XplanaZine

Missing Link of Electronics Discovered: “Memristor”
After nearly 40 years, researchers have discovered a new type of building block for electronic circuits. Researchers believe that the memristor, or memory resistor, might become a useful tool for constructing nonvolatile computer memory, which is not lost when the power goes off, or for keeping the computer industry on pace to satisfy the exponential growth in processing power every 18 months. — Scientific American

OpenSolaris Ready for Prime Time
On May 5 Sun Microsystems will launch a supported version of OpenSolaris at the CommunityOne conference in San Francisco. Sun sees several opportunities for the open-source version of Solaris. For one, it wants OpenSolaris to become a part of the burgeoning cloud computing trend. The company will be working with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform. — PC World

Social networking applications pose risks
People often think Facebook profiles and sometimes MySpace pages, if they’re set as private, are only available to friends or specific groups, such as a university, workplace, or even a city. But that’s not true if they use applications. On Facebook, for instance, applications can only be downloaded if a user checks a box allowing its developers to “know who I am and access my information,” which means everything on a profile, except contact info. So what do these third-parties do with the information? Sometimes, they use it to connect users with similar interests. Sometimes, they use it to target ads, based on demographics such as gender and age (something Facebook and MySpace also do). But experts who track online security issues think there’s too much personal information flying around out there, with few guarantees that it’s safe. They also think social networkers have little understanding where their information goes and how it’s used — and as a result, have a false sense of security. — CNN