A quick blurb. 

As someone who wanted to be a particle physicist (before I switched to computer science), this is one of the most exciting customer win stories I've read as a Sun employee: Stanford Gets First BlackBox! If you're wondering what a BlackBox is, it's basically a full-fledged data center housed in a "standard" shipping container, or a mobile data center. The fact that it's housed in a shipping container means that a BlackBox can be deployed anywhere with power, water (for cooling) and network connections. More details about the BlackBox can be found here.

Here's hoping that SLAC's new BlackBox will help in the discovery of new physics and particles (Quarks were first discovered at SLAC)!

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has successfully measured temperature variations on the surface of an extra-solar planet called "Upsilon Andromeda b" - a Jupiter-like "gas giant" planet orbiting the star Upsilon Andromeda. The star is about 40 light years from the Earth.

The surprising thing about the finding is that the night side of the planet is always very cold, while the day side is like that of a lava. One possible explanation for this is that the planet is "tidally locked" with its star (like the Moon and the Earth), so that one side always faces the star while the other side is always dark. The star-facing side is being boiled (literally) by the star's heat while it's perennial winter on the dark side.

Read the original story here.

By the way, I will blog about Astronomy according to the ancient Mizos - the stars and constellations as the Mizos saw them, and the folklore surrounding them. Stay tuned.