After almost 50 years at Cambridge University the leading physicist Stephen Hawking, 66, is considering leaving Britain and move to Canada. He attacked the British government for carrying out “disastrous” cuts in science funding totalling $160 million.

Last month, Hawking said the funding cuts would “cause enormous damage both to British science and to our international reputation.” He is now said to be contemplating an offer to join a fellow academic who is leaving Cambridge this autumn to lead a well-funded Canadian science institute. Neil Turok, an authority on mathematical physics, said “the door is open” for Hawking to join him permanently at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ont., which has received $600 million in funding.

Turok decided to leave Cambridge after failing to persuade university authorities, research councils and sponsors to spend $40 million expanding the university’s Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, which he heads, into a Hawking Institute.

That was the rumor; but Hawking’s office said that Hawking had no plans to leave Britain permanently.

A spokesman was quoted as saying that hawking “is not joining the brain drain”.

UPDATE:

The University of Cambridge has poured cold water on reports its most famous physicist might be coming to Canada to work, saying Wednesday Stephen Hawking “has no plans” to leave. (CBC)

It made news when Google ‘forgot’ to change its logo to give a wink to Canucks on the Canada Day. Although the internet giant has a history of recognizing the Canada Day in the past (except for 2003) July 1st of 2008 brought a bit of hollowness for the Canadians when the same old primary-coloured letters appeared on the Google website. Here is the history and corresponding logos:

• 2007 – the L in Google was transformed into an image of the Peace Tower, complete with fireworks.
• 2006 – there was a Canadian flag
• 2005, a simple Maple Leaf did duty as the first O (although Google’s list of holiday logos for that year lists Canada Day as July 2.)
• 2004, the second G was a loon and its reflection with a Canadian flag hanging off the L.
• 2003, forgot the Canadians
• 2002, a moose lurked behind the word Google with a Canadian flag again suspended from the L.
• 2001, the first year the company marked the holiday, there was a beaver, a Canadian flag and even text saying: “Happy Canada Day.”

Do you really care if Google forgets or recognizes the Canada Day!

When Rogers revealed specifics for the services plans for the upcoming iPhone 3G this Friday many Canadians were not happy.

But why?

Rogers has set a mandatory three-year contract. O2 offers an 18-month contract and throws in the iPhone for free and AT&T has a two-year contract.

In the U.S., AT&T offers 450 minutes of voice, unlimited data and 200 SMS messages. But Rogers thinks Canadian don’t even deserve that.

• $60: 150 minutes of calls, with unlimited evenings and weekends; 400 MB of data; 75 sent SMS messages, with unlimited incoming text messages and visual voicemail messages.
• $75: 300 minutes of calls, 750 MB data and 100 sent SMS messages.
• $100: 600 minutes of calls with 1 GB of data and 200 sent SMS messages.
• $115: 800 minutes of calls, 2 GB of data and 300 sent SMS messages.

There is nothing like “unlimited data” to Canadians for whatever amount they pay!

People are really angry and James Hallen has started a petition at RuinediPhone.com. James is planning to send the online petition to Rogers on July 11th, the day the iPhone 3G is available, and also to send a letter to Steve Jobs. The letter was drafted when there were nearly 6,000 petitions which is a fraction of the current 15,664 number at the time of writing this post.

Gone are the days when screensavers save your monitors when old CRTs are replaced by flat panel screens!

In an effort to save environment an Australian company, Telstra, has decided to remove all animated logo screesavers from the company laptops and computers and replaced with a black, power-saving screensaver.

Well, it sure is another simple method to make your PC greener if you haven’t already done so.

Happy earth-saving!

Looks like a its a conspiracy against Net neutrality! Big service providers are are predicting Internet will essentially run out of bandwidth by 2010 without substantial investment in network infrastructure.

Decades of dealing with the trickle of bandwidth consumed by voice and dialup modems left AT&T twiddling its thumbs. The massive rise of DSL and cable modem service in the 2000s has had AT&T facing a monstrous increase in the volume of data transmissions. And that’s set to increase another 50 times between now and 2015.

