IBM’s Watson computer triumphed over its human competitors on Tuesday’s special episode of Jeopardy. The computerized trivia-playing machine finished out with a total of $35,734 in winnings with the next runner up at $10,400 and 3rd place at $5,000. One more day of competition will determine an overall winner to a $1 million prize.

The man vs machine competition has drawn quite a bit of attention with two Jeopardy! champions taking on the IBM supercomputer named ‘Watson’. The first special episode which aired Monday night turned out to be the highest rated episode since early 2007 and the second most program of the night.

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%.

Would you like it if your car did the stopping for you at traffic lights? IBM is developing a technology that will automatically cut your engine at a red light. I’m thinking that people don’t want to give up that much control.

The patent proposes that the system would collect positioning data from cars stopped at a red light. After a given amount of wait time, a “stop-engine” notification would be sent to the vehicles, with a “start-engine” notification to follow when the light changes back to green.

If you thought the tape format was deader than a cassette tape, think again. At least two companies are still playing with magnetic tape. IBM and FujiFilm have spent the better part of three years in order to achieve a new record in areal data density on linear magnetic tape.

They have results, having successfully recorded data onto a dual-coat barium ferrite prototype magnetic tape at a density of 29.5 billion bits per square inch. That’s 39 times denser than current magnetic tapes. Neither company has announced when this will be available.

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.

Lenovo’s ThinkPad W700ds is pretty damn intriguing. We want one. Sadly every gadget under our tree had just a single screen. So we were happy to learn that GottaBeMobile got their gadget-loving hands on one. They were nice enough to share their knowledge of the twin screened beast.

The model they have features a 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and NVIDIA Quadro FX3700M graphics. The primary display is a 17-inch WUXGA with a 1920 x 1200, while the secondary panel is a 10.6-inch WXGA with 768 x 1200 resolution. It still looks pretty awesome to us. You can check out the video below.

Dual screens on a laptop. Oh yes. We’ve been drooling over Lenovo’s W700ds, and now we have the laptop’s first widely available video. The unit in the video appears to be that of a pre-production model.

Another thing that you might have noticed is the wobble in that pull-out panel. Yikes, that thing looks fragile. It looks like it didn’t go back in too easy either. But we’re hoping Lenovo works out all it’s issues before it hits the market for real. I have no doubt that they will as they have a lot riding on this unit.

We told you about this dual-screened ThinkPad a few days ago, but now more details have come to light. The W700ds comes with your choice of Intel Core 2 Quad processors and is combined with the NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700M GPU. RAM maxes out at 8GB and SSD / HDD storage maxes out at 960GB.

The primary 17-inch screen is supposed to be the brightest on the market, and if that’s not drool-worthy enough, it sports an integrated WACOM digitizer. The 11 pound laptop starts at $3,600, so you’d better start saving your money for January it ships.

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.

Datamancer has done it again and this one looks like it would be pretty comfortable to use. It’s got the usual brass, wood and classic typewriter keys, along with some other really super details. Like some violet LEDs, an acanthus-leaf pattern etched into the brass, and a soft burgundy wrist pad that is removable for cleaning. It began life as a very rare but plain IBM Model M-15 split ergonomic keyboard, but as you can see, it looks much better now.

This IBM concept laptop looks like something from an alternate dimension. It’s the kind of laptop we might be using had the cold war never ended and spies were everywhere and issued these laptops by Q.

It’s a concept by Nicolas Lehotzky. The most interesting thing about it is the giant security “knob” which is fingerprint activated and allows the laptop to respond only to the owner’s touch, acting as a physical lock. It also has hidden USB ports and a trusty built-in paper shredder. It goes well with the watches depicting the Bond villains.

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. …