More than 5 percent of Indiana motorists currently have a suspended driver's license.

And though local law enforcement can't catch every person driving while suspended or with a revoked license, the Indiana State Police is banking on a developing piece of technology to improve upon these efforts.

By buying and installing a new License Plate Reader (LPR) system on troopers' vehicles, ISP officials say those driving illegally on the state's roadways now stand a much better chance of being caught.

"It's just another tool in our tool belt for us to use to help catch violators of the law," said Sgt. John Bowling with the ISP Pendleton District. "It's another new piece of technology, and we're excited to have it."

According to an ISP news release, the LPR system -- which is mounted to the trunk of a state police cruiser -- can scan license plates at a rate of 1,800 per minute as the cruiser passes by vehicles while parked or when vehicles pass the state police vehicle on the highway.

Today we celebrate Dennis Ritchie Day, an idea proposed by Tim O'Reilly and one that we fully support. Ritchie, who died earlier this month, made contributions to computing that are now so deeply woven into the fabric that they impact all of us.
Tim O'Reilly's initiative was prompted by the fact that Sunday, October 16 had been declared Steve Jobs Day in the State of California. So there is every reason to accord Ritchie, whose work underpinned every aspect of Jobs' achievements, a similar honor.

Legendary feats of intelligence - Ken Jennings winning 74 consecutive "Jeopardy!" games - have their match in astonishing acts of stupidity, like a would-be robber who dons a mask without remembering to cut eyeholes.

Quite a gulf exists between the extremes in innate human intelligence. Yet establishing a clear biological basis for why some people are smarter than others has so far proven tricky. Even the concept of intelligence as a quantifiable, explainable phenomenon has only been recently settled.

"A generation ago, people were arguing over the definition of intelligence, and that argument is now done," said Richard Haier, professor emeritus in the School of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine. "Intelligence is something that's real and exists, and it can be measured."

To this end, neuroscience has made great strides in illuminating the brain structures and mechanisms that account for intelligence. As progress continues, the differences that underlie brilliance and its opposite should come to light.

New research on brain cells could shed more light on neurological diseases, scientists have discovered.

Researchers from The Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh have found brain cells alter their genetic make-up during a person's lifetime.

They have identified genes - known as retrotransposons - responsible for thousands of tiny changes in the DNA of brain tissue.

Researchers, whose work is published in the journal Nature, found that the genes were particularly active in areas of the brain linked to cell renewal.

By mapping the locations of these genes in the human genome, scientists could identify mutations that impact on brain function and that may cause diseases to develop.

The mere presence of a predator causes enough stress to kill a dragonfly, even when the predator cannot actually get at its prey to eat it, say biologists at the University of Toronto.

"How prey respond to the fear of being eaten is an important topic in ecology, and we've learned a great deal about how these responses affect predator and prey interactions," says Professor Locke Rowe, chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) and co-principal investigator of a study conducted at U of T's Koffler Scientific Reserve.

"As we learn more about how animals respond to stressful conditions - whether it's the presence of predators or stresses from other natural or human-caused disruptions - we increasingly find that stress brings a greater risk of death, presumably from things such as infections that normally wouldn't kill them," says Rowe.

Shannon McCauley, a post-doctoral fellow, and EEB professors Marie-Josée Fortin and Rowe raised juvenile dragonfly larvae (Leucorrhinia intacta) in aquariums or tanks along with their predators. The two groups were separated so that while the dragonflies could see and smell their predators, the predators could not actually eat them.

There's nothing like a dynamic solar system... and right now another planet is being heard from. According to various sources, a bright spot - possibly a developing storm - has been spotted on Uranus.

"Professional observers this morning (October 27) reported a very bright cloud on Uranus, using the Gemini telescope, and need amateur confirmation if possible, to obtain a rotation period." says John H. Rogers, Jupiter Section Director, British Astronomical Association. "Near-infrared filters may have the best chance of detecting it. It was recorded in the 1.6 micron band, which is further into the IR than amateurs can reach, but your usual near-IR filters might be successful. I think that methane filters are not especially promising, as these clouds on Uranus are overlaid by a methane-rich layer of atmosphere, but would be worth trying anyway. Anyone who has a 1-micron filter should have a go too."

At this point in time, information is limited, but professional images taken using the 8.1-metre Gemini Telescope North on Hawaii have recorded a region said to be ten times brighter than the planetary background. The bright spot is believed to be attributed to methane ice. ""This is an H-band image, centered at 1.6 microns, close to the wavelength of maximum contrast for such features. Its contrast will decrease with decreasing wavelength, and will likely not be detectable by amateur astronomers, except possibly at the longer CCD wavelengths where the Rayleigh scattering background can be suppressed." says Larry Sromovsky, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Looking with a methane band filters at 890 nm might be productive, especially if the feature continues to brighten."

Facebook's new server farm in the northern Swedish city of Lulea is the firm's first outside the U.S. - in a location chosen because the fierce cold will help to keep the company's racks of high-performance computers cool.

Facebook looked at several sites across Europe, and picked Lulea for its cold climate. The move will see Facebook become faster for users across Europe.

'Facebook has more users outside the U.S. than inside,' Facebook director of site operations Tom Furlong said. 'It was time for us to expand in Europe.'

Facebook will be constructing a gigantic datacenter in Lulea, Sweden.

The city is located near the Arctic Circle and will be home to Facebook's first European data center. Lulea's sub-arctic climate will enable the company to take advantage of natural cooling resources with a climate that has short, mild summers and long, cold winters.

The data center will have a floor space of more than 900,000 square feet, which exceeds the size of 15 football fields. According to the town of Lulea, the facility will be built in three phases and eventually consist of three separate server rooms that are designed to handle a substantial portion of Facebook's data traffic. The completion date is targeted for 2014.

Facebook has been frequently criticized, especially by Greenpeace, that it does not make enough effort to achieve an efficient use of energy in its data centers and draw most of its power from coal power plants. The Lulea data center will consume power that is exclusively produced by water power plants and the natural climate should help bring down the power consumption quite a bit. Competitors, such as Google, use similar concepts: Google recently opened a data center in Hamina, Finland, which uses sea water for cooling its servers.

It appears that we are now having 2013 as a much more credible date for space flights.

Stephen Attenborough, commercial director at Virgin Galactic, said that the company will be taking customers into space in about 2 years, if all tests go well. According to a report published by the BBC, Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson had originally hoped to launch into space by 2007 and apparently 500 people have bought tickets for $200,000 a piece so far.

Attenborough, however, cautioned against considering 2013 a fixed date just yet. He said that the launch into space cannot have a fixed date as the carrier won't compromise on safety. He denied claims that the space flight program is delayed.

"Our foot is flat on the gas, we have proven technology, we have a spaceport that opened last week, and the test flight programme is well advanced - I don't think you can ask for a lot more from a programme like this," he told the BBC. "A delay is [a] strange word, and there is no delay."

A new look at the interstellar dust permeating the universe has revealed hints of organic matter that could be created naturally by stars, scientists say.

Researchers at the University of Hong Kong observed stars at different evolutionary phases and found that they are able to produce complex organic compounds and eject them into space, filling the regions between stars. The compounds are so complex that their chemical structures resemble the makeup of coal and petroleum, the study's lead author Sun Kwok, of the University of Hong Kong, said.