Mystery Surrounds Cyber Missile That Crippled Iran's Nuclear Weapons Ambitions →

There are other really good reports on the Stuxnet virus that infected Iran's nuclear facilities, but this one makes a few points I hadn't even heard about yet.

Spacelog →

cameronmoll:

This is fascinating. Original NASA transcripts from early space exploration. The transcript formatting reads like blog comments or a Twitter conversation. Every comment has a permanent URI — here's the original "Houston, we've had a problem." Additional controls at the bottom of each page reveal the original transcript and a map showing where the crew was during the conversation.

If this isn't making content meaningful, accessible (in a traditional sense), and enjoyable to consume, I don't know what is.

The Men Who Stole the World →

Time looks back on four young men and their roles in the "pirate revolution" that never happened, with an interesting revelation:

The pirates never wanted music and movies and all the rest of it to be free — at least, not in the financial sense. They wanted it to be free as in freedom.

Bose-Einstein Condensate Created from Photons →

"Super photons" for the win!

Microsoft Gives Cloud To Scientists →

Microsoft is now selling Azure as a cloud-based HPC solution for scientists, too. Sounds pretty good:

Microsoft today unveiled its behind-the-scenes work on porting a popular suite of supercomputing software tools to its Azure cloud platform. It's work that culminated in an a test job that the company says would have cost an estimated $3 million if it had used traditional on-premises hardware, but it got the job done for a little more than $18,000 using a hybrid approach. The teams ran a large chain protein sequence through BLAST, a software tool set designed to churn through databases, which in this case were all known DNA base pairs in the human genome.

BLAST is a computationally expensive search algorithm, especially when running against such a huge set of data. In fact, these searches "have proven too taxing for the search and analysis system maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), which makes protein databases available."

Having used the NCBI's BLAST tools before, I can tell you that they are certainly backed up. The ability for scientists on any scale to tap into a huge network of computational power to alleviate that problem is awesome. Microsoft gets props for making science cheaper, faster, and easier.

[Sources]
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20022738-75.html?tag=mncol
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/microsoft-gives-the-cloud-to-scientists/