| Blog - Best of 2010: Astronomers Find First Evidence Of Other Universes and Blog - Best of 2010: Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy |
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In December, astronomers said that our cosmos was "bruised" in collisions with other universes and that they'd found the first evidence of these impacts in the cosmic microwave backgroundThere's something exciting afoot in the world of cosmology. Last month, Roger Penrose at the University of Oxford and Vahe Gurzadyan at Yerevan State University in Armenia announced that they had found patterns of concentric circles in the cosmic microwave background, the echo of the Big Bang.This, they say, is exactly what you'd expect if the universe were eternally cyclical. By that, they mean that each cycle ends with a big bang that starts the next cycle. In this model, the universe is a kind of cosmic Russian Doll, with all previous universes contained within the current one.That's an extraordinary discovery: evidence of something that occurred before the (conventional) Big Bang.Today, another group says they've found something else in the echo of the Big Bang. [Read the full article] Even without an economy-wide price on carbon, many businesses are going green both as a way to save money and as a hedge against the rising cost of fossil fuels.Editor's Note: This introduction begins our Business Impact report on the topic of Corporate Energy Strategy, unfolding here daily throughout January.Businesses can be excused for feeling some confusion about what to do about their energy consumption. Though they've been told to expect an economy-wide price on carbon, the U.S. Congress failed to impose one last year, and the nations participating in the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 did not reach a binding agreement on how to cut carbon dioxide emissions. [Read the full article] Google's terms of service give it the right to use the information it collects for advertising purposes if it chooses to head in that direction. The terms note that "some of [Google's] services are supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions. These advertisements may be targeted to the content of information stored on the services, queries made through the services, or other information." They go on to specify that Google can at any time modify or extend how and when advertising is delivered and that users must agree to let Google advertise in consideration for granting use of its services.Google's Chrome Web browser—a closely related product that runs on other operating systems—also collects information from users, but it uses this to improve the software, rather than to target advertising. [Read the full article] 
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