Internet

Google's Android does a lot more these days than just smart phones and nifty mobile gadgets. An Internet pioneer is using the platform to launch a interplanetary Internet protocol on Earth that could harden wireless networks against delays in data transmission.

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Most DARPA challenges serve some sort of obvious military or intelligence purpose. But the agency has us scratching our heads over its latest competition, the Network Challenge: a $40,000 cash prize will go to the first person who finds the correct latitude and longitude of ten weather balloons located within the continental United States.

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Yes, hard to believe, but it was 40 years ago today that the first two nodes of what would become Arpanet connected, thus beginning the Internet As We Know It. In the ensuing four decades, the Internet would change our world as profoundly as radio and the printing press had before it. So to celebrate, we’ve compiled five milestones in the Internet's young life.

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While some companies hope an iTunes-like approach to distributing scientific papers on the cheap will get journal articles into the hands of people who need them, a new study shows that many medical students are already taking the Napster approach. A new paper studying the downloading habits of medical students found 125,000 users of peer-to-peer filesharing services who obtained some 5,000 scientific papers for free, circumventing the usual $30 fee.

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Since its inception, the World Wide Web has been dominated by English. Even websites that use a different language still use the Latin-character "www" format, with a URL spelled out with the English alphabet. Well, that domination will soon come to an end, as Icann, the committee that regulates the Internet, has begun finalizing steps towards approving web addresses in non-Latin characters.

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Your grandma might think that the Internet is rotting your brain, but it's possible if she did a little face-time with Google that she could stay sharper in the noggin herself. In a new study, Internet novices who were instructed to search the web showed increased activity in areas of the brain associated with making decisions and memory in just two weeks, according to a poster presented today at the annual Society for Neuroscience conference.

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If it were up to us, everything would be faster by at least one order of magnitude, but the laws of physics often get in the way of unlimited speed and efficiency. Take fiber optic data transfer: the pulses of light carrying data through the worldwide network of fiber optics move really fast, but alas, cannot go any faster than they do. However, scientists at Cornell University have figured out a way to pack more data into those pulses of light, using a system they're calling a "time telescope," which has the potential to increase fiber optic data speeds by 27 times.

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No less than the open freedom of the Internet is at stake in the war over net neutrality. Now FCC chairman Julius Genachowski has waded into the fray with two new proposals and a clear message: an open and nondiscriminatory Internet is a must for the future.

That stance emerged today in Genachowski's address at the Brookings Institute in Washington. He laid out problems such as the limited competition among ISPs, the economic incentives for ISPs to sell bundled phone and TV service with Internet, and the burden of growing Internet traffic that puts pressure back on ISPs.

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Moving computing from the desktop to the 24/7 data centers of the "cloud" may be the way forward (just ask Google), but it will come with a hefty energy price. Teams at MIT and Carnegie Mellon University, however, are developing a smart algorithm that could reroute Internet traffic to where energy is cheapest at any given moment, potentially saving millions of dollars in energy usage.

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We all know the web browser will soon become the central figure in the world of computing. That's why we care about a few compelling new hints from Khronos Group, the consortium behind such standards as OpenGL, about WebGL, a web standard that promises to bring 3-D acceleration to browsers without the need for plugins.

That would open up a fresh world of possibilities for what can be done within the once-humble confines of a browser window.

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