Internet2, a project to bypass the congested public Internet and link research institutions via a high-speed network, takes its first big step forward this month with the launch of the Abilene test-bed. Abilene will initially link 70 research institutions with 13,000 miles of fiber-optic cable looped between New York and Seattle and operating at 2.4G bits per second. Designed to serve the academic...

The REINAS Project is "a distributed measurement-gathering environment built around one or more relational database systems and supporting both real-time and retrospective regional scale environmental science." Based at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in cooperation with meteorological and oceanographic scientists from the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) and Monterey Bay Aquarium...