“LiveScience is reporting on what appears to be the first digital simulation of an entire life form. Researchers created more than a million digital atoms to reverse engineer the satellite tobacco mosaic virus, a relatively simple organism. But is it really a life form? From the article: ‘Viruses are tiny bundles of protein and genetic material that straddle the line between life and non-life. Many scientists prefer to call them “particles” because even though they contain RNA or DNA like other lifeforms, they can only replicate inside other living cells.’”

• Slashdot | First Digital Simulation of an Entire Life Form

SpaceAdmiral writes “A revolutionary new jet engine has recently been tested in Australia. It is hoped that the engine, designed by UK defense firm QinetiQ and capable of Mach 7.6, will pave the way for ultra fast, intercontinental air travel. Scramjet (supersonic combustion ramjet) engines have no moving parts and take all of the oxygen they need (to burn hydrogen fuel) from the air, allowing for larger loads than rockets which must carry oxygen for fuel.”

• Slashdot | New Jet Engine Tested

“The US is planning to build a permanent lunar base which will support future visits to Mars. The living conditions on the moon presents a variety of challenges from medical to construction. Contingency planning would be critical but some feel the challenges presented on the moon will be less than Mars. The moon is closer to Earth, the atmosphere is less harsh and, unlike Mars, water does not exist. Is this the start of the next space race?”

• Slashdot | US Plans Lunar Motel

I just did a quick test and brief evaluation of Cantoo WebTest – a free open source tool for automated testing of web applications. I found it pretty good and intuitive, and I think it has a rather mature feature set. Having made a similar test tool myself five years ago (based on IE proprietary methods) I felt quite at home, and found the xml format delightful. I would have liked some more features to select specific elements, especially support for unnamed elements, preferbly using XPath notation. It produces a nice report describing the test run, this uses xml/xslt so it’s pretty easy to change into your own report style, or just use the xml report directly from within an application. I am still unsure if the xml format allows for much dynamic in the script, such as if/else etc.. But there is supposedly better support for those things via the Groovy scripting interface, I will be doing more tests in near future as I attempt to build test suits while developing, I will also get to test it’s include functionality in depth, in order to facilitate fragment re-use.

• My first example test script

It’s hard to decide wether to laugh, cry or party about this news… No doubt it will be exciting to see, but I really liked the idea of leaving some stuff for the imagination to run with, I really hated much of the revelations made in the latest trilogy, especially the über-strange description of the jedi force entities (the dreaded mediclorians!!).

The TV series spin-off of the Stars Wars film franchise will run to at least 100 episodes, according to producer Rick McCallum.
He told BBC Radio 1 the writing team would soon be meeting to start on the project, which would begin filming in 2008 and be ready the same year.
“Hopefully if we can make it work and everybody’s excited and watches it we will keep on going,” said McCallum.
The series will be set between episodes three and four of the film saga.
It would cover the 20 years in the life of Luke Skywalker growing up that remains a mystery to most film-goers.
McCallum said there would be “a whole bunch of new characters” and the series would be “much more dramatic and darker”.

• BBC News | Star Wars series to run and run