By eHow Health Editor

There’s actually a scientific explanation behind those dreaded Monday morning blues. Our internal clocks naturally operate on a day that is longer than 24 hours. By the time Monday rolls around each week, we’ve built up a sleep deficit of at least an hour. Of course, the weekend revelries and facing another work week don’t help matters. Here are some tips to make Monday mornings a little easier.

Step1

If you can, sleep in an extra hour on Monday mornings. Going to bed early on Sunday night doesn’t always help because most people will remain awake until their usual bedtime.

Step2

If you can’t sleep in by a full hour (and most of us can’t), take action Sunday night to shorten your morning preparation time so that you can set the alarm for 15 minutes later than usual. Wash your hair, pack lunches, lay out your outfit or pack your briefcase on Sunday night.

Step3

Hop out of bed the moment you wake up on Monday morning. Lingering in that downy comforter will only draw out the agony.

Step4

End your shower with a jolt of cold water to tear yourself out of your grogginess. Or exercise in the morning to get your blood pumping and to release those feel-good endorphins.

Step5

Get out in the sunlight. Bright light tells your body that it is indeed the morning and helps reset your internal clock.

Step6

Drink coffee or another caffeine beverage. Although it’s not healthy to drink caffeine to the point of addiction, caffeine, when used in moderation, can give your Monday mornings that much-needed oomph and alertness.

Step7

Anticipate your Monday morning on Friday afternoon. Fight the temptation to race away from a messy desk. Clean up your desk and leave yourself a to-do list to make Monday morning a little more tolerable.

Tech and and auto industries lead the number of planned layoffs according to a monthly survey.

By Kenneth Musante, CNNMoney.com staff writer

October 1, 2008: 7:36 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The number of job cuts announced in September rose as the economy slowed, according to a report released Wednesday.

Positions on the cutting board rose 7.2% to 95,094 from 88,736 the previous month, and were 33% higher than the same month last year, when 71,739 cuts were announced, according to outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.

September brought the announced layoff total for the third quarter to 287,142 – the largest number since 2005, according to the report.

The computer industry was the hardest hit, with 25,715 positions on the line after PC maker Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500) announced the largest workforce reduction of the year, the report said.

HP said it would cut 24,600 jobs worldwide as a result of its acquisition of Electronic Data Systems Corp. But since those cuts were a result of the deal and not a consequence of the ailing economy, the report noted, HP’s workforce could gain many of those jobs back.

The struggling auto industry came in second place, with plans to drop 14,595 jobs, while the apparel industry came in third place, announcing 8,350 cuts, according to the report.

Surprisingly, planned job cuts were relatively modest in the financial sector, the report said, despite the turmoil that plagued the nation’s financial institutions during the month.

Banks wait for bailout

The data showed that finance industry had announced 8,244 job cuts in September, compared with a spike of 27,169 during the same month last year as the credit crunch began to unfold. But they did jump from 2,182 in August.

September saw a major reshaping of the financial landscape as institutions such as Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch (MER, Fortune 500), AIG (AIG, Fortune 500), Wachovia (WB, Fortune 500) and Washington Mutual were acquired, bailed out, or went bankrupt.

“While all of these scenarios are being played out, the fate of the workers remains in limbo,” John A. Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in a statement.

Financial institutions are waiting to see if Congress passes the Bush administration’s $700 billion rescue plan that would allow the government to buy up tainted assets in order to keep their businesses from failing.

Whether the bailout plan is approved by Congress – and what form it takes – will affect the number of layoffs that may eventually be announced, according to Challenger.

“One of the big questions is: Are there going to be more runs on banks and financial institutions?’” he told CNNMoney.com.

If there is no bailout plan, financial job cuts will likely increase, according to Challenger. On the other hand, if all banks take advantage of the government’s offer, the number of layoffs could be limited, since no one institution is singled out.

