The long, challenging technological march from the low-power light bulb Thomas Edison invented to the ultimate in a bright and energy-efficient lighting device may finally reach fruition.

Space geeks gather for out-of-this-world excitement at Yuri's Night Bay Area. Dylan Tweney reports from Moffett Field, California.

The early start on daylight savings time passed last month with little impact, both in terms of the predicted aclockalypse as well as the energy savings it was supposed to generate. However, the shift did have some severe consequences for one Pennsylvania 15-year-old: 12 days in the slammer. The kid made a call in to his school's recorded information line in the early hours of March 11, just a few minutes before the hot line supposedly received a bomb threat. School officials, in their haste to find the caller, matched his cell phone number to a list of callers to the hotline that morning, and immediately pointed the finger at him. His phone correctly recorded the call time as 3:12 am, which was apparently close enough for them to the 3:17 am entry in the system's call logs for the bomb threat. However, the officials hadn't set the clock in their call system properly, meaning the bomb threat came in more than an hour after the kid's innocent call, and it took nearly two weeks of the kid sitting in juvenile detention for somebody to figure it out. The real culprit here is somebody's stupidity -- because even if the time change hadn't occurred, the call times still didn't match up by five minutes.

Researchers associated with various universities and government-backed initiatives are exploring the idea that the existing internet should be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up. Right off the bat, it seems pretty safe to say that our current internet infrastructure, which has billions upon billions invested into it, isn't going to be dismantled, and the researchers involved with these projects almost certainly realize that. Still, these studies are interesting from an academic perspective, and because they may influence future build-outs in some way. Those who are in favor of a clean start point to a number of different areas where the internet could be made better. Security is obviously a big one, and many of the different plans explore ways of building more security directly into the infrastructure of the internet. They also point to the rise of the mobile internet as something that the original internet researchers never conceived of, and thus didn't account for. As one professor puts it, in light of how much things have changed, "It's sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today." That sentiment, of course, would seem to betray the whole thing, since the internet does work well, despite it undergoing radical changes over the years.

The whole question sounds analogous to the debate between free markets and central planning. If you believe that complex systems need a high level of planning in order to work, it would seem miraculous that a free market system could remain relatively stable and efficient. But history has shown that, if anything, it's the centrally planned economies that more often go haywire. Perhaps the internet question should be turned around: why should we trust that a rebuilt internet, that was designed to fix the problems that we can imagine today, would be able to accommodate completely unforeseen issues that arise 40 years down the road?