Brewster Kahle, the man behind a project to file every webpage, now wants to gather one copy of every published book

Tucked away in a small warehouse on a dead-end street, an internet pioneer is building a bunker to protect an endangered species: the printed word.

Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the non-profit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every webpage ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.

Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn will replace some of its workers with 1 million robots in three years to cut rising labor expenses and improve efficiency, said Terry Gou, founder and chairman of the company, late Friday.

The robots will be used to do simple and routine work such as spraying, welding and assembling which are now mainly conducted by workers, said Gou at a workers' dance party Friday night.

The company currently has 10,000 robots and the number will be increased to 300,000 next year and 1 million in three years, according to Gou.

Foxconn, the world's largest maker of computer components which assembles products for Apple, Sony and Nokia, is in the spotlight after a string of suicides of workers at its massive Chinese plants, which some blamed on tough working conditions.

The company currently employs 1.2 million people, with about 1 million of them based on the Chinese mainland.

Geological history has periodically featured giant lava eruptions that coat large swaths of land or ocean floor with basaltic lava, which hardens into rock formations called flood basalt. New research from Matthew Jackson and Richard Carlson proposes that the remnants of six of the largest volcanic events of the past 250 million years contain traces of the ancient Earth's primitive mantle -- which existed before the largely differentiated mantle of today -- offering clues to the geochemical history of the planet.

Their work is published online July 27 by Nature.

Scientists recently discovered that an area in northern Canada and Greenland composed of flood basalt contains traces of ancient Earth's primitive mantle. Carlson and Jackson's research expanded these findings, in order to determine if other large volcanic rock deposits also derive from primitive sources.

Information about the primitive mantle reservoir -- which came into existence after Earth's core formed but before Earth's outer rocky shell differentiated into crust and depleted mantle -- would teach scientists about the geochemistry of early Earth and how our planet arrived at its present state.

International collaboration including MPQ scientists sets a new value for the antiproton mass relative to the electron with unprecedented precision.

According to modern cosmology, matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts in the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe. Physicists are developing concepts to explain why the visible universe now seems to be made entirely out of matter. On the other hand, experimental groups are producing antimatter atoms artificially to explore the fundamental symmetries between matter and antimatter, which according to the present theories of particle physics should have exactly the same properties, except for the opposite electrical charge). Now the independent research group "Antimatter Spectroscopy" of Dr. Masaki Hori, which is associated with the Laser Spectroscopy Division of Prof. Theodor W. Hänsch at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, has measured the mass of the antiproton relative to the electron with a precision of 1.3 parts per billion (Nature, 28 July 2011). For this they used a new method of laser spectroscopy on a half-antimatter, half-matter atom called antiprotonic helium. The result agreed with the proton mass measured to a similar level of precision, confirming the symmetry between matter and antimatter. The experiment was carried out at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva (Switzerland) in a project led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and Tokyo University (Japan), and including the University of Brescia (Italy), the Stefan Meyer Institute (Vienna, Austria), and the KFKI Research Institute (Budapest, Hungary).

Physicists believe that the laws of nature obey a fundamental symmetry called "CPT" (this stands for charge conjugation, parity, and time reversal), which postulates that if all the matter in the universe were replaced with antimatter, left and right inverted as if looking into a mirror, and the flow of time reversed, this "anti-world" would be indistinguishable from our real matter world. Antimatter atoms should weigh exactly the same as their matter counterparts. If scientists were to experimentally detect any deviation, however small, it would indicate that this fundamental symmetry is broken. "Small" is the keyword here - it is essential to use the most precise methods and instruments available to make this comparison with the highest possible precision.

"Brain cap" technology being developed at the University of Maryland allows users to turn their thoughts into motion. Associate Professor of Kinesiology José 'Pepe' L. Contreras-Vidal and his team have created a non-invasive, sensor-lined cap with neural interface software that soon could be used to control computers, robotic prosthetic limbs, motorized wheelchairs and even digital avatars.

"We are on track to develop, test and make available to the public- within the next few years -- a safe, reliable, noninvasive brain computer interface that can bring life-changing technology to millions of people whose ability to move has been diminished due to paralysis, stroke or other injury or illness," said Contreras-Vidal of the university's School of Public Health.

The potential and rapid progression of the UMD brain cap technology can be seen in a host of recent developments, including a just published study in the Journal of Neurophysiology, new grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health, and a growing list of partners that includes the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the Veterans Affairs Maryland Health Care System, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Rice University and Walter Reed Army Medical Center's Integrated Department of Orthopaedics & Rehabilitation.