AT&T says that video alone will eat up 80 percent of traffic in two years which is just 30 percent now. The BBC has come under fire from service providers like Tiscali, which claim that its iPlayer online-TV service is becoming a major drain on network bandwidth.

Publishers and content creators have argued that Net neutrality should be legislated in order to protect consumers. ISPs reject the neutrality concept itself citing services like voip requires priority by default.

Is it going to cost more to watch videos in YouTube in future?

To set a new Guinness world record and to promote the country’s succulent top export more than a thousand barbecue fanatics in Uruguay grilled up 12 metric tonnes (26,400 lbs) of beef on April 13, 2008.

A grill of nearly 1 mile long was set up and firefighters had to lit six tonnes of charcoal to start the grand ceremony.

Tags: Urugay, BBQ, record

A 26-year-old entrepreneur from Texas was named Miss USA on Friday, besting 50 other beauty queens for the coveted crown. Crystle Stewart completed her degree in Consumer Science and Merchandising at the University of Houston. She won the Miss Texas USA 2008 title in a state pageant held in Laredo, Texas on July 1, 2007, after competing against 121 contestants.

She founded and runs her business “Inside/Out” which aids young women in building self-esteem and volunteers with many organizations in the community

Details in the official Miss USA 2008 site.

Tags: missUSA

A tattoo, or dermal pigmentation, is a mark made by inserting pigment into the skin for decorative or other reasons. Tattoos on humans are a type of decorative body modification, while tattoos on animals are most commonly used for identification or branding.

That is what wikipedia has to say about tattoos. Looks like the defination needs to be modified soon. A recent study suggest that injecting DNA-containing vaccines with a tattoo gun is far more effective than the way human vaccines are now delivered. Visit Yahoo Health for further details. (photo: Dennis Mojado)

The use of tattoo injections, coupled with the ability to rapidly produce large quantities of a vaccine, might prove extraordinarily valuable in a situation such as a threatened terrorist attack, where a sudden need arises for large amounts of an effective vaccine.

As an example on how scared people are these days, a drunken man’s threat to blow up half a city with his television remote control forced Australian police to declare a state of emergency at a luxury golf resort.

Geoffrey Martin Fryatt, 57, a resident of the Fairways Golf and Lifestyle Retreat in Brisbane, was arrested by elite paramilitary police after terrifying neighbors with a knife and threatening to detonate a store of chemicals with the TV remote.

“One push of the button will blow up half of Brisbane,” Fryatt shouted in the standoff last May before police in the Queensland state capital opened fire with rubber bullets.

Fryatt’s lawyer told the Brisbane District Court that his client lost control after losing much of his life savings in a fraud carried out by his finance broker, local media said.

“People are genuinely scared of sudden explosions,” the judge said, sentencing Fryatt to a year’s probation. “Frightening members of the public with threats of bombs and bomb hoaxes has a much greater impact than it once did,” she said.

Fryatt accepted probation, but said he was concerned it could interrupt plans to travel overseas to do humanitarian aid work, the Brisbane Times newspaper reported.

“Let’s get you right before we send you off to a third world country,” the judge said.(Reuters)

The United States, Sweden and Japan topped a new ranking that measures how well countries use telecommunications technologies; networks, cell phones and computers; to boost their social and economic prosperity.

The ratings for “innovation driven economies” measured in the study, scale 1-10 are:

UNITED STATES 6.97

SWEDEN 6.83

JAPAN 6.80

CANADA 6.50

FINLAND 6.10

BRITAIN 6.10

AUSTRALIA 5.93

GERMANY 5.52

FRANCE 5.07

SOUTH KOREA 4.78

HONG KONG 4.46

ITALY 3.85

SPAIN 3.56

HUNGARY 3.18

CZECH REPUBLIC 3.11

POLAND 2.18

Following are indexes for “efficiency and resource driven economies”, scale 1-10, but not comparable with indexes for innovation-driven economies.

RUSSIA 6.11

MALAYSIA 5.82

MEXICO 4.37

BRAZIL 4.28

SOUTH AFRICA 4.11

CHINA 3.42

PHILIPPINES 2.38

INDIA 1.68

NIGERIA 1.01

Source: Reuters