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FEARING LOSS OF CONTROL

One of the challenges many companies considering SaaS face is a loss of control. Jeff Muscarella, executive vice president with spend-management consultancy NPI Financial, says this manifests itself initially during contract talks. The way to avoid being disappointed, he says, is to be very specific about your company’s needs.

Sometime last year, it became clear that ClearChoice had a problem. The company’s chain of dental-implant centers was at 29 and counting, testing the elasticity of its disparate IT systems. Each location had its own database fed by site-specific instances of applications—most notably Great Plains ERP software—making it difficult to get any visibility into whether the company was operating at peak efficiency.

Proteins are incredibly complex, yet tiny — so tiny that conventional imaging techniques often can't capture them.

The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, known as SOFIA, is a modified Boeing 747 airplane that houses a NASA telescope.

Pollen (left) and plant stems (middle, right) are shown from an expensive microscope (top) and with an inexpensive add-on lens for an iPhone (bottom).

Oran Weitzberg has a form of high-functioning autism, called Asperger's syndrome, which enables him to happily spend long hours performing software debugging tasks that are stultifying for ordinary programmers.

The Rocket mobile communications appliance.

New measurements from the Herschel Space Observatory have discovered water with the same chemical signature as our oceans in a comet called Hartley 2 (pictured at right).

Guy Narbonne, a paleontologist at Queen's University in Ontario, inspects a fossil at the Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve in Newfoundland. It is filled with half-a-billion-year-old treasures like this one.

NobelPrize.org