March 2007 Archive

31 March 2007

The move to open up the application programming interfaces (APIs) to Yahoo Mail is meant to encourage Web developers to build applications that use the mail service. The company expects these third-party mashups, hybrid software that combines content from more than one source, will bring in more customers

With at least 46 million consumer records accessed by hackers, the TJX case outranks the previous largest case tracked by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse: a June 2005 disclosure by credit card processor CardSystems that hackers accessed accounts of 40 million card holders

Ever feel as though you're being followed? As if someone is behind you, shadowing your every move? It might be your shadow person, created by unusual activity in a specific brain region, a new study shows. The paper, published in the British journal Nature, describes the case of a 22-year-old woman with no history of psychiatric problems who was being evaluated for treatment of epilepsy. When a region of her brain called the left temporoparietal junction was electrically stimulated, the woman described encounters with a shadow person who mimicked her bodily movements — via Warren Ellis

30 March 2007

Yahoo has announced that they will be offering unlimited email storage starting this coming May. The launch is all a part of Yahoo's ten year anniversary. While not all users will see their storage caps disappear right away Yahoo is promising that this feature will eventually reach their entire population

A Norwegian team has made the first piece of hardware that uses evolution to change its design at runtime to solve the problem at hand in the most effective way. By turning on and off its genes it can change the way it works, and it can go through 20,000 - 30,000 generations in just a few seconds. That same number of generations took humans 800,000 - 900,000 years

Apple is throwing its weight behind the music industry's efforts to protect the album format by allowing fans to buy complete digital albums without having to pay again for songs they already own. The record industry is keen to maintain the profitable album format, which is under threat as users of web-based music download stores, such as Apple's iTunes and Napster, prefer to buy individual songs rather than whole albums. Apple said it was introducing a Complete My Album service that offers customers who want to turn individual tracks into an album a 99-cent credit for every song they have already purchased from the album

29 March 2007

A student has been suspended from school in America for coming to class dressed as a pirate. But the disciplinary action has provoked controversy — because the student says that the ban violates his rights, as the pirate costume is part of his religion. Bryan Killian says that he follows the Pastafarian religion, and that as a crucial part of his faith, he must wear full pirate regalia as prescribed in the holy texts of Pastafarianism — via WWdN: In Exile

Chemists at the University of Washington who have made glasses with lenses that can be transparent or dark, in shades of yellow, green or purple, all at the push of a button. The glasses will let the wearer instantly change the colour of their lenses to virtually any hue by tuning a tiny electronic knob in the frame

A device that uses radio waves to heat the muscle lining of patients' airways appears to treat their asthma. Just three sessions of the new treatment cut the number of mild asthma attacks in patients by a half during a one-year trial. The probe reduces inflammation in the bronchial tubes, doctors believe, and could lessen asthmatics' need for steroids. The procedure, known as bronchial thermoplasty, involves inserting a long, thin catheter probe through the nose or mouth to reach the lung airways. Once the probe is in place, the tip is heated using radio waves. This raises the temperature in the muscle tissue of the airway up to 65°C for 10 seconds

28 March 2007

Two Kiwi schoolgirls are worldwide celebrities after their school experiment forced an international pharmaceutical and food giant to admit it made false claims about vitamin C levels in Ribena. GlaxoSmithKline, the second-largest food and drug company in the world, was yesterday fined NZ$217,500 in the Auckland District Court after it admitted 15 breaches of the Fair Trading Act

San Francisco's Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to become the first US city to ban plastic bags from large supermarkets to help promote recycling. Under the legislation, beginning in six months large supermarkets and drugstores will not be allowed to offer plastic bags made from petroleum products — via Darren Barefoot

Microsoft is warning users of a new exploit that could allow an attacker to control which sites a user can visit. The vulnerability lies within the Web Proxy Auto Discover (WPAD) component

27 March 2007

Just a couple of weeks ago Sandisk introduced a 32GB solid-state drive. Now Samsung has one-upped them, unveiling a 64GB solid-state drive. They are expecting to begin shipping in the second quarter of this year. Samsung says the device can read 64 MB/s, write 45 MB/s, and uses just 0.5 W when operating (0.1 W when idle). In comparison, an 80GB 1.8-inch hard drive reads at 15 MB/s, writes at 7 MB/s, and consumes 1.5 W when either operating or idle

