A new technology being developed by IBM can potentially expand your favorite media storage device to over 500,000 songs or around 3,500 movies. Using a special "racetrack" memory technology, the new storage device will have the capability to store more data in the same amount of space possible with lightning fast boot times and lower production costs. For more details regarding this new technology, read more about it in our full article.

Apparently, scientists have been able to do something simply astounding with Linden Labs' MMOPRG. They were able to create artificial life in the form of a child-like intelligence in Second Life, named Eddie. Read more on this by heading over to the full article.

Ever wondered about atoms? Well, you're not alone. IBM scientists have taken their thoughts on atoms to whole new level. In fact, they were able to measure the force needed to push a single atom through the use of a tuning fork. Find out more in the full article.

We know that you are already proud of the Cell Broadband Engine that can be found in PlayStation 3 units. Aside from providing you with the most exciting gameplay experience, the chip is also responsible for bringing about medical breakthroughs.

Today, we learned that Mayo Clinic and IBM decided to collaborate yet again to help improve medical imaging technology. At the heart of this project is the unassuming chip. Know more after the jump!

Moving beyond being a more-than-capable multimedia player, Sony's PlayStation 3 has proven itself to be very useful even in the field of science. Eight PS3s clustered together are helping scientist Dr. Gaurav Khanna investigate the gravity waves that are supposed to emerge once a massive black hole swallows up a star.

Khanna said that the PS3 was an ideal tool for his research due to the fact that it can run Linux, and that its powerful Cell processor - which is also used by IBM's fastest supercomputer Blue Gene/P - is more than capable of doing the computations needed to solve the mystery of the gravity waves.

Prior to getting eight PS3 units, Khanna was used supposed to get a supercomputer. But since a supercomputer cost US$ 5,000 in grant money, the scientist figured that he can save more by buying eight 60GB PS3 units (worth US$3,200) and clustering them together, calling them his "gravity grid".

Khanna was able to petition Sony to grant him the PS3 units, which were given to him free of charge. "Once I was able to get to the point that I had this kind of performance from a single PS3, I think that's when Sony started paying attention," Khanna said.

So how are the PS3 units - the gravity grid - faring in his research? "I don't have to use that supercomputer anymore, which is a good thing," he said. It tells a lot on how powerful the PS3 can get.

Programming and 3D graphics professionals from IBM Zurich recently announced that they can create a Google Earth for the human body. That is, they can come up with a way to create a program that browses the human body using layers and layers of 3D images. The program is called Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine (ASME).

Such an application could come very handy in revolutionizing how today's medical practitioners write medical records. Instead of mere text and numerical values, graphics could be viewed displaying the human body with the ability to point ti any given part and learn everything about it using sights, sounds, and numbers.

The proposal is a welcome one and is considered a huge leap in 3D-imaging application to everyday life, but some are questioning how the whole project would turn out when push comes to shove. Website Realityme says there's quite a few challenges that must be hurdled by IBM Zurich before they can truly be convincing.

First is the disparity in the comparison of human body imaging techniques to that of Google Earth. Realityme says that these are two different subjects that will be approached differently. Where Google Earth only shows the Earth's surface using height, length, and width, the human body is volumetric and has complex sections and organs inside.

Attempting to do this with hopes of doing everything as "real-time" as possible would be fairly difficult. Considering how unique human bodies are in measure, even getting your particulars digitized could run up big costs.

In conclusion, Realityme says that the project is by all means feasible, though it might be a little early to issue foregone conclusions. Still, it's interesting to think that the future of medicine can be so in touch with the precision of computers. Let's just hope our 3D medical images won't be as open to the public as Google Earth.

This could be the most credible proof that the PlayStation 3 possesses formidable hardware: IBM's fastest supercomputer to date, Blue Gene/P, is juiced up by the same kind of processing chip that was originally designed for the Sony PS3.

Blue Gene/P is approximately 100,000 more powerful than a PC, just enough to make PlayStation 3 owners feel proud about their powerful machine. IBM's latest supercomputer can run about 1,000 trillion calculations per second, also termed as "petaflops".

