Google Earth goes underwater

Google has lifted the lid on its first major upgrade to its global mapping software, Google Earth, by expanding this map to include large swathes of the ocean floor and abyssal plain, says The BBC.

Users can dive beneath a dynamic water surface to explore the 3D sea floor terrain.

The map also includes 20 content layers, containing information from the world's leading scientists, researchers and ocean explorers.

The Web sites of several high-profile rail and travel organisations crashed yesterday morning, highlighting yet again the need for extra capacity to cope with unexpected demand, says Computing.co.uk.

National Rail, South West Trains and Transport for London all went down for periods as huge numbers of travellers checked for updates, despite advance Met Office warnings of adverse weather conditions and subsequent travel problems.

"It is essential that travel providers load-test their Web sites ahead of periods of expected high volumes of traffic to avoid costly downtime, which can be damaging to an organisation's image and leave travellers in limbo," said Rob Cotton, chief executive at Web site monitoring firm NCC Group.

Russian Dmitry Zavalishin is cooking up a new operating system. He calls it Phantom, and it claims to have a different approach on the OS than any other out there, with the primary goal of being immortal, reports The Register.

In Phantom, powering off the computer will not cause programs to lose state. They can pick up where they left off as soon as the machine is turned back on.

There are a few obvious uses to this sort of technology - medical, military and mobile - where automatic state preservation will save the programmer from a lot of mistakes and wasted time. But there's also a possibility that the increased productivity may give Phantom some headway into the commercial server market.

Starting this year, some of the world's leading thinkers in exponentially growing technologies will gather annually at Nasa Ames Research Centre, in the heart of Silicon Valley, for 10 weeks of discussions on how to change the future, says CNet.

The gatherings will be part of what is known as Singularity University, a new academic institution co-founded by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, X Prize chairman and CEO Peter Diamandis, and former Yahoo Brickhouse head Salim Ismail.

Singularity University is less a traditional university and more an institution that will feature intensive 10-week, 10-day, or three-day programmes examining a set of 10 technologies and disciplines, such as future studies and forecasting; biotechnology and bioinformatics; nanotechnology; artificial intelligence, robotics and cognitive computing; and finance and entrepreneurship. Anyone can apply.