But if a bailout plan passes and is only embraced by a few institutions, that would emphasize the weakness of those companies, and we might see more job cuts, he added. 

By Alexis Madrigal October 06, 2008 | 11:00:00 PM

FREMONT, California — Solar cells have been converting sunlight into electricity for years, but scientists have been much less successful at turning that technology into money.

Now, in a staid Bay Area office park, a converted hard-drive factory with a shiny new façade has begun churning out unconventional solar tubes that could change the economics of solar power.

The highly-automated factory belongs to Solyndra, a three-year-old company that has received $600 million in venture capital and $1.2 billion in orders for its new modules, which look like curtain rods. Those big investors are betting the company’s unique product will soon blanket commercial buildings across the world.

Instead of the standard panels mounted on racks that have dominated solar for the last 20 years, Solyndra’s cylindrical solar modules collect sunlight more efficiently across a broader range of angles and catch light reflected off the roof itself. The solar cells also contain no silicon, which has been a costly component of most solar systems.

Targeted at a highly specific market — office and big-box rooftops — and with signed contracts in hand, the company, along with a small cadre of other well-funded solar startups, are racing to turn their scientific and engineering marvels into profitable businesses.

The scramble, the money, and the size of the prize — a big slice of the trillions of dollars made in energy — remind the company’s founder, Chris Gronet, of his earlier experience in the industry that became the basis for the information revolution.

“We think the solar industry or market look very similar to the way semiconductor manufacturing was 20 years ago,” Gronet, Solyndra’s CEO, told Wired.com. “We say, ‘Wow this is familiar. We’ve been through this before.’”

All types of solar power have experienced growth in the wake of increasing awareness of the risks of climate change and the rising costs of fossil fuels. A report released last week by Lux Research, a solar-focused analysis firm, predicts that the total solar market will grow from $33.4 billion in 2008 to $100.4 billion in 2013. While traditional silicon-based solar cells continue to underpin most solar systems, there is a broad expectation among industry analysts and insiders that these new thin-film solar cells, such as Solyndra is making, will experience rapid growth. While thin-film cells aren’t as efficient at using the sun’s energy as their silicon competitors, they cost less to produce.

Instead of using wafers of material, a la computer chips or traditional solar PV, thin-film solar cells use tiny amounts of material deposited in ultra thin layers along the surface of glass or metal. In Solyndra’s case, vice president of business development Kelly Truman said that their process uses just a bit more than a micron of copper indium gallium diselenide, or CIGS. Using less of the expensive photovoltaic material drives the cost of their production down.

For years, CIGS technology had appeared the most promising for cheap solar power. The National Solar Technology Roadmap, created by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, states that steady efficiency improvement “could ultimately allow CIGS to achieve the lowest module costs and levelized cost of energy among all PV technologies.”

The total solar market can be broken into three main pieces: solar for utilities, residential installations and commercial buildings. Solyndra is focusing exclusively on the commercial side. What Gronet envisions is solar panels installed on your average Home Depot or Ikea, generating a substantial percentage of the company’s power needs right on site.

On the roof of the Solyndra office buildings, they’ve installed the first Solyndra array. What’s striking about the system is how simple it appears: The solar tubes look like reverse fluorescent light bulbs that generate electricity rather than using it. The mounting system is also light and small, as you can see in the image. They don’t have to be bolted to roofs because the spacing between the cylinders makes them less susceptible to wind damage than traditional flat solar panels.

But despite the industry’s high hopes, CIGS solar cells have proven very difficult to manufacture at industrial scales. Greentech Media analyst Michael Kanellos said that the risks for CIGS thin-film players have “increased dramatically” over the last few months with the worsening financial system and increased competition.

“Some CIGS will survive, but a lot of these companies might only leave a wet spot on the pavement,” Kanellos wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com.

Kanellos noted that Solyndra’s cylindrical design was advantageous, but also the most difficult to manufacture.

