Many times individuals lose loved ones and for certain reasons are unable to make the trip to the location of the funeral. For those individuals, this can be a great stress and is often times very painful.

 During the last Space Shuttle mission, Expedition 18 Commander Mike Fincke filmed a high definition tour of the International Space Station. Flight Engineers Sandy Magnus and Yury Lonchakov will appear in a 35-minute HD video on NASA Television's HD Channel 105 at 1pm CST and 3pm CST both Thursday (tomorrow) and Friday.

The new administration of yesterday's sworn-in U.S. President Barack Obama has taken its first steps toward change by unveiling an entirely redesigned White House website. The symbolic move reaffirms Obama's tech-savvyness and puts technology on the map for his administration. With this change, the official White House website is finally, for the first time ever, in sync with the latest web 2.0 trends - including blogging, YouTube videos and eye-catching slideshows. The welcomed change results in a sophisticated, inviting and more personal experience.

 In the last century photography has evolved tremendously. Photos that once took days to get developed and returned to you can now be snapped digitally from cameras, cell phones, and other devices and uploaded to a computer and printed out with color inkjet and laser printers in seconds.

 Scientists in South Korea are working on developing flexible electronics using an ultrathin film which could enable those reading the newspaper online to feel as though they are reading the paper in print via foldable displays.

 On January 17, 2009, the National Weather Service threw out a claim that Rochelle, IL had the coldest temperature ever recorded in the state (on January 16, 2009) at -38 degrees Fahrenheit. They cite AWOS temperature recording equipment as being less reliable than other nearby ASOS equipment, which did not show a record cold temperature.

 Today at Lotusphere, IBM and Research in Motion (RIM) announced a Lotus extension involving software and developer tools which operate on the Blackberry platform. RIM's Blackberry will now support Lotus's collaboration tools - including Domino Designer and XPages via a Java Eclipse plug-in - allowing on-the-go real-time access to Lotus Symphony documents, and eventually their entire office suite.

 A federal judge has ordered that the nation’s first peer-to-peer (P2P) administration, Elite Torrents, which was convicted by a jury trial on criminal copyright infringement, will not be forced to pay fines to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). However, this ruling is nothing to get excited over as the RIAA can still sue individuals for pirated music, and far larger fines.

 China's state media announced today that it plans to introduce its own set of geostationary orbiting satellites for a Chinese GPS system by the year 2015. The Beidou Navigation System (BNS) will enable its military and civilian users to find their way anywhere in the world without relying on the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS).

Tomorrow's Presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, an event of historic proportions by any merit, will be streamed live to iPhone and iPod touch users - thanks to Juicy Development's Talk Radio application. As the inauguration ceremony unfolds, iPhone and iPod touch users across the globe will be able to hear a live audio stream of the event. That is, provided there is public Wi-Fi hotspot coverage because carriers don't currently allow applications that stream audio over their cellular networks.

 A record cold front sweeping down from Canada is blanketing much of the United States. At least one new state record (by 2 degrees Fahrenheit) for the coldest temperature ever recorded occurred in Illinois, where in Rochelle temperatures dropped to -38 degrees Farhenheit today, January 16, 2009.

 The U.S. Minerals Management Service has issued a favorable "Final Environmental Impact Study" (FEIS) for a wind farm project in Nantuck Sound, called the Cape Wind project.

 The New Journal of Physics is reporting that the Internet is obeying a form of Moore’s Law where exponential growth is occurring. If it follows along with Skynet from the movie The Terminator, it should become self aware by the year 2020. Just kidding. :)

 The recession is looming over the once booming solar manufacturing industry. HelioVolt, headquartered in Austin, is a thin-film solar manufacturer that is currently being forced to cut jobs. They are not alone as OptiSolar, a solar-panel plant in Sacramento, is also being forced to lay off half of its staff.