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Microsoft has posted an awesome new concept video with some ubercool new interfaces that could be here in five to ten years, estimates Kurt DelBene, President, Microsoft Office Division. That sounds a bit conservative. "All of the ideas in the video are based on real technology," he said. "Some of the capabilities, such as speech recognition, real time collaboration, and data visualization, already exist today. Others are not yet available in specific products, but represent active research and development happening at Microsoft and other companies." "Other companies" … hmm, some of the concepts look a bit like Nokia's visionary Morph concept tech  (see the video at the bottom of this post and our 2010 news item).

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/05/23/Marcus_Chown_in_Conversation_with_Fred_Watson Marcus Chown, author of Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You: A Guide to the Universe, discusses the mechanics behind quantum computers, explaining that they function by having atoms exist in multiple places at once. He predicts that quantum computers will be produced within 20 years. ----- The two towering achievements of modern physics are quantum theory and Einsteins general theory of relativity. Together, they explain virtually everything about the world in which we live. But almost a century after their advent, most people havent the slightest clue what either is about. Radio astronomer, award-winning writer and broadcaster Marcus Chown talks to fellow stargazer Fred Watson about his book Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You. - Australian Broadcasting Corporation Marcus Chown is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, he is now cosmology consultant of the weekly science magazine New Scientist. The Magic Furnace, Marcus' second book, was chosen in Japan as one of the Books of the Year by Asahi Shimbun. In the UK, the Daily Mail called it "a dizzy page-turner with all the narrative devices you'd expect to find in Harry Potter". His latest book is called Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You.

And yet, even today, seventeen years after the launch of the arxiv, every attempt to set up a preprint service for biologists has been a dismal failure, as noted by both Ginsparg and Timo Hannay (whose Science21 talk notes are up at Nature Networks. You can also get video and microblogging). Contrary to what a naive outsider's opinion might suggest, biologists appear to be highly resistant to the whole idea of sharing pre-publication results.