News Briefs

US population hits 300 million

As of Tuesday, the United States passed the 300 million mark for people living in the country. The estimate was made assuming that America was gaining one person every 11 seconds. The estimates also took into account the fact that the country gains a migrant every 31 seconds.

Passing this mark now puts the USA in the same group as China and India with populations over 300 million. The United States passed the 100 million mark in 1915, but didn’t reach the 200 million mark until 1967. It will be another 37 years before the 400 million mark is passed.



Element 118 discovered again?

In 2002, a team of scientists allegedly discovered the 118th element of the periodic table but later retracted their claim. Now a new team of scientists is announcing that they have discovered the fabled element.

They did it by bombarding heavy atoms onto a radioactive target and searched for distinctive types of radioactive decay to indicate the presence of element 118. To be specific, they bombarded californium and calcium ions together to form an element with 118 protons and 143 neutrons. The discovery will not be made official until other groups are able to reproduce their findings.



Firefox 2.0 almost ready

On Monday night, the third release candidate for Firefox 2.0 was released. It will most likely be the last test edition of the browser before its official release later this year.

There are several new features in this version compared to previous versions. Most notable are the anti-phishing alerts which warn a user if they are visiting a website that may be attempting to steal private information and passwords. There is also the ability to restore your session if the browser crashes.

The release candidate is coming around the same time as Microsoft’s IE 7 browser is nearing completion and scheduled for released by the end of this month.