Apple is moving into Silicon Valley headquarters that look like a spaceship. Facebook is expanding its campus with a new building designed by Frank Gehry. Now it's Google's turn. 

This week, Google, the search giant, is expected to propose new headquarters -- a series of canopy-like buildings from Heatherwick Studio, a London design firm known for works like the fiery caldron at the 2012 Olympics, and Bjarke Ingels, a Danish architect known for his innovative designs. 

The project in Mountain View, which Google has not made public but has discussed with members of the City Council, is likely to aggravate an increasingly testy relationship between the company and community leaders who fear the company is overrunning their small city. 

When Google moved here in 1999, it had a dozen employees and a search engine known only to computer aficionados. Now, its 20,000 local employees make it the biggest employer in a city that is bursting at the seams. 

Link: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Google-plans-new-headquarters-San-Francisco-fears-being-overrun/articleshow/46394191.cms

Facebook is rolling out a new feature for suicide prevention that allows users to report suicidal posts on the social networking site and also contact a helpline or another friend for guidance.

Facebook has announced updated tools that provide more resources, advice and support to people who may be struggling with suicidal thoughts and their concerned friends and family members.

The new effort is part of a collaboration between Facebook and researchers at Forefront: Innovations in Suicide Prevention, an interdisciplinary organization based in the University of Washington's School of Social Work.

Link: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/social/Facebook-introduces-suicide-alarm/articleshow/46384965.cms

Cluster Computing VS Grid Computing

Cluster computing 

It is a type of computing in which several nodes are made to run as a single entity . The various

nodes involved in cluster are normally connected to each other using some fast local area networks . There are

mainly two reasons of deploying a cluster instead of a single computer which are performance and fault

tolerance. An application desires high computation in terms of response time, memory and throughout especially

when we talk about real time applications. Cluster computing provides high computation by employing

parallel programming, which is use of many processors simultaneously for a number of or a single problem.

Another reason is fault tolerance which is actually the ability of a system to operate gracefully even in

the presence of any fault. As the clusters are the replicas of similar components, the fault in one component only

affects the cluster’s power but not its availability . So, users always have some components to work with even in

the presence of fault.

Grid computing 

It is the segregation of resources from multiple sites so as to solve a problem that can’t be solved

by using the processing of a single computer . It employs use of multiple clusters that are loosely coupled,

heterogeneous and are geographically dispersed . Here individual user gets access to the resources (like

processors, storage, data etc.) on demand with little or no knowledge of the fact that where those resources are

physically located. For example, we use electricity for running air-conditioners, televisions etc. through wall

sockets without concerned about the fact that from where that electricity is coming and how it is being generated.

It is more popularly known as a collection of servers that are bound together to attack a single problem .

Grid computing is concerned about sharing, collecting, hosting and providing services to various consumers. 

Fusion Energy in action.

Clean electrical power from a fusion reactor remains a distant goal, but it's one step closer following a test in which fusion energy output exceeded the energy pumped into a fuel pellet.

This close-up photo shows the container, about the size of a pencil eraser, that contains a tiny pellet of deuterium-tritium fuel. Ultraviolet lasers pound it with enough energy to trigger fusion.

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have reported an important step on the way to fusion energy: a reaction in which fusing hydrogen gave off more energy than the lasers put in to initiate the reaction.
Fusion, the reaction that powers the sun and the more powerful part of thermonuclear explosions, combines lightweight atoms like hydrogen and releases a lot of energy in the process. In contrast, heavy elements such as uranium are split to release energy in the fission reactions that powered the first atomic weapons and today's nuclear power reactors.
Scientists long have hoped to harness fusion's power to produce energy free from the radioactive byproducts that are so troublesome with fission reactors. But controlled fusion has been extremely hard to create: it requires an extraordinarily high concentration of energy to get the reaction started and to produce enough extra energy to achieve a self-sustaining reaction.

The researchers at LLNL's National Ignition Facility (NIF) achieved "fuel gains," meaning they got more energy out of fusion from a tiny capsule about a millimeter across that contains deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen with one and two neutrons, respectively. It's machined with extremely high precision and mounted at the center of 192 ultraviolet lasers that pack a walloping 1.85 megajoules of energy.
The results, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, yielded results 10 times better than previous deuterium-tritium experiments, the researchers said.
However, it was still well short of "ignition," in which the energy produced exceeds what the entire experiment used, not just the smaller amount that actually reached the fuel. Controlled fusion has proved a famously elusive idea, and NIF has worked for years to get this far.
The researchers did see progress on another front called boot-strapping, a phenomenon that's part of achieving a self-sustaining fusion reaction. The boot-strapping process takes place when helium nuclei -- each one a pair of protons and a pair of neutrons produced by the fusion reaction -- impart energy to further fusion rather than escaping.
"We also see...evidence for the 'bootstrapping' required to accelerate the deuterium-tritium fusion burn to eventually 'run away' and ignite," the researchers said.
NIF's funding comes from the US government's Stockpile Stewardship program, designed to ensure nuclear weapons' reliability and storage safety even without underground nuclear tests. Improving the country's energy security, though, also is a goal.

