Martin Nowak’s 15 minutes of geek fame may be over. Mr. Novak, a German eye doctor who dabbles in industrial-strength mathematics, attracted attention last March when he discovered the world’s largest known prime number—a behemoth that ran nearly 8 million digits long.

But now he’s been surpassed by Steven Boone and Curtis Cooper, a pair of professors at Central Missouri State University, who have managed to find a prime number that runs 9.1 million digits. For Mr. Boone and Mr. Cooper, it’s been a long time coming: The duo started searching for primes nine years ago, and they now have more than 700 computers crunching numbers. (The Guardian)

Casting about for prime numbers might seem like an odd avocation, but there’s a financial incentive for skilled mathematicians. The first person to discover a "Mersenne" prime number over 10 million digits long will win $100,000, the top prize ...

With the dot-com bust and the trend of businesses to outsource their technology labor overseas, colleges have seen a decline in student interest in technology disciplines. Now that the technology industry is rebounding, college officials are hoping for a rekindled interest in computer science and other technology majors. They may get an indication about the level of interest during this week’s annual trek of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students to Silicon Valley for job recruitment. (CNET)

To read more about the shortage of students majoring in computer science, see an article from The Chronicle, by Andrea L. Foster.

It looks as if Morpheus, the last surviving member of the first wave of popular peer-to-peer services, might be about to call it a day. Despite legal assaults from the record and movie industries, an unfavorable decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., and dissolution of its one-time counterparts Napster, KaZaA, and Grokster, the service had vowed until recently to soldier on.

But Michael Weiss—the chief executive officer of StreamCast Networks, which owns Morpheus—now says he has approached record companies to discuss settling the industry’s longstanding lawsuit against his firm. Any settlement would almost certainly mean an end to Morpheus. "We can take a look at another four years of legal battles and spending millions of dollars on both sides, [but] is that where I want to spend the next four years of my life?" Mr. Weiss...

Students and staff members from Saint Joseph’s University, in Philadelphia, are spending their winter breaks aiding the recovery effort in New Orleans, and they are detailing the experience on a group blog run by the university. The team, which is spending a week in Louisiana helping residents clean out their homes, offers an on-the-ground perspective of the reclamation project and describes some visceral reactions to the damage wreaked by Hurricane Katrina.

A professor at Devry University in Westminster, Colorado, has been fired, she says, for some "water-cooler kvetching" about the institution on her blog.

Meg Spohn, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Denver, served as department chair of communications and composition at the Westminster campus until mid-December. On her Web site, Ms. Spohn had critiqued the university’s online training seminars and hiring practices—complaints, she argues, that were fairly antiseptic.

But campus officials evidently saw something a bit more sinister in her online musings. And Ms. Spohn may have a difficult time if she chooses to fight the firing: Colorado is an "at-will" state where companies are allowed to dismiss employees for any reasons not prohibited by federal law. (The Denver Post) 

Security experts are buzzing about a newly exposed—and, some say, potentially catastrophic—vulnerability in Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The security hole, discovered last week, allows hackers to infect computers by sneaking malicious code into harmless-looking image files. In the past, computers have contracted viruses when users unwittingly downloaded or executed corrupted files; now Windows machines could be infected by images that appear in pop-up ads or instant messages. (Financial Times)

Microsoft officials say they’re working on a patch that would seal up the security hole, but it might not be ready until January 10. In the meantime, some colleges may be battening down the hatches, but others say their existing antivirus practices should be enough to get them through the next week.