Web sites that feature the TRUSTe security certificate are two times more likely to contain badware than Web sites without any security certification, researcher Ben Edelman alleges

EcoPods are environmentally friendly coffins made from recycled paper. Whether you're worried about the state of the planet, or just want to be sure that you'll have an easy climb back out of the grave, should the zombiism take hold, this seems like a good idea — via Boingboing

A remote-controlled mechanism to launch tiny, liquid-filled darts into the bellies of horses was found buried under the starting gate of a Hong Kong race track. It was a device worthy of Rube Goldberg, or perhaps Wile E Coyote — via kottke.org

26 March 2007

For the first time, physicists have devised a way to make visible light travel in the opposite direction that it normally bends when passing from one material to another, like from air through water or glass. The phenomenon is known as negative refraction and could in principle be used to construct optical microscopes for imaging things as small as molecules, and even to create cloaking devices for rendering objects invisible — via Warren Ellis

A new electronic spacecraft propulsion concept proposes to utilise electrostatically charged and accelerated nanoparticles as propellant. Millions of micron-sized nanoparticle thrusters would fit on one square centimetre, allowing the fabrication of highly scaleable thruster arrays — via miberg.newsvine.com

St Louis University researchers have concocted batteries fueled by almost any kind of sugar, from tree sap to flat soda, and that could be used to power everything from computers to mobile phones. Their thinking: If sugar can jack up the human body, why not electronics?

25 March 2007

Forget WEP and WPA; try switching over to the EM-SEC Coating System, a recently announced paint developed by EM-SEC Technologies that acts as an electromagnetic fortress, allowing a wireless network to be contained within painted walls without fear of someone tapping in or hacking wireless networks. The EM-SEC Coating System is clearly the most secure option aside from stringing out the CAT5, and can be safely used to protect wireless networks in business and government facilities

A company named Tenebraex is helping colour-blind people to travel. But it's also developing goggles to help soldiers and physicians to see all colours at night, and not only the green colour of current night vision systems. These goggles, which should become available this northern summer, will be sold for about US$6,000 to the Army. But as states one of the founders of the company, with monochrome night vision, blood is the same colour as water. So these expensive night vision devices might be more targeted to Army physicians than to regular soldiers

A study in the peer-reviewed journal Science shows that mice transgenetically altered with a single human gene are then able to see in full tri-colour vision. Mice without this alteration are normally colour-blind. The scientists speculate that mammalian brains even from animals that have never evolved colour vision are flexible enough to interpret new colour-sense information with just the simple addition of new photoreceptors. Such a result is also indicated by a dominant X chromosome mutation that allows for quad-colour vision in some women

24 March 2007

e360 Insight, the spammer that sued Spamhaus, is accused of using a botnet and compromised headers to get their advertising into the mailboxes of the claimant. These are also the folks that tried to get the Illinois courts to suspend SpamHaus's domain registration when they wouldn't play by e360's rules

Australia's sluggish broadband speed has drawn the ridicule of business leaders both here and abroad. Australians are typically avid users of new technology once it arrives but the nation's small population, large land mass and legacy of heavy communications regulation have meant infrastructure plans have been slow to gain traction. Some big names have launched openly scathing attacks on the nation's broadband speeds in recent months. Rupert Murdoch calls the service a disgrace and James Packer says installing high-speed broadband should be a top priority for Australia

The spread of cancer and the effect of drugs to combat it could be closely monitored using tiny implants. US researchers are perfecting a way to use microscopic particles which stick to chemicals in cancer cells and show up during scans. Their latest advance is to find a way to keep a supply of the particles inside the body for longer periods. However, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) technique has not yet been tested in humans

23 March 2007

For all of his death-defying stunts, Harry Houdini couldn't escape the Grim Reaper: the unparalleled performer, age 52, expired on Halloween 1926. Many of his trade secrets went with him to the grave — but rumors that Houdini was murdered soon took on a life of their own. Eighty-one years later, Houdini's great-nephew wants to exhume the escape artist's body to determine if enemies poisoned his renowned relative for debunking their bogus claims of contact with the dead