World's largest solar thermal plant.

The "tower power" plant, which uses more than 300,000 mirrors to reflect sunlight, starts delivering electricity to customers in California.

While the East Coast feels the brunt of yet another winter storm, Southern California's abundant sunshine is getting put to good use. On Thursday, the world's largest solar thermal plant began delivering electricity to customers.
The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System -- jointly owned by NRG Energy, Google, and Bright Source Energy -- can produce 392 megawatts of solar power at full capacity. According to NRG Energy, that's enough "electricity to provide 140,000 California homes with clean energy and avoid 400,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, equal to removing 72,000 vehicles off the road."

Construction started on the Ivanpah solar plant in October 2010.

Sprawled across roughly 5 square miles of federal land in California's Mojave Desert, the plant has more than 300,000 software-controlled mirrors that reflect sun to boilers at the top of three 450-foot high towers. The focused blasts of sun rays turn water in the boilers into steam, which then drives power generators. It's basically a large-scale version of using a magnifier to melt army men -- except this version creates usable electricity.
For Google, which put $168 million into the project, investing in green energy is nothing new. The Web giant has invested in several solar and wind projects and says that over 34 percent of its operations are currently powered by renewable energy.
While the companies behind the plant are touting the benefits of clean energy, it has raised other environmental concerns. Apparently, some birds that fly through the intense heat around the towers -- which can reach 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit -- are dying or suffering from burned feathers, reported The Wall Street Journal.

'Terminator'-style cube robots swarm and self-assemble

Robotics researchers at MIT show off the capabilities of small cube-shaped robots with no external moving parts.

The M-block with its innards and flywheel exposed.

If you look down and see a series of colorful cubes crawling toward you, don't panic. It's not Tetris come to real life, but rather the creation of robotics researchers at MIT. The M-Blocks robots are cube-shaped modular bots with no external moving parts. Nonetheless, they can move, crawl over each other, and self-assemble.

The secret to the robots' movements lies under the skin. Each little cube hides a small flywheel that can hit speeds of 20,000 revolutions per minute. Magnets embedded in strategic locations help the M-Blocks stick together.

The current M-Blocks are about the size of wood alphabet blocks, but one goal is to miniaturize the technology. MIT likens the potential resulting microrobots to the liquid-metal androids from the "Terminator" movies. These could end up being the ultimate Transformers, with massive groups of robots altering their shape to suit changing needs.

Watching the radio-controlled M-Blocks move is fascinating. They spin, jump, click together, and fly off each other. The researchers hope to eventually turn the blocks into autonomous robots that can make their own decisions about how they turn into different shapes. Let's just hope they don't develop sentience and start making up their own shapes geared for overthrowing the human race.

Zuckerberg: Let's make the Internet 100x more affordable

Working with his Internet.org partners, Facebook's CEO outlines what needs to be done to drop the cost of Web access worldwide.

Two-thirds of the world's population doesn't have access to the Internet, and this is something Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a coalition of tech companies want to change. Their goal: Bring the Internet to every single person on Earth.

While the partnership between the companies, dubbed Internet.org, was announced last month, Zuckerberg released a video on Monday explaining how the coalition aims to bring the Web to nearly 5 billion new people.

"Our plan is to make basic Internet services affordable so that everyone with a phone can join the knowledge economy," Zuckerberg said. "In order for this to be economically feasible we need to make the Internet 100 times more affordable."

To bring down the price of Internet service, Zuckerberg suggested a combination of lowering the costs associated with infrastructure and the amount of data used.

To cut infrastructure costs, he said, cell phone towers need to be upgraded so signals can travel further, spectrum needs to be used more efficiently, and smartphone hardware prices need to be lowered. For data, he said that apps should cache data instead of request it and that compression algorithms should be used.

The Internet.org coalition partners include Facebook and a number of mostly mobile tech companies such as Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung. At its launch, this group said it plans to bring Web access to the unconnected world by focusing on a small number of goals, such as affordability, efficient data use, and backing new business models.

A study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project released last week looked at the 15 percent of people in the US who still don't go online. According to the study, one of the contributing factors that limits people's access to the Internet is affordability.

"When I was getting started with Facebook, I could build it because I had access to the Internet and a few basic tools that gave me what I needed to build it for the world," Zuckerberg said in the video. "If we can get to a point where everyone around the world has access to those same tools, then everyone is going to be able to benefit from the innovation and ideas and hard work of billions of people around the world."