“Everyone else is having trouble making efficient flat CIGS panels. Curving adds another layer of complexity,” Kanellos wrote. “It is part of the reason that their contracts call for the delivery of their solar panels from now to 2012.”

Only two other CIGS-based thin-film manufacturers have managed to start cranking out actual saleable product. Nanosolar and Global Solar started selling cells last year. Solyndra, after hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, generated its first revenue in the third quarter of this year.

If Gronet and his team can work out the manufacturing challenges and navigate the difficult financial waters, their unique design and tightly focused business model could lead them to profitability, even after government subsidies in Europe phase out.

“In any unsubsidized world, which is a few years down the road, you need a cost structure that allows you to compete,” Gronet said. “Our panel, because it’s CIGS and thin film, will beat the costs of any silicon system.”

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

To get around this issue and delete the document, you must first Un-Publish the document, and then you can Delete the document, without an issue.

BUT, this will not delete the File.  For clarification, the file is the actual physical file that sites on the server, the document is the listing with a title, description, permissions and associated file.

You then must delete the file from the back-end.  This functionality is intentional, as you can link multiple documents to a single file.

Jonathan Fahey, 07.31.08, 2:30 PM ET

MIT professor Daniel G. Nocera has long been jealous of plants. He desperately wanted to do what they do–split water into hydrogen and oxygen and use the products to do work. That, he figures, is the only way we humans can solve our energy problems; enough energy pours down from the sun in one hour to power the planet’s energy needs for a year.

In January, only a month after reevaluating his methodology in the face of a frustratingly slow process, he finally found a way. “For six months now I’ve been looking at the leaves and saying ‘I own you guys!’”

Nocera’s discovery–a cheap and easy way to store energy that he thinks will be used to change solar power into a mainstream energy source–will be published in the journal Science on Friday. “This is the nirvana of what we’ve been talking about for years,” said Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT. “Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited–and soon.”

Plants catch light and turn it into an electric current, then use that energy to excite catalysts that split water into hydrogen and oxygen during what is called photosynthesis’ light cycle. The energy is then used during the dark cycle to allow the plant to build sugars used for growth and energy storage.

Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera’s lab, focused on the water-splitting part of photosynthesis. They found cheap and simple catalysts that did a remarkably good job. They dissolved cobalt and phosphate in water and then zapped it with electricity through an electrode. The cobalt and phosphate form a thin-film catalyst around the electrode that then use electrons from the electrode to split the oxygen from water. The oxygen bubbles to the surface, leaving a proton behind.

A few inches away, another catalyst, platinum, helps that bare proton become hydrogen. (This second reaction is a well-known one, and not part of Nocera and Kanan’s study.)

The hydrogen and oxygen, separated and on-hand, can be used to power a fuel cell whenever energy is needed.

“Once you put a photovoltaic on it,” he says, “you’ve got an inorganic leaf.”

James Barber, a biochemistry professor at Imperial College London who studies artificial photosynthesis but was not involved in this research, called the discovery by Nocera and Kanan a “giant leap” toward generating clean, carbon-free energy on a massive scale.

“This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind,” he said. “The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated.”

Nocera’s discovery arose from frustration. Disappointed with the pace of his lab’s progress, Nocera and his team decided in December to question some of the basic assumptions they had made in setting up earlier experiments.

Chemists, it turns out, are always worrying about the stability of their catalysts and end up doing backflips to try to synthesize materials that won’t corrode. Photosynthesis, though, is so violently reactive that the catalysts involved break down every 30 minutes. The leaf has to constantly rebuild them. Maybe, thought Nocera, instead of fighting corrosion, he should work with it. “It’s a bias a lot of scientists have. We want something to be structurally stable. But all it has to be is functionally stable.”

This thinking led Nocera to try his cobalt-phosphate mixture. He knew it wouldn’t hold together, but he thought it might still work. Sure enough, Nocera’s catalyst breaks down whenever the electricity is cut, but it assembles itself again when electricity is reapplied.