The working title of the third Stargate television series has been unveiled. The series currently exists in the form of a one-page treatment of the story and characters, with the title Stargate Universe. The new series has been conceived to be a completely separate, third entity, executive producer Robert Cooper said in an interview — much more so than Atlantis was. Atlantis was much more of a spin-off series of SG-1 and was sort of born out of SG-1

The biggest whale fossil ever discovered in Italy has been found in one of the country's finest vineyards. The five-million-year-old skeleton, 33ft (10m) in length, was dug up in the northern grape-growing area of Tuscany

Google's YouTube is getting another challenge from the media industry, this time as NBC Universal and News Corp join forces to distribute full-length TV shows and other video over the Internet, supported by advertising. The new venture, which doesn't have a name yet, will also allow users to download movies and TV shows to own and play back whenever they want. At first, however, the focus will be on showing video streams of hit shows — with ads — such as NBC's Heroes and Fox's 24

22 March 2007

Doctor Who will return for a fourth series in 2008, executive producer and lead writer Russell T Davies confirmed last night. Series four is officially existing, he announced at the launch of Series Three in London. I'm very excited, but we have known for ages

A US federal judge has overturned a law designed to protect children from viewing internet pornography, saying it violated the right of free speech. The law made it illegal for websites to provide children access to harmful material, but it was never enforced. Judge Lowell Reed of Philadelphia said other means of protection, such as software filters, were more effective

Activist groups sued the parent company of Comedy Central on Thursday, claiming the cable network improperly asked the video-sharing site YouTube to remove a parody of the network's The Colbert Report

21 March 2007

Four Amway distributors have been ordered to pay Proctor and Gamble over $19 million in compensation. The four had spread rumours that the company was involved in Satanism, and the case has dragged on for over a decade. The judge had earlier decided that Amway itself could not be held responsible for the actions of its self-employed distributors — via The Pagan Prattle

Google has long been criticised about their graphic design or lack thereof. People have been clamouring for quite some time now to see a little spice on the site. Google is addressing some of these concerns with a new feature added to personalised home pages. When signed into your Google account, users can now choose one of several themes to personalise the look of the page

20 March 2007

Three years after establishing itself as one of the first specialist CRM vendors running its software on Linux, SugarCRM has launched into the project-planning market

VOD and AnyTime have emerged as favourites to grab a deal to supply Australia's number-three internet company, iiNet, with content for its online movie service, scheduled to launch before the end of June

There is a new form of contraception available for women. The device is a soft plastic ring that releases the contraceptive hormone directly into the bloodstream. Professor Gab Kovacs from Melbourne IVF says the device is inserted internally and is 99 per cent effective. It contains half the dose of female hormone contained in the lowest dose contraceptive pills

19 March 2007

The Pukaki Lagoon Explosion Crater in Mangere, New Zealand, is for sale. Current owners the Pangley family are selling it as aprt of a 62.3 hectare property. According to the realtor, the crater, formerly used for auto racing, would be ideal for a natural amphitheatre — via Boingboing

Philips hopes that fitting-room fiascos will become a thing of the past if it ever forays into the world of fashion. The consumer electronics giant has come up with a way to change the size, shape and style of clothes by weaving muscle wires into the fabric. The wires are made of shape-memory alloys that change length according to the small current passed through them. Here's the idea: you try on a special pair of Philips' trousers, and connect up to a power source that changes the length of the wires in the fabric until the trousers have the correct waist size, inside leg and width. Then simply disconnect to try the trousers in exactly your size. Philips says the technique could also be used to correctly fit shirts, socks and bras, or indeed any other article of clothing

18 March 2007

A recall of potentially deadly pet food has dog and cat owners studying their animals for even the slightest hint of illness and swamping veterinarians nationwide with calls about symptoms both real and imagined. Some of the 60 million cans and pouches of food have been blamed for kidney failure in scores of animals and killed at least 16 pets. Since Friday, nearly 100 brands of the cuts and gravy style food have been recalled by Menu Foods of Canada, including popular labels sold at Wal-Mart, Kroger and other large retailers

Deutsche Telekom's Musicload, one of the largest online music stores in Europe, has come out strongly against DRM on account of its effects on the marketplace and its customers. Musicload said in a letter distributed last week that customers are having consistent problems with DRM, so much so that 3 out of 4 customer service calls are ultimately the result of the frustrations that come with DRM

