Yesterday, in our first IMT issue of 2007, we opined the future of so-called Web 2.0, discussing the role of interactive and user-friendly media sharing and online social networking — such as MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn — in business worldwide.

Now Disney is joining the club.

According to Red Herring yesterday, Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger next week will unveil a new Disney Web site that is similar to MySpace and Facebook. The site will feature social networking, chat and video clips, but it will incorporate parental controls for Web-crawling kids.

The site also offers Disney Xtreme Digital, a broadband tool that allows Web surfers to create custom profiles and personal pages and share them with others, as well as classic Disney characters.

Hopefully, for Disney's sake, the initiative will fare better than Wal-Mart Store's The Hub.

Attend MIT — for Free!
By the end of this year, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the world's most prestigious universities, will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. Learners won't have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted.

It's all free of charge.

"MIT is using the power of the Internet to give away all of the educational materials created here," Anne Margulies, executive director of the OCW program at the university, tells The Christian Science Monitor.

Intended as an act of "intellectual philanthropy," OpenCourseWare (OCW) provides free access to course materials such as syllabi, video or audio lectures, notes, homework assignments, illustrations, and so on. So far, by giving away their content, the universities are not discouraging students from enrolling as students. Instead, the online materials appear to be only whetting appetites for more.

The MIT site, along with companion sites that translate the material into other languages, now average about 1.4 million visits per month from learners "in every single country on the planet," Margulies says.

Super-Bright Supernova Hints at Stellar Smash-up
Astronomers have spotted a supernova intrinsically two to three times brighter than any previously recorded. It may have formed in a catastrophic collision between two stars.

According to New Scientist:

It appears to have been forged in a collision between two stars, adding fuel to a long-running debate about what causes the type Ia explosions that are a crucial tool in cosmology. The prevailing view of type Ia supernovae is that they result from a dense stellar corpse called a white dwarf that slowly collects matter from an ordinary companion star. Eventually the white dwarf reaches a mass threshold called the Chandrasekhar limit, triggering an explosion that completely destroys it.

Cows Engineered to Lack Mad Cow Disease
Scientists have genetically engineered a dozen cows to be free from the proteins that cause mad cow disease, a breakthrough that may make the animals immune to the brain-wasting disease.

An international team of researchers from the U.S. and Japan reported Sunday that they had "knocked out" the gene responsible for making the proteins, called prions. The disease didn't take hold when brain tissue from two of the genetically engineered cows was exposed to bad prions in the laboratory.

PhysOrg reports:

Experts said the work may offer another layer of security to people concerned about eating infected beef, although any food derived from genetically engineered animals must first be approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

The surviving cows are now being injected directly with mad cow disease to make certain the cattle are immune to it.

The research could be used as a tool that would help researchers better understand similar brain-wasting diseases in humans, researchers say.

Ping Pong for Three
Inventor Secil Boyd has successfully prototyped a new three-player version of ping pong. "TriPong" uses an odd-shaped table at regulation ping pong height and Plexiglas "nets" that divide the table into three wedges, one for each player, and each with a neutral zone and scoring zone.

Each player starts with one point and it takes three points to win, so players must team up to keep themselves in the game.

"If you win TriPong, you're better than the other two players," Boyd tells The Associated Press. "When you lose the ability to play like a team, the winner will emerge."

The TriPong table is currently not available for retail, but Boyd is in negotiations with a major sports company to bring the three-person ping pong table to market by the end of this year.

Vibrating Vest to Warn of Imminent Danger
U.S. researchers are testing a vibrating vest that writes messages on its wearer's. In the future, it could be used to send important commands to soldiers or firefighters, warning them of imminent danger when ordinary radios cannot be used, for example.

New Scientist reports:

The vest is made from black spandex and fastens around a person's lower torso with Velcro. An array of 16 small vibrating motors is embedded in the back of the vest and connects to a control unit on one side. This unit contains a wireless transceiver linked wirelessly to a controlling computer.

Commands sent from the computer are translated into patterns "displayed" — like Braille-on-the-back — by the vibrating motors. Eight of the symbols are derived from hand signals already used by the military. "They communicate things like stop, look left, run, proceed faster or proceed slower," explains Lynette Jones, the MIT engineer leading the project. When four corners of the array vibrate, for example, this means stop. And a vibrating column, moving from one side to the other, means turn left or right.

The U.S. army is part-funding the research.

Mysterious Object Hovering over O'Hare
A group of United Airlines employees swear they saw a mysterious, saucer-shaped craft hovering over Chicago's O'Hare Airport last fall.

"Our theory on this is that it was a weather phenomenon," FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said. "That night was a perfect atmospheric condition in terms of low (cloud) ceiling and a lot of airport lights. When the lights shine up into the clouds, sometimes you can see funny things."

AP reports that the Federal Aviation Administration acknowledged that a United supervisor had called the control tower at O'Hare, asking if anyone had spotted a spinning disc-shaped object. But the controllers claim they didn't see anything, and "a preliminary check of radar found nothing out of the ordinary."

And yet United spokeswoman Megan McCarthy said company officials "don't recall discussing any such incident from Nov. 7."

Agents Mulder and Scully were unavailable for comment.

Mysterious Object Crashing in Jersey
(Unrelated to Mysterious Hovering Object)
A mysterious metallic object that recently crashed through the roof of a house in eastern New Jersey has not yet been identified. Nobody was injured when the golf ball-sized object, weighing nearly as much as a can of soup, struck the home and embedded itself in a wall Tuesday night, AP reports.

Police received a call Wednesday morning that the metal object had punched a hole in the roof of the single-family, two-story home, damaged tiles on a bathroom floor and then bounced, sticking into a wall. Neither the address of the house nor the names of the residents have been identified, though Lt. Robert Brightman did say that the couple and their adult son live in a township housing development.

The rough-surfaced object, with a metallic glint, was heavier than a usual metal object of its size, said Brightman, who added that no radioactivity was detected.

The FAA, which sent investigators to the town, did not know where the object came from. "It's definitely not an aircraft part," a federal official said. "I can't speak beyond that as to what it might be."

Our theory: Unbeknownst to him, one of the family members living in the house is actually living a life that is not real, as he is the subject of the world's most popular reality TV show, produced by a visionary though reckless producer (by the name of Christof), while everyone he has ever known, in fact, has been an actor…and the object fell through the "sky" of the show's gigantic sound stage.

Or maybe it's one of these…

Russian Rocket Falling in U.S.
Yesterday a spent Russian booster rocket re-entered the atmosphere over Colorado and Wyoming, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said.

NORAD spokesman Sean Kelly told AP that the agency was trying to confirm a report that a piece of the rocket may have hit the ground near Riverton, Wyoming, at about 6 a.m.

Eyewitnesses reported seeing flaming objects in the sky at the time the rocket was re-entering. A trooper found a 3-by-5 foot area burned in the snow about 35 feet from the edge of the highway, but found no object.

Metamaterial Works for Visible Light
Ames Laboratory researchers have found the first metamaterial known to work for visible light, announcing the discovery in the Jan. 5 issue of the journal Science.

PhysOrg reports:

For the first time ever, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory have developed a material with a negative refractive index for visible light. Ames Laboratory senior physicist Costas Soukoulis, working with colleagues in Karlsruhe, Germany, designed a silver-based, mesh-like material that marks the latest advance in the rapidly evolving field of metamaterials, materials that could lead to a wide range of new applications as varied as ultrahigh-resolution imaging systems and cloaking devices.

The discovery marks a significant step forward from existing metamaterials that operate in the microwave or far infrared — but still invisible — regions of the spectrum. Those materials, announced this past summer, were heralded as the first step in creating an invisibility cloak.

Corporate Communications
According to the poster's description, this is a Kodak commercial that was produced for internal use to demonstrate Kodak's changing business (to digital).

To us, it demonstrates that funny does not necessarily equal innovative. But funny is funny.

And Celine Dion will sing the theme song while riding along on a unicorn through a field of baby animals. How's that for advanced?!?! Booyaaaaah!


Cheers.