Apparently, LEGO Universe actually died because the cost of keeping the game G-rated was too high. http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2015/0...

I've taken this test multiple times, and I always score a 0 (perfect color vision), but that's not surprising to me. I've known since preschool that I have better than average color perception.

Well, the Russian billionaire Yuri Milnor created the Fundamental Physics Prize about a year ago. http://www.fundamentalphysicsprize.org/ The top prize is worth $3 million (meaning the breakthrough prize is not the largest science prize in history) and there are a number of smaller prizes worth $1 million each.

The article seems to be sorely lacking in details, and when it finally does mention the specific models, it seems that they only actually tried to get inflation out of toroidally compactified Type IIa String Theory, claiming that this was generic. If anything, this is the opposite of a generic situation. Toroidal compactifications preserve far too much supersymmetry to be generic, and as the article mentions, there are other reasons to expect that inflation won't be visible in the IIa theory. Additionally, the article fails to mention that there are a number of inflationary mechanisms in string theory that seem to be quite generic. Included in these are KKLT, KKLMMT, Brane Inflation, DBI Inflation, and many more stringy inflation models which I haven't mentioned. In fact, if anything, the problem currently seems to be that there are too many viable inflationary models in string theory.

I got to work on part of this system, which IBM calls Autobench, for my senior project at PSU. The system is a highly configurable framework which can download, compile, and run various benchmarks and profilers (for example while compiling a kernel). Its all centrally administered, so IBM can run a battery of tests on a variety of different machines at once.

I think Martin Bligh said that IBM has been using this for a while now, automatically downloading kernels upon release and testing them. The new thing is the regression matrix which is posted to the web. Very cool.