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BBC News - Making the first computer virus
Dr. Fred Cohen created the first computer virus more than 26 years ago before pioneering ways to fight malicious code. As a student he that a neighbouring university had created a Trojan, but immediately realized that if he could make the code self-replicating it could infect spread itself. He approached a computer security expert at the university with his idea and a request to build one to verify the idea. After creating the virus, he spent the next five years trying to figure out ways to protect computers from the very thing he knew others would soon create.
A University of Washington professor has discovered what may be a massive body of water, about the size of the Arctic ocean, under East Asia. The subterranean ocean can be seen on these images as a large red spot. It's existence had been theoretically predicted, but now they have proof of its existence.
D-Wave, a company based in British Columbia, will be demonstrating the worlds first commercially-available quantum computer, just in time for Valentine's day. The 16-qubit machine being demonstrated is referred to as an adiabatic quantum processor because it can handle thermal noise that has, in the past, been a serous limitation to getting quantum computers out of the lab. There is some skepticism that the system will work, including from one of the researchers who developed the adiabatic model on which the computer is based. Well, the proof will be in the pudding, as they say (whoever "they" are). 
An entertaining interview with Scott Rosenberg, author of "Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software" which attempts to demonstrate, to the uninitiated, just how difficult it is to develop good software.
