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Researchers at Stanford University have just made a major breakthrough that may impact the technology industry for years to come: they've built a better battery. The project, an attempt to use lithium-sulfur in place of the lithium-ion technology that is used in batteries today, has been in development since 2007. Recently, the scientists' efforts were rewarded when they created a battery that lasts four times as long as its lithium-ion counterparts while also having the benefit of being "significantly safer" than today's batteries which occasionally explode after short-circuiting.

Although still a ways off from commercial viability (and availability), the lithium-sulfur batteries promise advances like 80% more capacity, 10 times the power density and, theoretically, the ability to last four times as long as modern batteries.

At the White House today, President Obama talked robots, hung out with the guys from MythBusters, and launched a campaign designed to create smarter, techier American kids.

"Reaffirming and strengthening America's role as the world's engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation is essential to meeting the challenges of this century," said Obama." That's why I am committed to making the improvement of STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] education over the next decade a national priority."

Giant science publisher Elsevier announced this week that it is developing what it calls The Article of the Future, a new method of leveraging the web's multi-media capabilities for presenting academic articles online. The company says it seeks to offer readers "individualized entry points and routes through the content, while using the latest advances in visualization techniques." It's got AJAX and it's got real-time web search.

Some parts of the available prototypes are interesting but opinion in the scientific community seems split. Is this ground-breaking stuff or yesterday's news repackaged by another industry threatened by the web? That depends on who you ask.

Noesis is a new semantic web search engine that helps scientists studying the environment access and retrieve the research data they need. Developed at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the new engine has the potential to enable scientists and researchers everywhere to perform more productive and focused searches thanks to the semantic technology Noesis uses.

The EU-funded OpenKnowledge program is a smart toolkit designed to unlock the hidden resources of the web that can't be accessed by web sites and browsers alone. With a small, downloadable piece of Java code, users can coordinate and share information with each other more directly than through traditional means. To highlight the potential of the OpenKnowledge system, researchers have put it to work in three different areas: healthcare services, emergency management, and proteomics research.

Researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Folwer recently published a paper in the British Medical Journal where they examined how a person's happiness is related to the happiness of their friends in their offline social networks. To follow up that study, they examined those same happiness clusters in online networks like MySpace and Facebook. Their conclusion? Happier people tend to have more friends and are more central to the network when compared with their more sullen friends.

Film director Jesse Dylan, the co-creator of the Emmy award winning Barack Obama support video Yes We Can has released a new work, this time explaining the Creative Commons Foundation's science initiative, Science Commons.

Dylan, who coincidentally is the eldest son of folk legend Bob Dylan, uses his familiar style to aggregate a quick selection of scientists explaining why a web-based revision of copyright policy is so important for the advancement of scientists. "Scientists are the ultimate remixers," one interviewee says, and we agree that Creative Commons in science is a very exciting idea.

Memorization is a waste of time when Google is only a a few clicks away. That's what Don Tapscott, author of the bestselling books Wikinomics and Growing Up Digital, believes. Tapscott, considered by many to be a leading commentator on our Internet age, believes the age of learning through the memorization of facts and figures is coming to an end. Instead, students should be taught to think creatively and better understand the knowledge that's available online.

CERN today officially unveiled the massive computer network that will crunch the enormous amount of data coming from CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). CERN expects that the LHC will produce around 15 petabytes of data every year. While the LHC was in its planning stages, CERN's IT department decided that the only realistic way to handle this amount of data would be by relying on the then still novel idea of grid computing. CERN's grid consists of 100,000 processors at 140 scientific institutions in 33 countries.

From the dynamics of social networks to market bubbles, science has a lot to say about the world of technology.

One of the great discoveries of modern science was the realization of how interconnected the world is. The deterministic, Newtonian view of a clockwork Universe was replaced by the much more dynamic, uncertain and entangled world of Quantum Mechanics. The new world is the one where Godel forever cut hopes for completeness in mathematics and Turing showed that computation, like the future, is fundamentally unpredictable. Despite these unexpected setbacks, modern science is wonderful, powerful and thought provoking - and relevant to technologists.

Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, announced this weekend the formation of a new organization dedicated to studying how the web works and expanding access to the billions of people who can't get online today. The World Wide Web Foundation kicked off with $5 million in support from media funders the Knight Foundation.

Can yet another organization really make a difference? Some observers seem to be suffering from Organization Fatigue, but we're interested to see what Berners Lee can do. A group dedicated to deep study of the web and the obstacles to its growth sounds like a great idea to us. Not everyone agrees.

Thanks to successful projects like Wikipedia or Wikitravel, wikis have quickly become a standard tool on the Internet, but in academia, the anonymity often associated with publishing in wikis is a key factor that works against them. Tracking down the exact history of changes in a wiki entry can be a convoluted process, yet being able to exactly attribute a certain statement to one writer is at the heart of the academic enterprise. Mememoir aims to provide a wiki that is heavily focused on authorship and can help to dispel the prejudices scientists have against publishing in a wiki-like format.

Need to get access to real scientific data but having trouble finding any relevant search results in Google? That could be because a lot of the science and technology documents on the web aren't typically indexed by major search engines. They're a part of the "deep web," the repository of web pages usually generated by database-driven sites that search engines' spiders can't access. One resource to help open up the deep web for scientific research is WorldWideScience. This portal allows you to query more than 200 million documents not typically indexed by today's search engines.

Here at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco Neil Young just announced that his whole life's work will be made available on in a dynamically updating collection delivered on Blu-ray disk. After his Keynote announcement I was fortunate enough to participate in a small group interview with a handful of other bloggers. Young offered interesting replies to questions about Trent Reznor and music piracy, about MP3 sound quality and about the way the web enables his extensive work on electric cars.

George Bush signed a $555 billion omnibus spending bill yesterday that included a huge victory for advocates of open science on the internet. All research funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency with a $29 billion research budget, will now be required to be published online, free to the public, within 12 months after publication in any scientific journal.

This should open up a whole world of new opportunities for online research. Readers outside of the academic world but aware of the financial future of health information online in the commercial sector can imagine the analogous excitement about this announcement for academic researchers.