Nocera’s discovery is still a science experiment. It needs plenty of engineering before it can be a useful device. The cobalt and phosphate at the center of Nocera’s work is cheap and plentiful, but the hydrogen reaction uses platinum, which is rare and expensive. The electrode needs to be improved so the oxygen-making process can speed up. And the system needs to be integrated into some kind of electricity-producing device, ideally powered by solar or wind on one end and a fuel cell on the other.

But splitting the oxygen away from the water was the hard part, and Nocera has done it. “Now we can start thinking about a totally distributed solar [photovoltaic] system,” he said. “We couldn’t have a solar economy unless it could produce energy 24/7. Now we can.”

His hope is that because unlike traditional electrolysis devices, which are expensive and require toxic alkaline solutions, his system is so cheap, simple and benign that scientists and engineers around the world will be able to improve it quickly.

For his part, Nocera says he will work to understand and improve both sides of his new discovery. His lab will try to learn every detail about just how his catalyst is making the oxygen. And he is going to work with his engineering colleagues at MIT to try to integrate his storage device into systems that he hopes one day will power homes and cars all day and all night.

Poop Power

July 24, 2008 — Researchers have identified a climate-energy win-win, but it may put them in deep doo-doo.

That’s what happens when you study poop for a living. Michael Webber and Amanda Cuéllar of the University of Texas at Austin estimate that digesting all of the nation’s livestock manure to produce methane to burn for energy could supply more than 2 percent of the country’s electricity needs.

Meanwhile, the process would avoid the greenhouse gas emissions created by burning the equivalent amount of coal, and it would prevent the release of the super-potent greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide released by normal manure degradation, allowing for a double-whammy of greenhouse gas reduction.

The combined savings could reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from electricity by about 4 percent.

“We wanted to look at what would happen if we took all the manure in the nation, which is currently an environmental liability, and turned it into a commodity as a source of energy,” Webber said. The pair’s work is published today in Environmental Research Letters.

Livestock in the United States unload more than a billion tons of manure each year, most of which ends up in lagoons or other outdoor locations where it decomposes, emitting methane and nitrous oxide, greenhouse gases 21 and 310 times more potent at warming than CO2, respectively.

The proposed approach would send the manure to anaerobic digesters where microorganisms would produce biogas rich in methane that could be captured and burned for energy, releasing the less-potent greenhouse gas CO2. The remaining solids could be used for fertilizer.

This approach would reduce other problems associated with manure ponds, including odor, air pollution, and water pollution from runoff or groundwater contamination, Webber said.

Digesters exist in the United States, and many more are used in Europe. But this is the first time anyone has studied the total potential of biogas production in the United States, he added. “The numbers are big enough that they’re worth paying attention to.”

“This isn’t new technology. It’s not hard to implement,” he added. “It’s decades-old technology that’s ready to go right now. We just haven’t done it. We don’t have incentives.”

But now, the rising cost of energy and increasing drive to reduce greenhouse gases and generate renewable energy make this a better time than ever to consider this approach, Webber said.

“There are a lot of biofeedstocks that are receiving a lot of criticism,” Webber told Discovery News. “This one seems controversy-free. It’s a waste stream right now. It doesn’t fall into the trap of competing with food.”

“They paint a very rosy picture of biogas potential by considering all the animals in the country,” said Christopher Weber of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., who has studied greenhouse gas emissions from livestock.

Webber agrees that not all animals are kept in conditions where it would be easy to collect the manure. Large feedlots would be the best starting point. But his analysis provides an upper limit for what might be possible, he said.

Meat, especially red meat, has received recent attention as a less “green” diet choice than vegetables or fish because of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with its production, including from manure. Reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from manure improves the calculation, but it does not even the playing field, Weber said.

“It would do nothing about the carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide in the production of the grain to feed the animals, which is another large chunk of the greenhouse gases associated with red meat production,” he said. Cows would continue to burp methane as part of their digestion, which is the largest source of methane in beef production.

