Revetec, a little known company from the Gold Coast region of Australia, may be on to something huge: they’ve created an engine that is 50% smaller, 50% lighter, has 50% lower emissions and is cheaper to manufacture than a conventional internal combustion engine of the same horsepower.

The prototype vehicle is shown above. You can read more about this “green invention” here and here.

YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation.

More specifically, YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.

These videos are not available for viewing/downloading, thumbs only. Once again, this is simply a research project that seeks to find out more details about how YouTube locates and takes down videos accused of copyright violation.

However, it’s quite interesting what kind of movies people are submitting…

WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a single rich application portal that blends terabytes of images, information, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a seamless, immersive, rich media experience. Kids of all ages will feel empowered to explore and understand the universe with its simple and powerful user interface.

WorldWide Telescope is created with the Microsoft high performance Visual Experience Engine™ and allows seamless panning and zooming around the night sky, planets, and image environments. View the sky from multiple wavelenghts: See the x-ray view of the sky and zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then crossfade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago. Switch to the Hydrogen Alpha view to see the distribution and illumination of massive primordial hydrogen cloud structures lit up by the high energy radiation coming from nearby stars in the Milky Way.

These are just two of many different ways to reveal the hidden structures in the universe with the WorldWide Telescope. Seamlessly pan and zoom from aerial views of the Moon and selected planets, as well as see their precise positions in the sky from any location on Earth and any time in the past or future.

Give it a try - www.worldwidetelescope.org

Today the World Wide Web’s (WWW) celebrates its 15th anniversary. 30th April 1993 the web’s code was put into the public domain by Cern, the lab where the web was developed. From only a few websites in the early days the web has seen a remarkable growth. Given its size It’s hard to imagine that it has only been around for such a short time.

According to the web’s inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the world wide web is “still in its infancy”. More insight thoughts are available in an interview with Berners-Lie by BBC News posted earlier today (well worth a read).

THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

For more information please read the full article at Times Online.