ScentCone writes “A University of Tokyo team has developed a flexible, laminated network of pressure and temperature sensors suitable for jobs such as robot fingers. Circuits as pressure sensors, and semiconductors as temperature sensors are not new, but the thin, networked laminate of the two is novel.”

Slashdot | Japanese Researchers Develop Sensor Skin

Yahoo recently wrote on the Yahoo! Search blog, that their index now provides access to over 20 billion items (Compared to Googles 8.1 billion). A couple of days after Professor John Battelle responded with a post where he mentioned the fact that Google Scientists did not seem to fully agree on Yahoo claims. Well to make a long story shorter Matthew Cheney and Mike Perry, researchers at the NCSA under the supervision of Dr. Orville Vernon Burton, decided to make a brief study of the two rival indexes, and see just who’s got the biggest and most mighty index..

A Comparision of the Size of the Yahoo and Google Indices

“The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a story on Peekaboom,
a two-player on-line game in which one player tries to get the other player to guess a word associated with an image, by revealing parts of the image one click at a time. From the article, ‘The process of revealing objects, or highlighting images within the larger context of the photo, is the sort of thing that researchers in computer vision must do to teach computers to see.’”

Slashdot | Teaching Computers to See with Games

ATP writes “CNN is reporting that a planet has been discovered in a solar system with 3 suns. The observation brings into doubt the theory stating that planets form from the dust orbiting around a single sun. The discovery also resulted in a new method of searching for extrasolar planets — until now most searching focused only on single-sun systems.”

Slashdot | Tatooine-like Planet Discovered

/. deepexplorer writes “Japan wants to gain the fastest supercomputer spot back. Japan wants to develop a supercomputer that can operate at 10 petaflops, or 10 quadrillion calculations per second, which is 73 times faster than the Blue Gene. Current fastest supercomputer is the partially finished Blue Gene is capable of 136.8 teaflops and the target when finished is 360 teraflops.”

* Slashdot | Japan Wants to Build 10 Petaflop Supercomputer

* CNN | Japan to build world’s fastest supercomputer