Vehicles may soon be swapping information about road conditions to warn drivers about jams and dangers. A German research project on show at hi-tech trade fair Cebit envisions a peer-to-peer network for vehicles on a road passing data back and forth. Cars or bikes experiencing problems would pass data that would ripple down the chain of vehicles behind them. Information would be conveyed to drivers via a dashboard screen or through a mobile phone headset

17 March 2007

Richard Dean Anderson will appear in the upcoming movie Stargate: Continuum. Anderson, who played Jack O'Neill on Stargate SG-1 for eight years before entering semi-retirement, will travel with an 18-person crew to the US Navy's Applied Physics Laboratory Ice Station in the Arctic next week to film scenes for the direct-to-DVD movie

The maple tree already provides Canadians with a beautiful part of the landscape, a national emblem and the sticky sweet syrup created from its sap. Now researchers have tapped into a new use for the sap: a base for a natural, biodegradable polymer, one they say may reduce our dependence on fossil fuel-based plastics. The discovery could potentially provide a new range of biodegradable products such as more environmentally friendly packaging material, and could be used for medical applications like drug delivery systems and surgical sutures

Scientists studying pictures from Nasa's Odyssey spacecraft have spotted what they think may be seven caves on the surface of Mars. The candidate caves are on the flanks of the Arsia Mons volcano and are of sufficient depth their floors mostly cannot be seen through the opening. The authors say that the possible discovery of caves on the Red Planet is significant

16 March 2007

The Tasmanian Devil, a rare carnivorous marsupial found only on Australia's southern island state of Tasmania, faces extinction in 10 to 20 years without a cure for the facial cancer now decimating the population. With half the population of this fierce, black furry animal now wiped out, leaving less than 75,000 devils, Professor Hamish McCallum at the University of Tasmania is battling to establish offshore colonies of healthy devils

Soon you could be piping digital TV around your home via power sockets. At the Cebit technology fair, German hi-tech firm Devolo is showing off home networking technology that can handle signals from a set top box. While many firms are working on ways to route data via the mains power circuits in the home, Devolo is among the first to use it to send TV signals. Further improvements to the home networking system will help it handle cable and satellite TV signals

SanDisk introduced an 8GB flash memory card for digital cameras and other devices, doubling the capacity of previous versions of the product. In addition, the company unveiled a new micromemory card for mobile phones

The government is heading back to the drawing board after a senate committee found its proposed new smartcard was likely to become an identity card. The Access Card was intended to replace the Medicare card and other benefits cards, streamlining access to a wide range of government health and welfare services. The government had explicitly ruled out its use as a national ID card amid widespread concerns that was what it would become. But in its report released last night, the standing committee on finance and public administration said the card was likely to become in effect an identity card, despite measures aimed at limiting its use

15 March 2007

Japan's Thanko has launched a new music headband just for runners. The VONIA is crafted with the iPod shuffle and other very small audio players in mind. A small pocket at the front holds the player and relays its sound through wires hidden inside the headband itself, preventing tangles during a run. The company has chosen to use bone conduction instead of headphones: sound transmits directly through the skull and leaves the ears free to pick up crucial audio cues from the outside world without affecting audio quality

A human rights legal group says Australia is breaching its international obligations by sending a group of asylum seekers to Nauru for processing. The Immigration Minister, Kevin Andrews, today announced the transfer of more than 80 Sri Lankan men currently being held on Christmas Island. Mr Andrews says the move will deter people smugglers and potential asylum seekers from trying to reach Australia. The spokeswoman from the group Australian Lawyers for Human Rights, Eve Lester, says the Government's policy is contrary to the United Nations convention on refugees

Thousands of Australians who use internet auction sites like eBay are facing a tax probe into their GST compliance. Online auction sites have been asked by the Australian Tax Office to provide information about sellers who turn over more than $50,000 a year

14 March 2007

Whether YouTube suffers the same fate as Napster may depend on the wording of a nearly antique law written long before video-sharing web sites were envisioned

