It never gets very cold here in the south so when winter rolls around we don’t think too much about keeping warm like people in colder climates do. A college in Switzerland called the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich had its new IBM super computer installed recently.

The school uses hot water to heat its buildings and IBM uses the excess hot water to cool the new supercomputer dubbed Aquasar. IBM says that using this left over hot water reduces the supercomputers carbon footprint by up to 85%.

In humans, DNA hold all the information about the body that holds all of the information about the person. DNA is so specific to the person that it is used by law enforcement to catch criminals and solve crimes. Researchers at IBM have found another use for DNA.

The company and other researchers have been looking for ways to get the build process used for microprocessors below 22nm. IBM is using DNA molecules as a scaffold for a new class of transistors that use carbon nanotubes or silicon nanawories.

ZTIC (Zone Trusted Information Channel) is a USB stick designed for secure online banking, even if your computer is crawling with viruses. The stick was developed in Zurich by IBM and opens an SSL connection with the bank’s servers, keeping the data safely on its side (it has no storage of its own) and displaying the transaction details on the hardware.

Even if your connection is breached, the hacker will be exposed on the device’s display. Pricing and availability are still up in the air. IBM hopes to entice banks into buying it for online banking, which saves banks money on personnel costs but is constantly under siege by hackers.

We didn’t see this one coming. Although we had hoped for something like it, after seeing the Apple Tribook. The new IBM ThinkPad W700 may only have one integrated secondary display, but it’s a foldable, 10.6 inch secondary display, with 768 x 1,280 pixels and LED backlight.

This may not be an Apple Tribook, but hell that was just a fancy dream. This one is real and the IBM ThinkPad W700 feature list has us impressed.

Microsoft has taken more than one significant hit this week by losing its antitrust ruling appeal in Europe on Monday and then finding out that IBM now also provides competitive software to their Office suite of products. What makes this even more concerning for Microsoft is that IBM is offering their tools for free.

Tuesday IBM launched Lotus Symphony, a collection of three office-minded, internet-based programs that are freely available on the web after registering. The programs, bearing the same name as IBM’s top commercial software, consist of Lotus Symphony Documents which is a word editor, Lotus Symphony Presentations as a slide show creating tool, and Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets. All the programs work with Windows and Linux operating systems, and IBM says they have a future version planned for Mac OSX. The trio of programs can export documents to PDF’s and support a multitude of file types including Word, Excel and Powerpoint files from Microsoft.

Moore’s Law seems in jeopardy with some recent memory design innovations by IBM. The new design triples the amount of memory on a microprocessor and marks the fastest access times ever recorded with eDRAM (pictured).

The new eDRAM requires about one-third the space of prior designs and vastly improves microprocessor performance in multi-core designs, graphics for gaming, and networking performance. The new memory also has significantly lower power requirements – needing only one-fifth the standby power of conventional SRAM.

SRAM or Static RAM is a fast volatile memory and preserves data only while continuously powered. SRAM has low power consumption but takes up considerable space on chips. DRAM or Dynamic RAM is commonly used in personal computers as a separate chip. Historically, DRAM has been considered too slow to be integrated directly onto the microprocessor.

IBM presented the breakthrough on-chip …

IBM and Yahoo! Inc. have announced their collaboration on a new, free enterprise search software solution. The search service is powered by Yahoo! Web search services and enables businesses of all sizes to quickly and easily find and access their disparate information.

IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is a free, entry level search product developed to help eliminate the barriers of entry to enterprise-wide search. The new service can be downloaded for free and will work with existing hardware. According to the press release, a simple three-click installation process takes customers only minutes to go from download to live search.

IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition supports up to 500,000 documents per server and over 200 file types in more than 30 languages. The service fully integrates with Yahoo! Search and offers features such as automatic spell correction, support for synonyms, wildcards, query reporting, and one-click access to send …

Today scientists from IBM, Macronix and Qimonda unveiled a new type of memory with the intention of possibly being a replacement for flash memory which is used in many electronic gadgets today.

The new memory announced today is called “phase-change” memory. The memory would have the same applications as flash memory, but with a a couple key advantages. First of all, the phase-change memory has shown to be faster than flash memory; up to 500 times faster. It would also only consume about half the power that flash memory does, even with the greater speed. Secondly, the phase-change memory is smaller. A cross section of the new memory prototype measures only 3 x 20 nanometers.

“These results dramatically demonstrate that phase-change memory has a very bright future,” said Dr. T. C. Chen, Vice President, Science & Technology, IBM Research. …