An anonymous reader writes Facebook today revealed details about Autoscale, a system for power-efficient load balancing that has been rolled out to production clusters in its data centers. The company says it has “demonstrated significant energy savings.” or those who don’t know, load balancing refers to distributing workloads across multiple computing resources, in this case servers. The goal is to optimize resource use, which can mean different things depending on the task at hand. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Link:
How Facebook Is Saving Power By 10-15% Through Better Load Balancing
According to Reuters , Iraq rebels have stolen 88 pounds of uranium compounds that were being used for scientific research at a university in the city of Mosul. Read more… 
Just like the odd eBay storefront that popped up last year , a new site called Factory Outlet eBay Store is selling refurbished Apple products and, despite the lack of any official Apple branding, is almost definitely the result of a partnership between Apple and eBay. And it’s selling Apple Certified Refurbished iPhones for cheap . Read more… 
The footprint of Manhattan’s been expanding since the 17th century, when early New Yorkers began their first project to infill its shoreline. A huge part of the island we know today is built on artificial pilings. Now, it might get its biggest expansion in years. Read more… 
If you work in a lab, you’ve probably used lab glass made from quartz. But you probably haven’t realized that the reason those test tubes are so durable is exactly what makes them so hard to mold. These beautiful GIFs, shot at GE’s Global Research in upstate New York, shows exactly what it takes to make those beakers. Read more… 
YouTube is about to get smoother: Google has announced that its video site is getting support for videos running at 48-and-60 frames-per-second . Slick. Read more… 
There’s no denying that graphene is a wonderful material —strong, flexible, and highly conductive—but it’s taking a long time to become a commercial reality. Now, scientists working with a material called cadmium arsenide believe it offers many of the same benefits—but could actually be far easier to use in the real world. Read more… 