Future spacecraft may surf the magnetic fields of Earth and other planets, taking previously unfeasible routes around the solar system, according to a proposal funded by NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts. The electrically charged craft would not need rockets or propellant of any kind. Mason Peck of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US, has received a grant to study the idea, which is based on the fact that magnetic fields exert forces on electrically charged objects. He says a satellite could charge itself up in one of two ways — either by firing a beam of charged particles into space, or simply by allowing a radioactive isotope to emit charged particles. The charged satellite would then be gently pushed by Earth's rotating magnetic field, enabling it to change orbit and even escape to interplanetary space. Early signs suggest the idea may work — via Warren Ellis

Office workers glued to their computer screens have an increased risk of potentially fatal blood clots, a world-leading New Zealand study has found. The study, by Professor Richard Beasley of the Medical Research Institute in Wellington found that 34 per cent of patients admitted to hospital with blood clots had been seated at work for long periods

Scientists are developing an artificial vein for use in patients with circulation problems. The device, which encourages blood to flow in its natural spiralling fashion, has produced highly promising results in clinical trials. The developers hope it will offer surgeons carrying out bypass operations an alternative to relying on blood vessels taken from the patient's body. It is hoped it could be made available to patients within a year

13 March 2007

The British military is set to take one of its most significant steps into the digital age with the launch of the first Skynet 5 satellite. The spacecraft will deliver secure, high-bandwidth communications for UK and friendly forces across the globe. It's not yet the Skynet of Terminator, but how long before it becomes self aware?

Viacom says it will sue Google and YouTube for US$1 billion. Viacom, which owns MTV and Nickelodeon, says YouTube uses its shows illegally. Viacom alleges that about 160,000 unauthorised clips of its programmes have been loaded onto YouTube's site and viewed more than 1.5 billion times. Google says it is confident that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders

Every year, Neil Engelman carefully collects his data, stands before his company's board of directors and is asked the same question: What caused more outages? The lightning or the squirrels? Four of the past five years, the answer has been the squirrels, says Engelman, vice president of operations for the Lincoln Electric System in Nebraska. Nebraska is not alone. Many states are grappling with a big increase in the number of power outages caused by squirrel electrocutions. Squirrels that fry themselves on power lines and transformers cause tens of thousands of blackouts every year

12 March 2007

Microsoft has admitted that its Live OneCare security suite has been accidentally deleting some users' Outlook and Outlook Express e-mails. According to postings on Microsoft's OneCare forum, erasures have been caused when the antivirus program finds a virus in an e-mail attachment. Instead of then quarantining that single e-mail, users have reported that entire .pst or .dbx files — the personal folder where non-Exchange Server users' messages and other details are kept — have been quarantined or, in some cases, even deleted

The European Union's consumer chief has hit out at Apple's bundling of its iPod music players and its iTunes online music store

Plants can do it: they simply grab carbon dioxide out of the air and covert it into biomass. In this process, known as photosynthesis, the plants use light as their energy source. Chemists would also like to be able to use CO2 as a carbon source for their synthetic reactions, but it doesn't work just like that. A team headed by Markus Antonietti at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces has now taken an important step toward this goal. They have successfully activated CO2 for use in a chemical reaction by using a special new type of metal-free catalyst: graphitic carbon nitride

11 March 2007

Mayan priests will purify a sacred Guatemalan archaeological site to eliminate bad spirits after President Bush visits next week — via The Pagan Prattle

Sweden's government has presented a bill to give its defence intelligence agency powers to monitor any e-mail or phone call into or out of the country. The National Defence Radio Establishment currently listens in on military communications and needs a court order for any other surveillance. The government says conversations within Sweden would remain untouched

Australian researchers say they have found a previously undiscovered species of taipan. The young snake has been found in the central deserts of Western Australia as part of a biodiversity survey. It was initially thought to be a brown snake, but Professor Steve Donellan from the South Australian Museum says DNA testing revealed it to be an unknown species of taipan. He says there are only two other known species of taipan in Australia, and the last one was found 125 years ago

10 March 2007

Scientists from the Northern Territory Menzies School of Health Research say they have discovered an effective treatment for the strain of malaria found in the Asia-Pacific region. The treatment combines a Chinese herbal extract and a longer-acting anti-malarial drug used to combat the more deadly strain of the disease found in Africa

Serbian vampire hunters have acted to prevent the very remote possibility that former dictator Slobodan Milosevic might stage a come-back — by driving a three-foot stake through his heart — via The Pagan Prattle

