Overload

EETimes has a very interesting article on recent research which has demonstrated that a material can be made to superconduct at room temperature by super-compressing the compound rather than super-cooling it.

The article does not discuss the potential for practical applications for this research, but if this method proves to be reliable and fairly economical, it would be a fantastic scientific development. There are a wide range of implications, such as the ability to send power across power lines without losing any energy, or to create electrical devices without the need for cooling. Dr. Richard Muller, professor of the Physics for Future Presidents course at UC Berkeley, has given very good explanations of how superconductors work and the uses of room-temperature superconducting materials.

For the first time in a long time, web developers can be happy with one of Microsoft’s decisions. Today, they announced that IE8 will actually improve IE’s previous behavior by rendering web pages in standards-compliant mode by default instead of requiring a special IE-specific tag to force standards-compliant rendering.

Apparently someone at Microsoft has finally started to understand the benefits of true web standards and their superiority to Microsoft’s previous attempts at complying with “standards”. Well, at least that’s what I’d like to think, though it might just be wishful thinking. It’s probably far more likely that the good folks at Microsoft simply looked at recent events in Europe and realized that they didn’t have much of a choice. With the EU’s monstrous antitrust appetite likely to remain to haunt them for a while, they likely had more to gain by taking some steps to help their image as an open company than continuing their ridiculous attempts at creating their own web standards (or lack thereof).

No matter what the reason for the change, IE8 is great news for anyone in the web development community and puts us on a road for a truly standards-compliant web much more quickly than I had imagined. Ars technica is reporting that IE8 will be going into private beta immediately, so hopefully we can expect this improvement soon.