cosmic

'Cosmic Panda' puts a shine on YouTube

It looks like YouTube is going slicker, simpler, and darker. Take a look at the experimental redesign rolled out today. Dubbed "Cosmic Panda," it boosts the old, cluttered, entirely-too-white video portal into the realm of contemporary Web design in many ways. It's about time, but I'll take it--it's pretty good.

Videos and thumbnails are easier on the eyes, controls are more intuitive, and you can do more channel customization.

Videos are set against a dark background to lower the contrast between the page background and video content. Thumbnails are bigger, and on playlists they show up immediately below the playing video. Videos come in three sizes rather than two, plus full-screen. And the Like, Add to, and Share buttons are visually set off from the video controls to cleanly separate viewing from organizing.… Read more

How Trekkies will soon be able to experience warp drive

Star Trek fans, you'd better sit down.

Because there are scientists out there, out there in Texas, to be precise, who believe that you will soon be able to propel yourselves at warp speed.

Alright, I'm not going to put a time frame on the 'soon'. Because, well, what is time anyway? Merely one dimension of our truly warped lives.

But here's the idea that Dr. Gerald Cleaver, Associate Professor of Physics at Baylor and his Associate Associate, Richard Obousy (I have not located a picture of this man, but he is reputed to have elongated ears) … Read more

Visions of the universe's most violent events

Astronomers are using the world's largest supercomputers to transform theories and formulas into animated 3D simulations of black holes colliding, stars being born, and gamma-ray bursts blowing everything else away.

Check out the story and image gallery at Popsci.com: "Cutting edge visions of cosmic extremes"

Report: Microsoft eyes server memory to cut PC crashes

Microsoft is apparently telling computer makers that they may need to start putting in PCs the same kind of error-correcting memory commonly used in servers to avoid crashes due to memory errors.

According to a report in EE Times, the software maker has been privately circulating a white paper that claims errors from standard memory are now among the top 10 causes for system crashes.

The issue was discussed at last week's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Los Angeles, though the EE Times report said memory chip makers and computer manufacturers were not necessarily all in agreement about … Read more