Hot Wires

Memorial fellowship. Imperial College student Richard Shackleton is the first recipient of a fellowship established by Bell-Northern Research in memory of Nicholas Battersby. Dr Battersby, a graduate of Imperial College and a BNR employee, was the victim of a shooting incident in Canada in March 1994. Mr Shackleton, 20, is in the third year of a four-year MEng in software engineering. He will spend six months at BNR's Harlow, Essex laboratory and a week at the Canadian company's main Ottawa lab.

Big box

Cray Research has doubled the performance available from its fast-selling J90 range, by increasing the maximum number of processors from 16 to 32. US prices now range up to $2.6 million for a system with a peak computing speed of 6.4 gigaflops (billions of operations per second).

Green disk

Edward Milner, compiler of The Green Index, is now editing a comparable resource for environmental researchers and campaigners, this time in CD-Rom form. Contents include a directory of United Kingdom organisations, an index of journal articles, a bibliography, glossary, gazetteer and international who's who of the environment. The Green Information Disc will be published by Mansell Publishing in September at Pounds 350.

Hacks' Net

Said to be the first United Kingdom Internet conference organised by journalists for journalists, NetMedia '95 will be held at the Department of Journalism, City University, London on 15 June. Speakers include Chip Bayers, managing editor of HotWired, Bill Mitchell of the San Jose Mercury News, and representatives of several UK newspaper groups including The THES's owners News International. Information from Milverton Wallace, 0171 477 8233, m.s.wallace@city.ac.uk.

Surf's up, Doc

In a project led by the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research, Nottingham University is to host a new World Wide Web gateway to improve access to information about biomedical research on the Internet. The Pounds 207,000 project, called OMNI, is funded by the funding councils' Follett Implementation Group on Information Technology.

More information is available from http://www.nimr.mrc.ac.uk/OMNI/ Cheap protein

Intelligenetics, the bioinformatics division of the Oxford Molecular Group, is now offering its Bionet online service through the Internet for as little as $50 a month. Bionet provides access to proprietary databases as well as all the major gene and protein sequence banks. Powerful hardware and software is used to search for similarities between sequences.

Frontier law

The Governance of Cyberspace conference in Middlesbrough next Wednesday and Thursday will not be a computer buffs' convention but will turn the spotlight on the social and political implications of a network without frontiers, without laws and with no way to police its users. The conference will consider the problems of libel and copyright online, and the risk that society will become divided into information rich and information poor.

Further information from Brian Loader, University of Teesside, 01642 342015, b.d.loader@tees.ac.uk.

Education post

The Department for Education has an Internet mailbox for general enquiries, info@dfe.gov.uk but no email addresses have been revealed for individual ministers in the department.

The Government's consultation paper on broadband communications in education will be published after Easter, according to a parliamentary written answer.

Leading edge

The Leading Edge conference and exhibition on April at Aston University will be a chance to get up to date with new technology from leading education suppliers. It is organised by TOSCA, an association of computing companies selling to the public sector. Admission is free for IT managers, staff and users in tertiary education. Information: 01691 670543.