An article reporting on the new White Paper from Joint Venture Silicon Valley, mentioned above.

"Silicon Valley may be in an economic slump, but the seeds of the next boom have already been planted, says a new report issued by a group of business and civic leaders. Advancements expected to lead the economic revival include the combination of bio-science and information technology, use of the Internet to increase productivity and the ability to build electronic circuitry on a molecular scale."

An interesting story on "parasitic computing."

"The communication system that brings you the Web page of your choice can be exploited to perform computations. In effect, one computer can co-opt other Internet computers to solve pieces of a complex computational problem. The enslaved computers simply handle what appear to be routine Web page requests and related messages, but the disguised messages ingeniously encode possible solutions to a mathematical problem. If the solution is correct, a message returns to the original sender."

An interesting article on an epistemological rift between particle physics and solid-state physics. This is interesting to those outside these two disciplines because of what it says about complex systems and emergence.

"Many complex systems -- the very ones the solid-staters study -- appear to be irreducible. Made of many interlocking parts, they display a kind of synergy, obeying "higher organizing principles" that cannot be further simplified no matter how hard you try."

While peer review isn't going away anytime soon, many communities are experimenting with alternative models to implement it. Here's one example.

"More than 1,400 biologists have volunteered for a new online service that rates the quality of scientific papers in the life sciences by essentially allowing a broad group of researchers to vote on which papers they think are most interesting. The service's organizers say it challenges the traditional system of judging the significance of scientific work."

An article reporting on the following report from Advanced Materials.

"RAM and human memory have always inhabited entirely separate worlds, but the boundary between them is now blurring. Hardware and wetware may have more in common than you think."