Andreaskem submitted this story about researchers being able to encode an image into a photon and to later retrieve it intact. From the article: "It's analogous to the difference between snapping a picture with a single pixel and doing it with a camera — this is like a 6-megapixel camera... You can have a tremendous amount of information in a pulse of light, but normally if you try to buffer it, you can lose much of that information... We're showing it's possible to pull out an enormous amount of information with an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio even with very low light levels."

Dik Zak writes "Many news sites are reporting that the magazine Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists intends to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock on Wednesday 17 January. The clock was started at seven minutes to midnight during the Cold War and has been moved forward or back at intervals, depending on the state of the world and the prospects for nuclear war. Midnight represents destruction by nuclear war. It is not revealed in which direction the hands of the clock will be moved, but it should be safe to assume that they will move closer to midnight: the magazine cites 'worsening nuclear [and] climate threats.' The clock stood at two minutes to midnight when both the United States and the Soviet Union tested nuclear weapons in 1953. The farthest away from midnight it ever got was 17 minutes, in 1991 when both superpowers signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. It currently stands at seven minutes to midnight."

brian0918 writes "Times Online is reporting that French and American researchers have discovered that the stones on the higher levels of the great pyramids of Egypt were built with concrete. From the article: 'Until recently it was hard for geologists to distinguish between natural limestone and the kind that would have been made by reconstituting liquefied lime.' They found 'traces of a rapid chemical reaction which did not allow natural crystallization. The reaction would be inexplicable if the stones were quarried, but perfectly comprehensible if one accepts that they were cast like concrete.'"

ReadWriteWeb writes "MIT and the University of Southampton in Britain have announced an initiative called Web Science. Tim Berners-Lee is leading the program, which is essentially about formalizing a new kind of scientific discipline. The goal is to understand the deeper structure of the social Web and how people are using it. But as well as studying the Web, they also hope to shape the future of the Web. In the conference call this morning, Tim Berners-Lee spoke about how Web Science will help build 'a new Web, a better Web, building things on top of the Web infrastructure.' He said they'll be 'developing new ways of analyzing things and we'll be building systems which have completely new properties'. But he made a point of saying that because the Web is about people, social aspects will be a very important part of it."