"We are doing something that few previously thought was possible," said Contreras-Vidal, who is also an affiliate professor in Maryland's Fischell Department of Bioengineering and the university's Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program. "We use EEG [electroencephalography] to non-invasively read brain waves and translate them into movement commands for computers and other devices.

The recent deregulation of genetically mutated bluegrass is the first domino to fall in the scheme to deregulate all GMO's and to avoid having to label these disgusting creations so that consumers, many of whom are fully aware of the dangers of these products, can choose to avoid them. The economic power wielded by consumers via their food dollars would quickly put an end to genetic modification, mutation and alteration. Therefore, regulation, control, liability for harm and damage along with labeling, must be avoided at all costs.

The reduction of biodiversity as a result of the infestation of transgenic plants and crops will cause the rise of monocultures where a single crop is grown in a region, or becomes the only crop that will grow, wiping out any biodiversity and by necessity causing a rise in the use of pesticides and herbicides as insects and weeds alike develop a tolerance to genetically mutated seeds and chemical applications. This infestation and resulting contamination of food crops in particular, or those crops to be used for feeds and fuel should be treated for what they actually are: the equivalent of AIDS in the plant world.

Transgenic crops are protected by fraudulent patents and will eventually be used to eradicate all rights to regional germ plasms. The GATT agreement will facilitate the loss of the right of farmers in any given region to reproduce or save seed, and will prohibit the sharing of seed; exactly what is being implemented now.

Astronomers discovered that the Earth has a Trojan asteroid friend that it does the sun dance with.

Trojans are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet and circles around the sun in front of or behind the planet. They ride in the same orbit as a planet and never cross its path or collide with the planet.


Asteroid 2010 TK7 was discovered by NEOWISE, the asteroid-hunting section of NASA's WISE mission. It was confirmed as the first Earth Trojan after follow up observations with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, NASA said.

Scientists thought Earth should have Trojans. However, those kinds of asteroids were hard to find because they are relatively small and appear near the sun from Earth's point of view, according to NASA.

Global population is expected to hit 7 billion later this year, up from 6 billion in 1999. Between now and 2050, an estimated 2.3 billion more people will be added - nearly as many as inhabited the planet as recently as 1950. New estimates from the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations also project that the population will reach 10.1 billion in 2100.

These sizable increases represent an unprecedented global demographic upheaval, according to David Bloom, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Economics and Demography at the Harvard School of Public Health, in a review article published July 29, 2011 in Science.

Over the next forty years, nearly all (97%) of the 2.3 billion projected increase will be in the less developed regions, with nearly half (49%) in Africa. By contrast, the populations of more developed countries will remain flat, but will age, with fewer working-age adults to support retirees living on social pensions.

"Although the issues immediately confronting developing countries are different from those facing the rich countries, in a globalized world demographic challenges anywhere are demographic challenges everywhere," said Bloom.

A team of Purdue University researchers is among a small group in the world that has successfully created ultrapure material that captures new states of matter and could have applications in high-speed quantum computing.

The material, gallium arsenide, is used to observe states in which electrons no longer obey the laws of single-particle physics, but instead are governed by their mutual interactions.

Michael Manfra, the William F. and Patty J. Miller Associate Professor of Physics who leads the group, said the work provides new insights into fundamental physic

Some dogs were domesticated by at least 33,000 years ago, but these canines did not generate descendants that survived past the Ice Age, suggests a new PLoS ONE study.

The theory, based on analysis of a 33,000-year-old animal that may have been a partly domesticated dog, explains why the remains of possible prehistoric dogs date to such early periods, and yet all modern dogs appear to be descended from ancestors that lived at the end of the Ice Age 17,000-14,000 years ago.

The ancient animal identified as being a partly domesticated dog was found in Razboinichya Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia.

"The Razboinichya dog find demonstrates that the right wolf/human conditions suitable for getting domestication started were present at least 33,000 years ago," co-author Susan Crockford told Discovery News. "However, such conditions would have had to be present continuously -- stable -- for many wolf generations, perhaps 20 over about 40 years for the domestication process to generate a true dog."

"It appears that such stable conditions were not present until after the Ice Age, sometime after 19,000 years ago," added Crockford, a researcher at Pacific Identifications Inc. and author of the book Rhythms of Life. "Even after the Ice Age, domestication of wolves could have got started at several different times and places, and still failed because the conditions were not continuous enough for the changes to become permanent."