The MacArthur Foundation recently funded one of the first multi-year efforts to analyze and evaluate youth behavior online.  The study, conducted as part of the Digital Youth Project, was exhaustive and included hundreds of structured interviews, over 5000 hours of observation, and analysis and review of over 10,000 MySpace and Facebook pages.[2]

In 2008 the National Science Foundation launched a new program to use CubeSats-- small, breadbox-sized satellites-- in space weather and atmospheric research.

The world's fastest supercomputer in November 2008 is a system at Los Alamos National Laboratory called Roadrunner. Roadrunner is one of two supercomputers in the world to break the petaflop (1000 trillion floating point operations a second) barrier and posted a top performance of 1.105 petaflops, barely edging out a machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory which achieved a peak performance of 1.059 petaflops.