On March 9, world-renowned environmentalist Professor Norman Myers will deliver a lecture at Macquarie University in Sydney, announcing the beginnings of the largest mass extinction in 65 million years and discussing what can be done to prevent it.

Myers argues that we are destroying the Earth's biodiversity so rapidly that we are witnessing the opening phase of a mass extinction of species, one of only six such events in the Earth’s entire history.

In the late 1980s, Myers controversially estimated the rate of species extinction to be 50 species per day, compared to the "natural" extinction rate of roughly one species every 3-5 years. Although his findings were severely criticised at first, most scientists have eventually come to accept them.

If you wanted to catch a few particles of comet dust speeding through the vacuum of space at 6 kilometers per second -- without damaging or destroying those particles -- how would you do it?

Faced with exactly this problem, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory focused on aerogel -- an extremely lightweight, porous material that is chemically identical to glass, but weighs only a little more than air.

Aerogel is the lightest solid known to science. It's also one of the most insulating materials on Earth, the most porous, and it's nearly transparent. Those last two properties made it an ideal choice for catching flecks of comet and interstellar dust on the recently-returned Stardust mission launched by NASA and JPL.

Windows narrowly bumped Unix in 2005 to claim the top spot in server sales for the first time, according to a new report from IDC.

Computer makers sold $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers worldwide in 2005 compared with $17.5 billion in Unix servers, IDC analyst Matthew Eastwood said of the firm's latest Server Tracker market share report.

And in another first, fast-growing Linux took third place, bumping machines with IBM's mainframe operating system, z/OS. Linux server sales grew from $4.3 billion in 2004 to $5.3 billion in 2005, while mainframes dropped from $5.7 billion to $4.8 billion over the same period, Eastwood said.

The New York Times is reporting that the CIA is secretly reclassfying documents. How did we catch on? Historians have some of the documents. From the article: "eight [of the] reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, 'Foreign Relations of the United States.'" Are our intelligence agencies rewriting history, stupidly paranoid, or both? We do know that they are ignoring a 2003 law that requires formal reclassifications. It puts that whole Google censorship thing in a whole new light. (Americans aren't allowed to see that video.)

Samsung Electronics is facing legal action from the big five US movie studios which claims one of its DVD players can be used to avoid encryption technology.

According to reports, Samsung is being sued by 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Time Warner, Walt Disney, and Universal.

The Korean Times said Samsung had not yet received the complaint. But the spokesman, "guessed that the film makers take issue with DVD-HD841, which Samsung sold in the United States between June and October 2004."

"If so, I do not know why the movie studios are complaining about the products, of which production was brought to an end more than 15 months ago. We stopped manufacturing the model after concerns erupted that its copy-protection features can be circumvented by sophisticated users."

After months of maintaining that it had not yet finalized its Windows Vista line up, Microsoft seems finally to have decided upon a half dozen core Vista versions.

On the line up are Windows Starter 2007; Windows Vista Enterprise; Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista ultimate, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Home Basic N and Windows Vista Business N.

According to information on the Microsoft site, all of the planned Windows variants will include integrated games.

They are only a few nanometers in size, but their impact is tremendous: The tiny particles drive cancer cells to their death in no time at all. At nano tech 2006 in Japan from February 21 to 23 Fraunhofer researchers will demonstrate the great efficiency of nanoscopic particles as a vehicle for drug delivery.

Medicines that will make their own way through the body and attack precisely the diseased cells on reaching their destination – such has been the dream of physicians and pharmacists since time immemorial. Fraunhofer researchers working in the Nanotechnology Alliance have now come a little closer to reaching this goal. They have developed bio-functional nanoparticles that cause necrosis in cancer cells. "These cell-like structures have a solid nucleus surrounded by proteins that detect and destroy cancer cells," explains Dr. Günter Tovar of the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB.

The Big Four record labels are escalating their attack on Patti Santangelo, the New York mother who's so far the only person to stand up to them.

And they'll be using her children as weapons against her.

"They've started to push back aggressively. They're going after her children - and this time not directly so they can get around certain protections the children have. They had information about the children that wasn't public, or wasn't supposed to be public, and it's of great concern not only that that they were able to obtain it, but also that they wanted it."

The RIAA has spent enough to feed a small country on trying to make the world believe it's owners, the multi-billion-dollar Big Four labels, are being "devastated" (their word) by people who share music online, that contracted artists are suffering and that support workers are being driven into extreme financial hardship.

They make the completely unsupportable assertion that people using the p2p networks to share files would otherwise have paid $1 or more to buy the song from an online corporate music site or an offline music store.

And they claim file sharers are criminals and thieves, although nothing has been stolen and at worst, file sharing, a purely civil, not criminal, matter, involves copyright infringement.

A cannabis smoker has been arrested after complaining to police that he was sold bad weed.

Hans-Juergen Bendt, 52, from Darmstadt, lodged a complaint about his dealer with police after he sold him seven ounces of "completely un-enjoyable" hash.

But despite the official complaint, in which Bendt described himself as a victim of "fraud" involving drugs of "absolutely mediocre quality", the officers failed to act upon the allegations and booked the complainant instead.

A week long experiment to run an international scientific computing grid under working conditions has resulted in sustained transfer rates of a gigabyte per second.

Tony Doyle, leader of the UK particle physics grid, said that corresponds to transferring a DVD worth of scientific data every five seconds. "At these rates it would take 25 days to transfer the nearly 400,000 films listed at IMDB.com and only an hour and a half to transfer the 1,000 flms produced each year by Mumbai-based Bollywood."

RAL works with sites at UK universisties to form GridPP, the UK particle physics grid, consisting of over 4,000 CPUs and 250 terabytes of storage.