A new DNA test will help police in the UK solve rape cases even when the attacker has not left any traces of sperm. The test looks for the genetic hallmark of other cells present in semen, such as skin and immune cells. Its developers at Birmingham's Forensic Science Service say the test will help provide DNA evidence in a further 90 sexual assault cases a year

Launched in 2001, A123 leveraged research initiated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to commercially develop lithium-ion batteries that incorporate nanotechnology in the electrodes. The result is a new generation of batteries that deliver up to 10 times longer cycle life, five times more power and dramatically faster charge times over conventional high-power battery technology

09 March 2007

Apple may sell zippy notebook computers later this year that use the same type of fast memory as music players and digital cameras, driving down prices of hard-disk drives, according Shaw Wu, an analyst at American Technology Research. A shift to flash memory in place of much slower hard-disk drives would eliminate one headache for consumers: lengthy start-up times when turning on computers

The prototype of a short-range gigabit wireless chip, which promises more than 2Gbps throughput speeds and costs just AU$10, will be unveiled by the end of this year, according to researchers from National ICT Australia

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created the world's first material that reflects virtually no light. This anti-reflection technology is based on nanomaterial and could lead to the development of more efficient solar cells, brighter LEDs and smarter light sources. In theory, if a room were to be coated with this material, switching on the lights would only illuminate the items in the room and not the walls, giving a sense of floating free in infinite space

08 March 2007

VMware is introducing a public beta version of ACE 2 Enterprise Edition, an upgrade of its two-year-old ACE program for virtualising desktop computers so they can run multiple software or operating systems. One of the new features is Pocket ACE, which allows the user to store the ACE desktop virtualisation tool on a USB drive, a portable hard drive or an Apple iPod, plug it into a remote computer and run the virtualisation software on that computer

Most people just grumble and hit delete, but when Gordon Dick received a spam message advertising Internet services, he fought back. The 30-year-old Web marketing specialist from Edinburgh sued the sender, Transcom Internet Services, in small-claims court. The court ordered the company to pay $1,445 in damages and $1,190 in court costs. If someone was throwing stones through your window, would you just ignore it? Dick said. It's anti-social behavior and they shouldn't be doing it in the first place

The sale of imitation samurai swords could be banned by the end of the year in the UK. Importing or hiring the weapons could also be made illegal following a string of samurai sword attacks in recent years. Breaching the ban, which is targeted at cheap imitation samurai swords rather than the more expensive genuine collectors' items made by licensed swordsmiths in Japan, would result in up to six months in jail and a £5,000 fine

07 March 2007

Access to YouTube has been suspended in Turkey following a court order. The ban was imposed after prosecutors told the court that clips insulting former Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had appeared on the site. According to Turkish media, there has been a virtual war between Greek and Turkish users of the site, with both sides posting insulting videos

Google is developing a program to help academics around the world exchange huge amounts of data. The firm's open source team is working on ways to physically transfer huge data sets up to 120 terabytes in size. Google sends scientists a hard drive system and then copies it before passing it on to other researchers

OpenID has gained two more high profile Internet company supporters. Wordpress announced their support and 37Signals support is nigh. These two organisations join Digg, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, LiveJournal, MediaWiki and others in their support of OpenID

Japan's public broadcaster NHK reported late last week that the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry plans to introduce Linux for use within classrooms across the country in the near future

06 March 2007

The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalises the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned

Dell is considering offering the Linux operating system as an alternative to Microsoft's Windows on its personal computers. The PC maker said it received more than 100,000 customer requests for Linux in a suggestion box posted on Dell's Web site less than three weeks ago

As of today, the Ubuntu development branch includes a tool called Proprietary Drivers manager that makes it easy for users to activate proprietary drivers. Together with the graphical frontends to Beryl and Compiz this will make the activation and experience of the 3D desktop very pleasant

Our closest invertebrate relative, the humble sea squirt, can regenerate its entire body from just tiny blood vessel fragments. The entire regeneration process, which in part resembles the early stages of embryonic development, can produce an adult sea squirt in as little as a week. The finding could illuminate not only the evolutionary origins of regeneration in all organisms, but also subsequent changes to it during vertebrate evolution

