SillyConCarbide writes "Every six months, the Materials Research Society holds a science as art competition. The winners from their most recent meeting are particularly breathtaking. Materials researchers may struggle for years with stubborn instruments, fragile crystals or difficult chemical reactions before obtaining a bit of precious data from the exotic substances they study. Now, the scrutiny of samples not only yields potentially important data, but also artistic inspiration. Polymer films, cerium oxide membranes, and tantalum oxide crystals can look beautiful in the right light — especially if that light is an electron beam."

betaville points out comments AT&T filed with the FCC in which they denied throttling traffic by resetting P2P file-sharing connections. Earlier this week, a study published by the Vuze team found AT&T to have the 25th highest (13th highest if extra Comcast networks are excluded) median reset rate among the sampled networks. In the past, AT&T has defended Comcast's throttling practices, and said it wants to monitor its network traffic for IP violations. "AT&T vice president of Internet and network systems research Charles Kalmanek, in a letter addressed to Vuze CEO Gilles BianRosa, said that peer-to-peer resets can arise from numerous local network events, including outages, attacks, reconfigurations or overall trends in Internet usage. 'AT&T does not use "false reset messages" to manage its network,' Kalmanek said in the letter. Kalmanek noted that Vuze's analysis said the test 'cannot conclude definitively that any particular network operator is engaging in artificial or false [reset] packet behavior.'"