“All in all, for grain-fed beef, I would think manure is responsible for a total of 20 percent of the life cycle emissions or so; a good start but certainly not enough to make beef on par with vegetables or fish in greenhouse gas production.”

So, out of the box, this just doesn’t work.  Here’s the situation.

Thickbox works fine before any async postbacks by the updatepanel.  However, once the updatepanel is reloaded (does a postback), thickbox will no longer work and will render your links regular HTML links.

The Reason

The reason for this is when the updatepanel posts back, the javascript is reloaded but is not initialized, nor is it registered with the DCOM.

Solution

Add the following code to the pageLoad method in your AJAX enabled page, so that it looks something like this:

<script type=”text/javascript” language=”javascript”>
function pageLoad()
{
var isAsyncPostback = Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager.getInstance().get_isInAsyncPostBack();
if (isAsyncPostback) {
tb_init(‘a.thickbox, area.thickbox, input.thickbox’);
}
}
</script>

This code will check if there is an async post back being fired, and if so, will re-initialize thickbox.

I search around for at least 4 hours until I was able to piece together some solutions.  This is the best one.

Good luck.

ASP.NET UpdatePanel ATLAS AJAX ThickBox modal iframe

Where is ASP.NET 3.5 on IIS ?

Most people on installing .NET 3.5 on the server “expect” an entry for  v3.5 under the ASP.NET version Tab in IIS manager. And not finding that entry start panicking. If you have been one of those read on. The more tech savvy folks try to run aspnet_regiis -i from the v3.5 framework folder… but even that is missing

That brings us to the question

What exactly is ASP.NET 3.5 ?

Take a look at the v3.5 framework folder you will not find most of the files needed for ASP.NET to run like aspnet_isapi.dll / aspnet_filter.dll / aspnet_regiis.exe / aspnet_regsql.exe…

The reason being .NET 3.5 is not a stand alone framework like v2.0 or v1.1 . It is just an extension of the 2.0 framework. The extension provides developers with new language features like Anonymous Types, Extension Methods, Lambda Expressions and of course LINQ …. and AJAX is now integrated … also you have a few new ASP.NET controls <asp:ListView>, <asp:LinqDataSource>, <asp:DataPager>

Will I get ASP.NET version 3.5 under the ASP.NET tab in IIS 6.0 ?

Nope. Because as far as IIS is concerned nothing has changed. The aspnet_isapi.dll from the version 2.0 folder will still handle the requests and there is no new ISAPI dll specific to version 3.5. So you don’t have to change any Script Mappings in IIS …just leave the web application pointing to v2.0 under the ASP.NET Tab. And this brings us to the next question

What exactly is the extension ?

For that if you have Visual Studio 2008 go ahead and create a Website targeting the .NET 3.5 framework. Then go to the Property Pages of the Website and select References. You will find an entry like this

And those four assembly references provide the new features of v3.5.  Here is a 10,000 ft view of the functionality implemented in these assemblies

System.Core – Provides namespaces like System.Linq, System.IO

System.Data.DataSetExtensions – LINQ to DataSet

System.Web.Extensions – AJAX

System.Xml.Linq – New XML API.. supports LINQ to XML

Do I have to configure anything manually ?

No. When you install the .NET 3.5 redistributable on the server it installs these assemblies in the GAC. And any website that refers to these assemblies can fetch them from the GAC so you do not have to configure anything manually. All you need to do is publish the content to a web application that is marked with ASP.NET v2.0

And now you should be thinking

The new language features should require a new compiler. How exactly is the new compiler used ?

The answer is your web.config file. When you create an ASP.NET 3.5 website in Visual Studio 2008 an entry is made in the web.config something like

<system.codedom>
  <compilers>
    <compiler language="c#;cs;csharp" extension=".cs" warningLevel="4"
              type="Microsoft.CSharp.CSharpCodeProvider, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089">
      <providerOption name="CompilerVersion" value="v3.5"/>
      <providerOption name="WarnAsError" value="false"/>
    </compiler>

The new features do require a new compiler to be used and the web.config tells .NET that the v3.5 compiler has to be used.

