavaSchools - Joel on Software

Russia's Space Research Institute has been studying the idea of a space-elevator cluster to economically deliver payloads from the Earth to the Moon and back.

SPACE.com -- Russia Studies Exotic Lunar Elevator

Intel was first out of the gate with a quad-core processor, AMD will offer the first native quad-core chip - four processors that are integrated in one piece of silicon. The company today offered a first glimpse at a 4-way, quad-core Opteron processor system during its annual analyst conference.

AMD demonstrates first native quad-core CPU | TG Daily

Chemical tricks were the key to creating the unparalelled tones of famed 17th- and 18th-century Italian violins, a new study says.

'Alchemy' Was the Secret to Making Stradivarius Violins

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments today in an abstract case involving automobile gas pedals that could apply the brakes to the recent dramatic growth in patents issued nationwide.

Supreme Court hearing abstract patents case - Los Angeles Times

Vista's fun run-in with CableCARD started earlier this year when we all found out at CES that they had every intention to finally make Windows (specifically Vista Home Premium and Ultimate) work with your CableCARD setup.

Analog video capture is sounding better and better!

Vista unable to stream, convert CableCARD media - Engadget