Blue Gene/P's predecessor, the Blue Gene/L, is  used to protect nuclear weapons stockpile, and has already reached a calculating speed of 280.6 teraflops or trillions of calculations. "Blue Gene/P marks the evolution of the most powerful supercomputing platform the world has ever known," said Dave Turek, vice president of IBM's deep computing, about Blue Gene/P.

IBM possesses a remarkable supercomputer manufacturing portfolio: they have produced about 50% of existing 500 supercomputers, as well as providing CELL processors for PlayStation 3 and for the Blue Gene/P. IBM also has notable competition in the supercomputing industry with the likes of Sun, maker of the Constellation machines.

The first batch of Blue Gene/P are slated for use at the following institutions: the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, and two unnamed US laboratories.

Peter Hofstee is one of the brilliant minds behind the Cell that powers our PlayStation 3 (PS3) video game consoles. Designs for the technology, which started seven years ago, include multiple uses aside from playing video games. And the fruits of his labor, including those of Microsoft's and IBM Corp.'s, are beginning to be realized today.

Aside from the Folding@Home Project that has received a very warm welcome within the gaming community, the Cell technology is being used quite differently in Rochester, Minnesota. Mayo Clinic researchers are currently using an IBM Cell blade server and the clinic's own software to accelerate the processing of 3D medical images such as magnetic resonance imaging.

Germany Fraunhofer Institute scientists, on the other hand, used several Cell servers to reconstruct a 3D image of a beating human heart from MRI scans. The importance of this is that it allowed doctors to view the organ with special glasses and make virtual incisions in real time.

Also, the University of Washington in Seattle utilized the technology last year by demonstrating how the Cell technology can improve the quality and speed of ultrasound scans. "In the future, you might be operating on somebody and repairing their heart valve while only making minimal incisions and not even having to string a camera inside," commented Hofstee.

Hofstee's own PS3 is one of the 30,000 units newly lined up to participate in the Folding@Home project. Currently, more than 270,000 systems are actively helping, two-thirds of which are PS3 units.

Humans may have the ability to destroy the world, fly to the moon and build an information superhighway, but for some reason we still can't figure out how a mouse thinks. It's ironic, we know, but at least we're getting there.

If all mice only had half a brain, they'd still be too complex for the most powerful supercomputers around the world, say researchers at the IBM Labs in the University of Nevada. That's because half a mouse brain carries eight million neurons (brain cells) and each neuron has 8,000 synapses that trigger responses in living organisms.

Scientists attempted to simulate how a mouse thinks with the help of a supercomputer called the BlueGene L. The machine has 4,096 processors running on 256MB of memory each. All of these components try to anticipate all the possible responses that half a mouse brain will take, and does so successfully in the process.

There's just one hitch: The supercomputer is lagging behind half a mouse brain on a one to ten ratio.  The mouse can literally run circles on the CPU with ease. The scientists say that the rodent's mental activity simulation simply factors in "tremendous constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any computing platform."

The IBM Lab team plans to give their hardware more oomph as better gear becomes available. they say that this will make it a lot easier for them to actually simulate rodent thinking patterns in real time.

The relationship between monkeys and videogames go back a long way. While them hairy critters usually starred or otherwise appeared in games, a recent report from CNN shows that monkeys - or at least, their cousins the great apes - are also benefiting from video games.

Researchers at Zoo Atlanta are currently studying the cognitive skills of two Sumatran orangutans by watching them play computer games.

"The more we understand about orangutan's cognitive processes, the more we'll understand about what they need to survive in the wild," said Tara Stoinski, manager of conservation partnerships for the zoo. "It enables us to show the public how smart they are."

According to CNN, the orangutans use a touch screen built into a tree-like structure that blends in with their zoo habitat. The games that the orangutans play were designed by volunteers from IBM. The games, which took almost 500 hours to develop, test the animals' memory, reasoning and learning, spitting out sheets of data for researchers at the zoo and Atlanta's Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, a partner in the project.

Elliott Albers, from the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, said that researchers hope to use the data to learn more about the orangutans' socializing patterns, such as whether they mimic others or learn behavior from scratch through trial and error. They also hope to use their findings to develop new and more effective conservation strategies to help the 37,000 orangutans living in the wild on the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra.