The number of U.S. hospitals has decreased by 20% in the last 30 years, from over 7,000 in 1975 to 5,747 in 2007. Meanwhile, staff shortages, shortfalls in Medicare reimbursements, non-paying patients, increases in medical errors, and rising administrative and energy costs are squeezing hospitals. To counter these challenges, streamline processes and reduce costs, hospitals are increasingly turning to the use of wireless technologies.

According to a new report by Kalorama Information, Wireless in Healthcare 2008 (The Market for Bluetooth, RFID, Zigbee, UWB WWAN, WMAN, WLAN and other technologies), the use of wireless technologies in healthcare continues to expand with hospitals leading the way. Wireless sales in healthcare reached $2.7 billion in 2007, growing at 22.9% annually since 2005. Kalorama expects continued strong growth with a CAGR of 29.5% resulting in sales of $9.6 billion by 2012.

The clinical environment is highly mobile -- medical personnel need fast information they can act on. A shortage of nurses and physicians creates pressure on hospitals to use staff more productively. Implementing WPAN-enabled PDA units, RFID wands, and other wireless technologies will help fewer nurses and doctors serve a growing number of patients in a more effective and efficient manner, while reducing errors and costs.

"It's no surprise that hospitals are earmarking large portions of current and future budgets to wireless development," notes Bruce Carlson, Publisher of Kalorama Information. "In 2003, 25% of US hospitals had wireless. That figure will be somewhere between 80% and 90% in 2010."

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NASA is preparing to rocket its research supercomputer into the petaflop era.

The space agency has signed an agreement with Intel and SGI to update its supercomputer at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. NASA hopes the project, dubbed “Pleiades,” will produce a supercomputer capable of breaking the petaflop mark1 quadrillion calculations per second by 2009.

By 2012, SGI, Intel and NASA plan to increase the performance to 10 petaflops.

The news that NASA and its partners are planning to build a machine that will first break and then move past the petaflop mark has become a common refrain in the supercomputer industry within just the last year. Both Sun Microsystems and IBM have each announced plans to build new supercomputers that pass the petaflop mark. Cray, one of the world’s best-known supercomputer companies, is also working toward that goal.

It’s possible the first petaflop machines could enter the Top 500 supercomputer list in June, when the organization that ranks these machines updates the list for the first time since November. IBM and its BlueGene/L system at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory currently hold the top spot with a maximum performance of 478.2 teraflops.

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 Exxon Mobil Corp said on Monday it plans to spend more than $100 million to test a technology that could allow it to affordably remove carbon dioxide and other substances from natural gas.

The company said it is building a commercial demonstration plant near LaBarge, Wyoming, to test its "Controlled Freeze Zone" (CFZ) technology -- a process to freeze out and remove components in gas.

The process can remove not only carbon dioxide, but also hydrogen sulfide, which is found in "sour" gas, it said.

After it is removed, the carbon dioxide could be used for enhanced oilfield recovery or injected into underground storage.

If successful, the technology could reduce the cost of producing gas from sour gas fields, Exxon said.

Exxon will begin building the plant this summer, and it expects operations to start in late 2009.

It plans to test the plant, which will process about 14 million cubic feet of gas per day, for one to two years.

More radio spectrum will need to be released to cater for breakthroughs in healthcare and transport, said Ofcom.

In a report focused on the future use of wireless, the regulator identified hundreds of new applications.

They include wireless devices which monitor health and radio frequency ID tags on food products that allow allergy sufferers to shop more safely.

Meanwhile sensors in cars could automatically inform emergency services in the event of a crash.

The report, entitled Tomorrow's Wireless World, was designed to give the regulator an insight into how wireless technologies will need to be regulated over the next 20 years.

It focused specifically on the health and transport sectors and both the relevant government departments were closely involved in the research.

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Two of IBM's (IBM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) most senior executives, technology strategy chief Nick Donofrio and hardware chief Bill Zeitler, will retire later this year, an IBM memo showed on Monday.

Chief Executive Sam Palmisano announced the retirements in an email to employees obtained by Reuters. Bob Moffat will take Zeitler's job as Senior Vice President and Group Executive, Systems and Technology, overseeing computer and microchips and keep is current role focused on IBM's supply chain.

A variety of executives will take on roles from Donofrio, whose title is Executive Vice President, Innovation and Technology, Palmisano said.

Spokesman Ed Barbini confirmed the moves and said the change was normal as, traditionally, executives retire around age 60. Zeitler would be 61 and Donofrio 63 when they retired, he said.

Bill has just passed in New Zealand. This Copyright law was approved by the New Zealand legislature and amends the Copyright Act of 1994. It is designed to accommodate new technology, such as digital music and film. It was crafted to create a new regime where the general copyright laws are worded such as make them easier to adapt to changing technology. It also was crafted to maintain a balance between the important interests of creators, owners and consumers of copyright works. 
This legislation is part of a larger attempt to reform the IPR's regime and make sure New Zealand’s intellectual property legislation is updated for international standards and can stay relevant into the coming decades. The Bill also incorporates the two treaties negotiated by the members of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO): the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performers and Phonograms Treaty. These treaties are an important part of creating a world standard that acknowledges and respects IPR's in an age of digital technology.

The New Zealand Associate Commerce Minister, Ms. Judith Tizard explained why the new Bill was needed. She said, “The Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Bill forms part of the Labour-led government’s wide-ranging reform of intellectual property law in general. A robust, up to date intellectual property rights regime is an essential part of an innovative, growing economy. The Bill will maintain the balance between protection, access and use already established in the original Act.”

The following questions will help describe some main changes found in the new law: How are Reproduction Rights Changed?; How does the Bill Affect Copyright & Communication?; Is the Copying Section Changed?; What is the Right to “Format Shifting”?

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Speaking at IBM's Business Partner Leadership Conference here, Google CEO Eric Schmidt reiterated his position that social networks are still too closed. "If it's not searchable by Google, it's not open, and open is best for the consumer," he said.

He added that "searchable by Google" means also searchable by other search engines, such as Yahoo. "People should be able to move from place to place, and their data is available everywhere," Schmidt said. "Social networks are a real phenomenon of people living their lives online, and it has has legs. We will have to deal with it as a society."

Google has focused efforts on creating code, such as the open source OpenSocial APIs and the Social Graph API, to make social data more portable and accessible to applications. So far, Facebook is the only major social network that has not endorsed the OpenSocial initiative, which is now managed by an independent organization, the OpenSocial Foundation.

NASA's final visit to the Hubble Space Telescope has been delayed at least a month, until the fall, because of extra time needed to build the shuttle fuel tanks needed for the flight and a potential rescue mission.

Atlantis and a crew of seven were supposed to fly to Hubble at the end of August, but now won't make the journey until the end of September or early October.

Shuttle program manager John Shannon said it's taken more time to incorporate all the post-Columbia design changes to the external fuel tanks than had been expected.

"It's a small price to pay to tell you the truth, four to five weeks, for all the improvements that we're getting on this tank," Shannon said Thursday.

The fuel tank for the next shuttle launch is the first to be built from scratch with the design changes. That work delayed Discovery's flight to the international space station from April until May 31.

The mission to Hubble, orbiting 350 miles above Earth, is unique. Not only must Atlantis be ready, another shuttle must be on the launch pad ready to rush to the rescue in case Atlantis suffers severe launch damage that might prevent a safe re-entry.

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Intel Corp. and Cray Inc announced a partnership on Monday to develop new supercomputer technologies which is described as a range of high-performance systems.

Cray, which currently uses AMD processors, has three machines in the top 10 on the latest list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, behind only IBM Corp., which has four.

"We're excited at the potential of bringing together Intel's powerful silicon expertise and Cray's industry leadership in scalable HPC systems," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray.

Ungaro said that he expects the first of these jointly developed HPC systems to hit the commercial market in either 2011 or 2012.

Cray said this deal was not a reaction to AMD's struggles getting out four-core versions of the Opteron chip, though the supercomputer maker was forced to delay the release of recent systems due to AMD's woes. So, it must be comforting to bring Intel on as an option.

AMD has been lagging lately in the performance race with Intel. However, its latest four-processor Opteron chip is winning good reviews in the supercomputer community, in part because it offers an efficient technology for retrieving data from memory chips.

Supercomputers are used heavily by government agencies for data-crunching and weapons development, while universities and private companies use them to conduct scientific research and model complex financial transactions.

Nearly a decade ago, Google unveiled an algorithm called PageRank, reinventing the way we search for web pages. Now, the company says, it has a technology that can do much the same for online image search.

Last week, at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google-affiliated researchers presented a paper called "PageRank for Product Image Search," trumpeting a fledging algorithm that overhauls the primitive text-based methods used by the company's current image search technologies.

"Our experiment results show significant improvement, in terms of user satisfaction and relevancy, in comparison to the most recent Google Image Search results," Shumeet Baluja and Yushi Jing tell the world from the pages of their research paper, available here.

Of course, the most recent Google Image Search results are often rubbish. Currently, when ranking images, the big search engines spend little time examining the images themselves. Instead, they look at the text surrounding those images.

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