What about IIS 7.0 ?

IIS 7.0 is no different.

Windws XP SP2 introduces a few new twists to TCP/IP in order to babysit users and “reduce the threat” of worms spreading fast without control. In one such attempt, the devs seem to have limited the number of possible TCP connection attempts per second to 10 (from unlimited in SP1). This argumentative feature can possibly affect server and P2P programs that need to open many outbound connections at the same time.Rant: The forward thinking of Microsoft developers here is that you can only infect 10 new systems per second via TCP/IP ?!?… If you also consider that each of those infected computers will infect 10 others at the same rate:
second 1:  1+10 computers
second 2: 10+10*10 computers (110 new ones)
second 3: 10+100*10 computers ( 1110 new ones)
second 4: 10+1000*10 computers (11110 new ones)
….
all the way to 10*60 + 10^60 computers in a single minute (that’s a number with 60 digits, or it would far exceed Earth’s population). Even if we consider that 90% of those computers are unreachable/protected, one would still reach ALL of them within a minute.

In other words, even though it is not going to stop worm spreading, it’s going to delay it a few seconds, limit possible network congestion a bit, and limit the use of your PC to 10 connection attempts per second in the process ! I have no problem with the new default setting limiting outbound connection attempts. Still, users should have the option to easily disable or change this setting. I might be going out on a limb here, but ever since the introduction of Windows XP I can’t help thinking that I dislike all the bult-in Windows “wisardry” in a sense that the system also limits user access. That irritating trend to ease the mental load on end users is somewhat insulting, considering that Windows is to make the more “intelligent” choice instead of the end user, as well as limit their access to tuning such settings…
End of rant.

With the new implementation, if a P2P or some other network program attempts to connect to 100 sites at once, it would only be able to connect to 10 per second, so it would take it 10 seconds to reach all 100. In addition, even though the setting was registry editable in XP SP1, it is now only possible to edit by changing it directly in the system file tcpip.sys. To make matters worse, that file is in use, so you also need to be in Safe mode in order to edit it.

You only need to worry about the number of connection attempts per second if you have noticed a slowdown in network programs requiring a number of connections opened at once. You can check if you’re hitting this limit from the Event Viewer, under System – look for TCP/IP Warnings saying: “TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts”. Keep in mind this is a cap only on incomplete outbound connect attempts per second, not total connections. Still, running servers and P2P programs can definitely be affected by this new limitation. Use the fix as you see fit.

To change or remove the limit, you can use the following program:

Event ID 4226 Patcher – Windows XP SP2 – A patching program for removing or changing the limit imposed on connection attempts in SP2. The patcher has the ability to restore tcpip.sys back to the original… Still, you might want to back up tcpip.sys, use it at your own risk. The author of this patch can be reached @ http://www.lvllord.de/

Monday, April 07, 2008

The Internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day – the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs – enough to make a stack 40 miles high.

This meant that scientists at Cern – where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 – would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.

This is because the Internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.

By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.

Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”

That network, in effect a parallel Internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.

One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.

From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed academic networks.

It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.

Ian Bird, project leader for Cern’s high-speed computing project, said grid technology could make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet.

“It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,” he said.

Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded “frozen screen” experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information.

The real goal of the grid is, however, to work with the LHC in tracking down nature’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass.

The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle – but even at optimum performance it will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analysing the mountain of data will be such a large task that it will keep even the grid’s huge capacity busy for years to come.

Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so.

Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers and molecular biologists.

It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyse 140m compounds – a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.

“Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science,” Doyle said.

“Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate.

“The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge.”

______

 Incredible!  For more information on the LCG, click here.