The first naturally occurring superheavy element has been found. An international team of scientists found several nuclei of unbibium in a sample of the naturally occurring heavy metal thorium. Unbibium has an atomic number of 122 and an atomic weight of 292. In general, very heavy elements tend to be unstable but scientists have long predicted that even heavier nuclei would be stable. The group that found unbibium in thorium say it has a half life in excess of 100 million years and an abundance of about 10^(-12) relative to thorium, which itself is about as abundant as lead.

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Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.

No assembly required.
Google App Engine provides a fully-integrated application environment.

It’s easy to scale.
Google App Engine makes it easy to build scalable applications that grow from one user to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.

It’s free to get started.
Every Google App Engine application can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views.

Sounds like a very good excuse to dust off those python books!

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PaperWorld is many things - it lets you create multi-user applications, yes, but it also gives you the tools to create large games, quickly, localise them to a particular language or region, and manage everything in your workflow - so your designers don’t need to code, and your coders don’t need to design, and anyone with a basic knowledge of xml can edit a config file and setup or edit a game quickly without having to recompile and deploy.

So how does it do all this?

The basic building block of a PaperWorld application is the module - A module is made up of a set of files (referred to as ‘components’ in PW3D) - each of which has a specific purpose.

By creating these files and putting them into a convenient directory you can load them when you need them as a single block - PaperWorld takes care of the heavy lifting - you just list the modules that are needed for a game and PaperWorld takes care of it all for you.

Each module has its own conf.xml file, which describes all the files that it contains. When you tell PaperWorld3D you want to load a particular module it loads this xml

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Adobe’s flagship product, Photoshop, will become a 64-bit application in the next major revision to the company’s bundle of creative pro applications, Creative Suite 4. However, the 64-bit version will only be available to Windows users because of a change Apple made at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in 2007.

The good news is that Adobe will make a 64-bit version for the Mac in the future.

“We can reassure people that literally from the day we found out Carbon 64-bit was cancelled, we have been figuring out what we need to do to get there,” John Nack, senior product manager for Adobe Photoshop, told Macworld.

At WWDC 2007 Apple discontinued its Carbon 64-bit program, which left company’s like Adobe without an avenue to make its current codebase 64-bit. What Adobe has to do now is transition all of the old Photoshop code to Apple’s native Cocoa programming language, where it can then be made 64-bit.

“If you want to go 64-bit on the Mac, you have to port to Cocoa and that’s not a trivial task,” said Nack.

Adobe said that they have been working on the Carbon 64-bit version of Photoshop for some time and had planned on releasing a version for Creative

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Our main goal for this release is to begin to get the base features in place so you can share your early feedback and begin testing your Adobe AIR applications. This alpha is not feature complete. For a list of the specific features included in this alpha release, please see the release notes.

Important: This prerelease of Adobe AIR for Linux is alpha-quality and is not feature complete. If you are looking for Adobe AIR for Macintosh or Windows, please go to Adobe.com.

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A scrambled Rubik’s cube can be solved in just 25 moves, regardless of the starting configuration. Tomas Rokicki, a Stanford-trained mathematician, has proven the new limit (down from 26 which was proved last year) using a neat piece of computer science. Rather than study individual moves, he’s used the symmetry of the cube to study its transformations in sets. This allows him to separate the ‘cube space’ into 2 billion sets each containing 20 billion elements. He then shows that a large number of these sets are essentially equivalent to other sets and so can be ignored. Even then, to crunch through the remaining sets, he needed a workstation with 8GB of memory and around 1500 hours of time on a Q6600 CPU running at 1.6GHz. Next up, 24 moves.

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