Think of it as a Manhattan Project, except instead of secret nuclear bombs, the end result is much better batteries for devices, electric vehicles and the power grid. That’s at least one …

U.N. Development Agency Launches Open Data Site To Track All $5.8B In Projects

As one U.N. agency takes flak for its perceived threats to the open Internet, another is actually using the Web to provide further transparency on its activities.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the arm of the UN established in 1965 to help build up nations around the globe — which it now aims to do by reducing poverty, encouraging democratic participation and empowering women — on Thursday launched a new website, “Open.UNDP.org” showing exactly where and how it is spending the entirety of its $5.8 billion annual budget for 2011 around the globe.

CartoDB Aims To Be The Instagram Of Maps

The Rolling Stones are celebrating their 50th anniversary as a band this year, and among the numerous tributes and festivities planned, one is geekier than most: An interactive online tour map, showing all the major stops the Rolling Stones made on their tours over the course of the past half-century:

The tour map timeline (screenshot below) was created by CartoDB, a data visualization company headquartered in New York that seeks to be the “Instagram service for maps.” That is, CartoDB wants to make it easy for individuals, companies and organizations to create and publish maps of whatever data they have, allowing customers to re-organize data in ways that make sense and produce new perspectives.

Email Privacy Bill On Hold Till 2013

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday voted to approve a bill designed to bolster the privacy protections of Americans’ electronic communications, including everything from e-mail to Facebook messages and Tweets.

But the bill, which was introduced by Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) to update older protections introduced in 1986, isn’t expected to be picked up again by the the full Senate, nor combined with House legislation, until 2013 at the earliest, sources close to the situation explained to TPM. Both of those would be necessary, along with the signature of the president, to become law.

NASA Finds Evidence Water Ice Is Plentiful On Mercury

Mercury, the planet in our Solar System closest to the Sun, appears to have plentiful deposits of water ice at its north and south poles, NASA announced on Thursday.

“We know of no other compound that measures the radar, the neutron spectrometry and the reflectance….than water ice,” said Sean Solomon, a geophysicist at Columbia University and the principal investigator of NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, which is the first to orbit Mercury, and which obtained the necessary data for the agency to announce the discovery in a NASA press conference streamed online Thursday afternoon.

SOPA Architect Rep. Lamar Smith To Chair House Science Committee

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) was selected on Wednesday to chair the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, which controls, in part, the budgets for NASA, the Department of Energy the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), FEMA and the FAA, among numerous other critical federal agencies.

“The Science Committee can play an exciting part in the discoveries of science, the exploration of space and the development of new technologies,” Smith said in a statement posted on his website. “I appreciate the confidence of my colleagues and look forward to chairing the Committee next Congress.”

Most Massive Black Hole Found By Texas Telescope

Updated 7:16 p.m. EST, Wednesday, November 28

Astronomers using a telescope in the Lone Star state have measured what they believe is the most massive black hole yet recorded, The University of Texas at Austin (UT) announced on Wednesday.

The black hole, which lies at the center of the galaxy NGC 1277, located some 220 million light-years from Earth, is so big it is difficult to comprehend: It is 17 billion solar masses, or 17 billion times the mass of our Sun, and makes up 14 percent of its relatively small host galaxy’s entire mass. The galaxy in question is about 10 percent the size of our Milky Way, for reference.

The black hole is so wide that it would extend well past the orbit of Neptune around our Sun were it transposed to our Solar System — subsuming most of it — as the following illustration from UT indicates:

Global Sea Level Rising 60 Percent Faster Than Predicted, Study Finds

The global sea level is rising 60 percent faster than previous reports issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), according to a new analysis of actual observed sea-level rise data recorded, performed by researchers in the U.S. (Maine), Germany and France.

Specifically, the new study, published late Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters and online at IOP Science, finds that while “global temperature continues to increase in good agreement with the best estimates of the IPCC…The rate of sea-level rise of the past few decades, on the other hand, is greater than projected by the IPCC models.”

What We Know About Elon Musk’s Proposed Mars Colony

Updated 10:00 a.m. EST, Wednesday, November 28

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has caused quite the commotion in recent days with his proposal to create a human colony on Mars, first unveiled in some detail during a November 16 talk at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London, UK.

But after news reports of the talk quoted Musk as saying he’d like to send 80,000 people to the Red Planet in the not-too-distant future, Musk himself upped the ante: Taking to Twitter on Tuesday, the charismatic multi-industry entrepreneur (Musk also founded Tesla Motors and Solar City, and before that co-founded PayPal) clarified that he actually planned to send 80,000 people to Mars every year once the colonization process begins, for a total of millions of human settlers on Mars.

Large Hadron Collider May Have Produced New Matter

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator and the “Big Bang machine” that was used to discover what appears to be the long-sought Higgs boson particle (as announced July 4), may have another surprise up its sleeve this year: The LHC looks to have produced a new type of matter, according to a new analysis of particle collision data by scientists at the LHC’s Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration, including researchers at MIT and Rice University.

The new type of matter, which has yet to be verified, is theorized to be one of two possible forms: Either “color-glass condensate” — a flattened nucleus transformed into a “wall” of gluons, which are smaller binding subatomic particles, or it could be “quark-gluon plasma,” a dense, soup or liquid-like collection of individual particles.