So whatever happened to the budding love affair between the stony, stoic Martian Barnacle Bill and Earth's spunky Sojourner rover? Wonder no more. Science magazine on Friday will publish the first peer-reviewed data from the Mars Pathfinder mission. Among the findings: The red planet's dismal dustiness belies a loamy past, "a warmer and wetter past in which liquid water was stable and the atmosphere was thicker." And, perhaps, life was good.
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TI does copper combo: Texas Instruments claims to have one-upped Motorola's and IBM's recent copper-chip achievements with a new technology that promises to increase performance tenfold and combat the effect of resistance and capacitance. The new chip technology combines copper wiring with a new insulating material called xerogel - a material made of microscopic air-filled glass bubbles.
TI claims xerogel solves the issue of capacitance in chips that continue to get smaller and smaller. New chips using the copper/xerogel combination are expected to be the size of a fingernail, with 500 million transistors. (4.Dec.97)
