High-tech industry in Israel goes from bust to boom KIRYAT GAT, ISRAEL--Israel's high-tech sector is having its best year since the dot-com implosion in 2000, and the evidence includes this working-class town, where bulldozers are rapidly clearing acres of land for a huge, state-of-the-art chip-making plant. The Intel Corp., the world's largest chip maker, announced this month that it would invest $3.5 billion to build a new plant, adjacent to an existing one that makes Pentium 4 chips, at an industrial park in this town in southern Israel, which has long struggled economically despite the money poured into it. Intel already has six design and production facilities scattered across Israel and more than 6,000 workers, making it one of the country's largest private employers. It will be adding at least 2,000 jobs at the new plant, which will produce 12-inch chip wafers, the company says.
Secret synagogue found in Portugal 16th century synagogue discovered in Portugal Prayer room hidden behind wall of housing belonging to Catholic priest, discovered during renovations Associated Press A chance discovery during renovations of a building in the Atlantic port city of Porto has revealed a dark secret from Portugal's past: a 16th century synagogue. Built at a time when Portugal's Jews had been forced to convert to Catholicism or risk being burned at the stake, the house of worship was hidden behind a false wall in a four-story house that Father Agostinho Jardim Moreira, a Roman Catholic priest, was converting into a home for his old-age parishioners.
The Desktop Graphics Card Comparison Guide These days, there are so many graphics card models that it has become quite impossible to keep up with the different configurations. Therefore, we decided to compile this guide to provide an easy reference for those who are interested in comparing the specifications of the various desktop GPUs in the market as well as those already obsolescent or obsolete. Currently covering over 240 desktop graphics cards, this comprehensive comparison will allow you to easily compare 15 different specifications for each and every card! We hope it will prove to be a useful reference. We will keep this guide updated regularly so do check back for the latest updates!
TIME FOR THE PUNDITS TO BLATEHR ON:
Top 10 tech trends for 2006 Once again, it's time for the Mercury News annual look into a crystal ball for technology trends in 2006. Never mind that the smartest people in tech wouldn't dare make serious predictions about what innovations will catch fire next year. We make a humble try anyway. Video -- in the form of your favorite TV dramas or Hollywood hit movies -- will come to the big screen in your living room and to the small screen on your cell phone. Whenever you want it. No need to mess around with time-shifting TV devices or mail-order flicks.
Top Entrepreneurs Make 2006 Predictions
With 2006 just a few days away, I asked seven top entrepreneurs to make some bold predictions for the new year. Some of their forecasts include IT budgets increasing, growing adoption of open source and even one of them predicted a couple of big acquisitions. I am really looking forward to 2006 and maybe more so after the seven entrepreneurs below predicted what could happen over the next 12 months. They include: Todd Masonis, Founder and VP of Products, Plaxo; Kathy Brittain White, Founder and CEO, Rural Sourcing; Scot Wingo, CEO, ChannelAdvisor; David Spitz, founder, Netsation and WindWire; Cary Chessick, CEO, Restaurant.com; Billy Marshall, CEO, rPath and Jeff Reedy, CEO, Overture Networks.
On-product magazines could change the media landscape (link to this article) December 24, 2005 The media mix is about to have a new and very viable form of print publishing – on-product magazines will hit the market for the first time in early 2006 and we suspect this innovation is capable of changing the world of print media as we know it. The concept of on-product magazines first came to Joanna Wojtalik while she was studying in the final year of a marketing course just two years ago. The idea was simple – create a small (in the first instance this will be an A7 - 74 x 105 mm) magazine which fits onto a fast moving consumer product and distribute via grocery rather than traditional magazine channels. Joanna’s idea is now patented and will launch in January as the first on-product magazine - a bottled water aimed at the female market with iLove magazine attached and will be joined in Q2 by a magazine for children and a magazine aimed at men on Iced Coffee. Distribution will be focused through convenience stores, supermarkets and gas stations, significantly differentiating the products that carry them and offering advertisers a circulation far in excess of magazines sold through traditional magazine distribution channels. By March, iLove magazine will be the largest circulation magazine in Australia and the company has global aspirations, holding patents for on-product magazines attached to all common food packaging formats.
FOR SABRINA:
Ancient Egypt 'respected dwarfs' The ancient Egyptians respected dwarfs, and did not see them as having a physical handicap, according to a study by US researchers. A team from Georgetown University Hospital looked at biological remains and artistic evidence of dwarfism in ancient Egypt. Ancient Egyptians worshipped dwarf gods, and many dwarfs held positions of authority in households. The research was published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics. In modern times, doctors have identified over 100 medical conditions that cause short stature. The most common cause is achondroplasia which causes severe shortening of the limbs. It affects one in 25,000 births per year. Around 75% of individuals with a restricted growth condition are born to parents of average size.
The psychology of the perfect Christmas dinner (or any dinner) IT'S a rite of passage that's been lurking on the horizon since you left home. But no amount of forward planning can prepare you for this. Christmas dinner is at your place - and you're doing the cooking. You know the score: you're going to have to conjure up at least three courses, along with wine and cheese. A choice of desserts is mandatory. You'll run out of pans, and will have to wash up every 15 minutes. And worst of all, the world expert - your mum - will be there, casting a critical eye over your efforts. So how can you make sure dinner is divine? It's easier than you might think. Good food, it turns out, is all in the mind. The way people perceive your dinner has less to do with what's on their plate than what's in their heads. At least that is what Brian Wansink, a food psychologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, has found. Among other topics, Wansink studies how the right environmental cues can make ordinary food seem fantastic. He has spent years feeding people cheap, mass-produced, bog-standard or downright horrible food and then bamboozling them into believing they like it. "Taste is tremendously subjective," he says. "People are not too smart to be fooled."
2005: The year in technology Many weird and wonderful new gadgets, gizmos and inventions were revealed in 2005. Autonomous cars, robotic assistants and nano-circuitry provided a bright view of the future, while cellphone viruses, virtual crime sprees and "non-lethal" crowd control weapons hinted at technological troubles ahead. The busiest inventor of the year was almost certainly Google, which continues to grow from a search engine into a many-tentacled technological titan. 2005 saw Google launch a service for hosting and searching video clips, an internet phone program, a searchable map of the world and an effort to digitise books from some of the world's largest libraries, to name a few of its projects. Not everything went so smoothly for Google though. In January the company was forced to release a tool to prevent spammers skewing its search engine results. Not long after, computer experts discovered a potential way to undermine the adverts that appear alongside the company's normal search results.
Shaking Off the Rust, New Suburbs Are Born IN the shadow of the hulking industrial carcass of the Bethlehem Steel site here, a cozy boutique called Comfort and Joy is selling "aromatherapeutic" cleaning products, herbal teas nested in silk pouches and $1,200 designer quilts. Down the street, another store, Home and Planet, is offering $800 end tables made from recycled steel beams. The pricey quilts and tables are increasingly being marketed to an influx of middle-class New Yorkers who have come to the Lehigh Valley in search of affordable housing and good schools they could not easily find back home. The newcomers are recasting this former steel and coal-mining area into a new kind of bedroom community, bringing their cosmopolitan tastes with them. America's newest suburbs are neither the classic towns close to a major city, nor are they distant exurbs built on once-empty farmland. They are aging industrial cities and their environs, on the far periphery of the most expensive metropolitan areas in the northeast and California - places where middle-class parents can still buy homes for their growing families while keeping their big city jobs.
Year-end thoughts: Solar and the long tail In the next few days we'll try to provide some year-end thoughts on various cleantech investing topics. Importantly, unlike many of the other notes on this site, these are conjecture and opinion and not the usual passed-along news updates, so read them with all due skepticism. First and foremost, we pretty much have to start with solar. According to numbers from an AP/ Dow Jones report (with figures from the NVCA), solar VC investments reached $67.7M in the first three quarters of 2005, as compared to $31.4M for all of 2004. The AP and Dow Jones also report that solar made up more than a third of all energy VC investments so far this year. Regardless of the specifics of the numbers, solar is without a doubt the hottest cleantech investment area right now (if you'll pardon the pun).
nooze, You Win According to new studies, nothing tunes up mind and body like a good nap. But there's an art to catching the right kind of z's. When billionaire adventurer Steve Fossett broke the record for around-the-world solo jet flight last March, he slept just 60 minutes in 67 hours of flight time -- 60 minutes broken into two- and three-minute naps. "I slept when I needed it and awoke refreshed," he says. Fossett, who holds world records in ballooning, sailing, and flying, adds that none of his feats could have been done without these micro-variety "power naps." So what makes a power nap effective? Think of it as an investment with the greatest return in the least amount of time, a kind of super-efficient sleep that fits nicely in a high-pressure schedule: say, between business meetings or in the minutes before a game. Napping in general benefits heart functioning, hormonal maintenance, and cell repair, says Dr. Sara Mednick, a scientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies who is at the forefront of napping research. A power nap, says Mednick, simply maximizes these benefits by getting the sleeper into and out of rejuvenative sleep as fast as possible. No surprise that Lance Armstrong's coach, Chris Carmichael, says that "naps were critical in his overall training plan." In Manhattan, napping has become a lucrative business: MetroNaps in the Empire State Building provides darkened cot-like redoubts that attract Broadway actors between shows as well as investment bankers who otherwise would fall asleep at their desks. And in Iraq, U.S. Marine commanders have mandated a power nap before patrols.
Top 10 little-known science stories of 2005 Posted by Roland Piquepaille @ 4:50 am It's always difficult to look at more than 330 stories published this year to select only ten. But here is my personal selection of science stories that I found either important, exciting or simply surprising.
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