Information, Knowledge, Science & Technology

smh.com.au : It's long been the PC industry's dream, to take centre stage in the vast home entertainment market. Success, however, has been elusive. And so the industry will launch in 2006 its most aggressive effort yet to persuade people to buy computers for wrangling the expanding universe of digital content. Leading the charge are longtime PC collaborators Intel and Microsoft, both of which are promising better support for high-definition programming and an improved ability to send video, still pictures and music throughout the home and to portable gadgets. Macintosh maker Apple is also widely expected to join the fray and, perhaps, do for entertainment computers what it did for digital music players when it unleashed the iPod in 2001. But it's not going to be easy to overcome a chequered past, particularly given the problems that emerged in the industry's first forays. Most companies haven't taken close enough notice of what's behind Apple's iPod succes

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington The Independent : For as long as humanity has enjoyed drinking wine, it has been thinking about ways to make it taste better, usually with trial-and-error techniques from the selection of grape varieties through consideration of the terroir to the moment when the fruit is picked. But now a scientist from Pittsburgh is using computer modelling to try to improve one of the most fundamental aspects of the winemaking process - fermentation. "We are asking what kind of performance we can get out of this," Lorenz Biegler of Carnegie Mellon University said. "We would like to come up with a reasonably good model of how this yeast cell behaves, then control this fermentation process so we can make better-quality wines." Mr Biegler has been working with scientists and winemakersfrom Chile to try to see whether the development of computer modelling can have an impact on the end product. They are trying to solve the problem of stuck batches - t