As near as I can tell, almost every kid goes through an intense dinosaur phase, and for some adults, the fascination remains for decades. Even years after the movie “Jurassic Park” brought dinos to life, I would still eat up all the dinosaur documentary shows I could find, like “Walking With Dinosaurs.” When I saw Inside the World of Dinosaurs as an app made specifically for the iPad, I was interested. When I saw that it was narrated by Stephen Fry, the UK actor, comedian and writer, I bought it.

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There’s no denying that the FOSS community has many virtues, but gender equality doesn’t seem to be one of them. Gender-related issues and tensions have plagued the FOSS world for as long as many of us can remember, and the problem has already been picked apart on these pages time, time and time again. Well guess what? It’s still a problem. That can hardly be denied. Linux bloggers varied widely, however, in their opinions as to what should be done.

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There’s nothing like a popularity contest to elicit a wide array of opinions — particularly those of the opposing kind — but recently an example appeared in the Linux blogosphere that seems to be something of an exception. “Debian is now the most popular Linux distribution on web servers,” proclaimed W3Techs in a blog post from earlier this month. A few mildly divergent comments were expressed, to be sure, but for the most part, Linux geeks appeared to be largely in agreement. Could this be a historic first?

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Researchers at IBM’s Almaden Labs have created a 12-atom magnetic memory bit, in a continuation of work on atomic-level memory storage first posited in 1959 by American physicist Richard Feynman. Disk drives currently use about 1 million atoms to store a single bit of information, according to IBM. The scientists used antiferromagnetism to achieve their result. They stored the ASCII code for the word “Think” on 96 iron atoms using this approach.

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Linux bloggers’ New Year’s resolutions tend to be many and varied in any given year, but one most can surely agree upon is the desire to outfit a new PC with nothing but free software. That sentiment, indeed, is just the one that was anticipated over at Computeractive UK, which published a compelling little story along those lines back in December. “I want to use only free software on my new PC. Where do I start?” the piece began. Of course, as any good Linux geek knows, there’s a wide world of FOSS out there.

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As the U.S. government continues to pound out proposals for getting its IT security ducks in a row, it appears it’s not the only party in Washington, D.C., to have a problem with network intrusion. IT systems belonging to the lobbying group the United States Chamber of Commerce were breached by hackers using servers located in China, according to a recent report. The Chamber’s members include most of the largest U.S. corporations, and the organization has more than 100 affiliates worldwide.

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Massive data sets — a season’s worth of baseball statistics, for example, or health data from around the world — can contain some very revealing knowledge. The problem confronting researchers, though, is finding it. That may be a little easier with some tools developed by scientists at Harvard University and the Broad Institute. The suite of tools called “MINE” — Maximal Information-based Nonparametric Exploration — were revealed this week in an article published in the journal Science.

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In the last three years, corporate views of master data management have rapidly evolved from data-centric confusion to a point where companies now focus on the consumers of master data and the business processes that consume it. In the next two to five years, the companies that use this MDM momentum will gain a strategic advantage. Companies are often tempted to start by defining what master data looks like versus starting by asking, “which applications and processes need master data” and then asking what data they need.

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Scientists are getting very close to proving or disproving the existence of the subatomic particle known as the “Higgs boson.” The list of possible hiding spots for the Higgs boson particle has been narrowed down, according to teams carrying out experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva Switzerland. The existence of Higgs boson — also know as the “God particle” — is key to explaining why there is mass in the universe. It will likely be another year before scientists have enough data to say whether the elusive particle really exists.

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There is good news and bad news for driver safety in the U.S.: The good news is that highway deaths fell to 32,885 in 2010, the lowest level since 1949, according to the NHTSA. The bad news, however, is delivered in the same report. The NHTSA unveiled a new measure of fatalities related to distracted driving, which it calls “distraction-affected crashes.” There were an estimated 3,092 fatalities in this category last year — despite the plethora of local laws passed to ban such behavior, and despite the numerous public safety and education campaigns to discourage it.

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The next generation of Microsoft’s Kinect input device may be able to read users’ lips and emotions. The forthcoming device, which is expected to come bundled with Xbox consoles, reportedly will not just sense motions the way the current Kinect generation does, but will also allow games to read lips, recognize which way players are facing, and detect when they are angry. To assess players’ emotional states, Kinect 2 may track their facial characteristics, as well as the pitch and volume of their voices.

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A team of researchers led by Tobias Schaedler of HRL Labs has developed an ultralight metallic microlattice that’s 10,000 times lighter than ultralight aerogels and carbon nanotube foams. Ultralight cellular materials weigh less than 10 milligrams per cubic centimeter. “An ordered lattice is inherently stronger than a foam with random porosity,” Schaedler told TechNewsWorld. Uses for ultralight cellular materials include thermal insulation, battery electrodes and damping for acoustic, vibration and shock energy.

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