January 13th 2012

Cruise ship runs aground and capsizes –
A 290m (950ft) long cruise ship, the Costa Concordia with about 4,000 passengers and crew on board runs aground and capsizes near the island of Giglio off the coast of Italy. Passengers were enjoying their first dinner on board after leaving Civitavecchia port near Rome for a Mediterranean cruise. Early reports are of 8 people being lost but helicopters are still evacuating people.
Collision of Costa Concordia 11 The Costa Concordia

Warner hits 5th fastest test century –
Australian left-hander batsman David Warner hits the 5th fastest test century in the first day of the test against India. He reached his second test century in just 69 balls. Faster test centuries are:
Viv Richards, West Indies v England, St John’s 1986 – 56 balls
Adam Gilchrist, Australia v England, Perth 2006 – 57 balls
Jack Gregory, Australia v South Africa, Johannesburg 1921 -67 balls
Shivnarine Chanderpaul, West Indies v Australia, Georgetown 2003 – 69 balls
David Warner, Australia v India, Perth 2012 – 69 balls
Warner_playing_for_AustraliaDavid Warner

IBM get a “bit” better –
Researchers from IBM successfully store a single data bit in only 12 atoms – currently it takes about a million atoms to store a bit on a modern hard-disk, so they believe this is the world’s smallest magnetic memory bit. The groups of atoms were arranged using a scanning tunnelling microscope which means the density of data on hard drives can be increased but below 12 atoms the researchers found that the bits randomly lost information, owing to quantum effects.

Facebook launch music sharing button –
Facebook launch a new ‘listen with’ button which appears when a person is listening to Spotify, Rdio or another music streaming service below the update in the news feed, allowing others to listen to the same thing at the same time. The catch is that your friend needs to have an account with the same service to ‘tune in’ simultaneously.