The decades-long growth in computer performance will come to a screeching halt without huge changes in software and revolutionary new microchips. That's the stark warning in a new report from the US National Research Council and it's bad news on many levels for a trillion-dollar industry that has become an engine of economic growth.

Can the rate of past discoveries be used to predict future ones? We may soon find out. Two researchers have used the pace of past exoplanet finds to predict that the first habitable Earth-like planet could turn up in May 2011.

In recent years, global photovoltaic (PV) production has been increasing at a rate of 50 percent per year, so that accumulated global capacity doubles about every 18 months. The PV Moore's law states that with every doubling of capacity, PV costs come down by 20 percent.

Entrepreneurs have long sought markets that can drive enough demand for space transportation to stimulate investment in new low-cost vehicles. David Hoerr argues that the issue is not new markets, but creating a large enough supply of space transports.

Many space advocates believe that space access is poised for a
revolutionary advance along the lines of microprocessors. Michael
Turner believes that a Moore's Law for spaceflight is by no means
inevitable.

The life of the silicon chip industry may last 10 or more years longer, thanks to a new manufacturing process using carbon nanotubes developed by NASA scientists.

The author introduces "Dickerson's formula", the biological equivalent of Moore's law, that predicts an accelerating pace of discovery in the burgeoning field of protein structure determination.

The first supercomputers to approach and even surpass the processing power of the human brain are to be built by IBM, under a contract announced by the US Government.

Engineers have crossed a symbolic barrier with a new way to make microchips with transistors that are a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair or as small as a flu virus. The 90-nanometre width is regarded as a major milestone because scientists believe it will eventually lead to the production of transistors with atomic level dimensions.

Researchers predict that Moore's Law will get a new lease on life through this decade because of nanotechnology.