Historians claim to have finally located the site of King Arthur's Round Table - and believe it could have seated 1,000 people.

Researchers exploring the legend of Britain's most famous Knight believe his stronghold of Camelot was built on the site of a recently discovered Roman amphitheatre in Chester.

Legend has it that his Knights would gather before battle at a round table where they would receive instructions from their King.

But rather than it being a piece of furniture, historians believe it would have been a vast wood and stone structure which would have allowed more than 1,000 of his followers to gather.

Historians believe regional noblemen would have sat in the front row of a circular meeting place, with lower ranked subjects on stone benches grouped around the outside.

Russian astronomers have developed an innovative satellite network that would alert people when any space objects are on a collision course with the Earth. Some argue the system isn't effective and is too expensive. A large asteroid hitting the Earth could mean the worst natural disaster in millions of years - and threaten most forms of life.

In his weekly address on Saturday, President Obama announced the Department of Energy will loan almost $2 billion to two solar energy companies: Abengoa Solar and Abound Solar Manufacturing. The loans will go towards developing solar energy plants.

With the funding, Abengoa will build a solar plant in Arizona that can power 70,000 homes. When completed in 2013, the plant will be one of the largest in the world. It will also store part of the energy it produces, becoming the first plant in the U.S. to do so.

Emotional scenes expected in New Orleans

The last space shuttle external tank rollout will take place later today in New Orleans, as Endeavour's STS-134 mission fuel beast is waved on its way to Florida by "hundreds of handkerchief-waving" Lockheed Martin Space Systems employees.

The ceremony, featuring local brass band the Storyville Stompers, marks the end of an era which has seen Lockheed Martin deliver "135 flight tanks to NASA during the 25 years of flying the space shuttle".

Private Google scraper in SCO-like refusal to die

Scroogle has once again returned from the dead, continuing to serve up its privacy-friendly Google search results after another programming tweak from founder Daniel Brandt.

Brandt and the not-for-profit Scroogle have been scraping Google search results since 2002, allowing netizens to use Mountain View's search engine without being tracked by the company. But in May, after Google removed an interface page where Brandt was scraping results, the service went offline. It returned a day later, as Brandt tapped a slightly different interface, only for this interface to vanish as well.

"Sup? Lst wknd wz gr8. Cw2cu agn . . . ttyl!"

A message from outer space or a text about a fun weekend and the promise to touch base soon? If you're a digital immigrant -- Statistics Canada says only 27 per cent of Canadians don't text, tweet and Google away their hours -- chances are, it sounds like a foreign language spoken by a generation you can't fathom.

But according to prominent American neuroscientist Dr. Gary Small, this lack of understanding is more than just a generation gap. In fact, spurred by the technological web of mobile phones, computers, the Internet and video games, we are in the midst of what he calls "a brain gap," in which the younger generation doesn't just look and sound different; their brains are rapidly evolving to such an extent they actually function differently, too.

"Because of the current technological revolution," says Small, author of iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind (HarperCollins, 2009), "our brains are evolving right now -- at a speed like never before."

And it's starting at a very early age. While every human is born with the same circuitry, give or take some genetic variations, "studies show that our environment moulds the shape and function of our brains, as well, and it can do so to the point of no return," he says.

In fact, by adolescence, 60 per cent of the brain's synapses, or connection sites between cells, have been pruned to suit dominant learning experiences. In other words, for "digital natives" who have grown up with constant, daily exposure, technology stimulates brain cells and neurotransmitter release, sparking the evolution of new neural pathways -- and weakening old ones.

VoIP service mulls legal action

Cryptoanalysts have published what they claim is the secret recipe behind a Skype encryption algorithm.

A group of code breakers led by Sean O'Neil reckon they have successfully reverse engineered Skype's implementation of the RC4 cipher, one of several encryption technologies used by the consumer-oriented VoIP service. The proprietary encryption technology is used by the VoIP service to protect communications exchanged between its its clients and severs. It also restricts what clients can access the service, a restriction Skype had plans to ease with the upcoming publication of an API.

Even if independent research proves that the proprietary RC4 algorithm has been exposed it doesn't follow that Skype is open to eavesdroppers, not least because the service uses a variety of encryption techniques.

Europe's comet-chasing Rosetta spacecraft flew less than 2,000 miles from asteroid Lutetia Saturday, capturing the first sharp images of the 80-mile-wide object between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

The closest approach occurred at 1610 GMT (12:10 p.m. EDT), and Rosetta's cameras took about 400 pictures of the asteroid during the flyby.

These pictures were collected by Rosetta's OSIRIS imaging instrument, beginning at a range of 50,000 miles from Lutetia.

The second picture shows Lutetia and Saturn in the image frame,

and the third shot shows a pair of images taken less than two minutes before Rosetta's closest approach to the asteroid.

Look west at sunset. Venus is passing by 1st magnitude star Regulus; they're only a little more than a degree apart. Bright Venus catches the eye first. As the glow of sunset fades, Regulus pops out of the twilight a little below Venus. The view through binoculars is superb.

Magnetic fields overlying sunspot 1087 became unstable and erupted yesterday. The explosion emitted a bright flash of UV light (a C3-class solar flare) and hurled a massive plume of hot plasma away from the sun. Click on the image to watch the action unfold: