The 49 Films That Will Define 2010 – “2010 is just around the corner, and though there aren’t many big name franchises returning next summer, fear not, there is still plenty to keep your local cinema busy…”

How to Make Your PC as Fast as the Day you Bought It – “Every few years, we buy an expensive new PC and love how fast it starts up, runs programs, and loads web sites. Inevitably, though it starts to slow down, until eventually we are pulling our hair out waiting for it to do routine tasks…”

Preventing a pirate attack – “Oil tankers are the floating goldmines of the ocean and it is of little wonder that pirates see them as attractive, if not imposing, targets. But with oil supplies supposedly running low, the last thing we need is for our precious barrels of liquid gold to fall into the wrong hands…”

30 Secrets Your Waiter Will Never Tell You – “What would two dozen servers from across the country tell you if they could get away with it? Well, for starters, when to go out, what not to order, what really happens behind the kitchen’s swinging doors, and what they think of you and your tips. Here, from a group that clears a median $8.01 an hour in wages and tips, a few revelations that aren’t on any menu…”

The End Of The CrunchPad – “Our plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, a little over a week ago. We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want. We’d put 1,000 of the devices on pre-sale and take orders immediately. Larger scale production would begin early in 2010. And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication…”

Samso: The energy self-sufficient island – “Inhabitants on the small Danish island of Samso have collaborated to form a social energy revolution. The small Baltic island has become one of the first industrialised places in the world to qualify as being totally energy self-sufficient…”

Harnessing Wave Energy – “Energy from ocean waves seems like the ultimate in renewable fuel, yet research lags behind studies of solar and wind power. Research now underway is based on ocean buoy generators. As ocean swells hit the buoy, electrical coils create electricity…”

Un-Google Yourself – “The mighty search engine has allowed us to do so many things. “Mighty” is the operative word, as these same search engines (usually the one that starts with a “G” and ends with an “oogle”) can also curse us all. If you think about it, any schmuck can find out more about you than you’d like by typing only your first and last name…”

Intel’s Six-Core ‘Gulftown’ processor revealed – “This chip will, according to sources, be featured in future Mac Pro models that could arrive as early as the first quarter of 2010. The “Gulftown” chip will be sold under the Core i9 name and will be Intel’s first six-core, dual-socket processor. The 32 nanometer chips feature 12MB of L3 cache. If paired with another chip, as Apple usually does in its high-end workstations, the processors will offer 12 physical and 24 logical cores…”

Trailblazing – “Welcome to Trailblazing, an interactive timeline for everybody with an interest in science. Compiled by scientists, science communicators and historians – and co-ordinated by Professor Michael Thompson FRS – it celebrates three and a half centuries of scientific endeavour and has been launched to commemorate the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary in 2010…”

Solar panel costs ‘set to fall’ – “A key goal for solar is what is known as grid parity. That is the point when it is as cheap for someone to generate power on their homes as it is to buy it from the grid. It varies from country to country depending on electricity prices, but the institute estimates that Italy – which has a combination of sunny weather and relatively high electricity prices – should reach grid parity next year. Half of Europe should be enjoying grid parity by 2020, it estimates…”

Catching rays + cutting emissions – “The system cost a total of 30,000 euros and it produces about 5,000 kilowatt hours of electricity each year. More importantly, that saves about 2,700 kg of CO2 emissions. The 5,000 kWh is about 500 kWh a year more than we use. The local utility is required to buy those 5,000 kWh of CO2-free electricity that spin through a meter and into the grid from me at 49 cents per kilowatt for a fixed 20-year period. I buy about 4,500 kWh back each year at the current market rate of about 18 cents per kWh. That amounts to about 2,400 euros of revenue per year, with monthly payments from the utility peaking at about 500 euros in June. (I pay a separate 70 euros per month to the utility for the electricity we use)…”

Harvard ignored warnings about investments – “Through the first half of this decade, Meyer repeatedly warned Summers and other Harvard officials that the school was being too aggressive with billions of dollars in cash, according to people present for the discussions, investing almost all of it with the endowment’s risky mix of stocks, bonds, hedge funds, and private equity. Meyer’s successor, Mohamed El-Erian, would later sound the same warnings to Summers, and to Harvard financial staff and board members…”

Game Theory – “At the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, researchers examine what makes video games click with players — or what doesn’t…”

USC professor creates an entire alien language for ‘Avatar’ – “Today’s topic: The USC professor who found himself on an unexpected Hollywood adventure when he was hired to create the language spoken by aliens on Cameron’s distant planet of Pandora…”

Big Freeze Plunged Europe Into Ice Age in Months – “In the film The Day After Tomorrow, the world enters the icy grip of a new glacial period within the space of just a few weeks. Now new research shows that this scenario may not be so far from the truth after all…”

How the 9/11 Pagers Got Hacked – “The shock and awe over the thousands of hacked pager messages from September 11, 2001 just anonymously published online isn’t just about painful memories. There’s also the big question as to how all those mundane, terrible and weird messages — 573,000 lines and 6.4 million words, to be exact — were stolen to begin with…”

Making Web Sites Faster in the Web 2.0 Age – “As much as anything else, a user’s impression of a web site has to do with how fast the site loads. But modern Web 2.0 websites aren’t your father’s Oldsmobile. Chocked full of rich Flash content and massive JavaScript libraries, they present a new set of challenges to engineers trying to maximized the performance of their sites. You need to design your sites to be Fast by Default. That’s the theme of the upcoming Velocity Online Conference, co-chaired by Google performance guru Steve Souders. Souders is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites, and spent some time discussing the new world of web site performance with me…”

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