05 March 2007

The Chinese government began blocking access to the popular blogging site LiveJournal on Friday, cutting off its citizens from the roughly 1.8 million blogs the service hosts. SixApart, the company behind LiveJournal, says there are 8,692 self-reported Chinese bloggers on the site, a number that's likely low since it's based on information volunteered in user profiles. China has blocked the site before, for no clear reason — then unblocked it again just as mysteriously, without any concessions from the company. The timing of the block coincides with the National People's Congress meeting in Beijing, says Xiao Qiang, a Chinese dissident and founder of the China Digital Times. According to Xiao, the event is often accompanied by stepped up security and a worsening of China's notorious internet censorship policies

Charlie Brooker, writing in the Guardian, reviews his phone under the headline, My new mobile is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots. It gets even better from there. This may be the best mobile phone review ever written — via Bruce Sterling

A team of British scientists has set sail on a voyage to examine why a huge chunk of the earth's crust is missing, deep under the Atlantic Ocean — a phenomenon that challenges conventional ideas about how the earth works. The 20-strong team aims to survey an area some 3,000 to 4,000 metres deep where the mantle — the deep interior of the earth normally covered by a crust kilometres thick — is exposed on the sea floor. Experts describe the hole along the mid-Atlantic ridge as an open wound on the ocean floor that has puzzled scientists for the five or so years that its existence has been known because it defies existing tectonic plate theories of evolution

The US Department of Transportation (DOT) has banned Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 2007 from its offices, and is considering switching its operations to Macs and PCs running Novell's SuSe Linux. The DOT enacted the ban in mid-January because certain applications essential to the agency's function can't run on Windows Vista

04 March 2007

Random House and HarperCollins have agreed to allow book browsing and searching on all their books

The recent 2.1.1 release of the popular blog software Wordpress was compromised by a cracker who made it easier for to execute code remotely. This is interesting because the official release was quietly and subtly compromised, and has been in the wild for a few days now. There's no word on if any affected sites have been compromised, but anyone running Wordpress is urged to upgrade to 2.1.2 immediately

A genuine crack for Windows Vista has just been released, which allows a pirated, non-activated installation of Vista (Home Basic/Premium and Ultimate) to be properly activated and made fully-operational. Unlike cracks which have been floating around since Vista RTM was released in late November, this crack doesn't simply get around product activation with beta activation files or timestop cracks — it actually makes use of the activation process. It seems that Microsoft has allowed large OEMs like ASUS to ship their products with a pre-installed version of Vista that doesn't require product activation — apparently because end users would find it too inconvenient

03 March 2007

Scientists at the University of Manchester have created the world's thinnest substance, a sheet of carbon one atom thick. Called graphene, the substance will revolutionise the computer industry, allowing transistors to be built on a far smaller scale than today. The team has already used the substance to build a transistor for single electrons

Computer hackers have scored a victory in their battle against Sony and the way the company controls its PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld games console. Last month three hacker teams — Noobz, Team C+D and a group led by PSP hacker Dark Alex — co-ordinating their efforts over the internet, found a flaw in the most recently released version of the firmware — version 3.03. Using this flaw they devised a way to unlock all PSPs, regardless of their age or the firmware running on it

Emergency workers attending the scene of a dirty bomb or nuclear blast could soon have a drug to help protect them

02 March 2007

The BBC has struck a content deal with YouTube, the web's most popular video sharing website, owned by Google. Three YouTube channels — one for news and two for entertainment — will showcase short clips of BBC content. The BBC hopes that the deal will help it reach YouTube's monthly audience of more than 70 million users and drive extra traffic to its own website. The corporation will also get a share of the advertising revenue generated by traffic to the new YouTube channels

Australia's first commercial wave-generated power station will in weeks begin supplying homes south of Sydney with electricity and fresh drinking water, courtesy of the sea. Lying anchored just 100 metres (yards) off a popular surf beach near Wollongong, a city of around 200,000 people just south of Sydney, the 485-tonne plant will power 500 homes along the local grid. Electricity is generated when waves wash into a funnel facing the ocean, driving air through a pipe and into a turbine capable of pumping 500kw of clean power each day into the local grid. The A$6 million (US$4.7 million) floating plant, built to withstand a 1-in-100 year storm, can also desalinate 2,000 litres of drinking water each day for almost as many homes as it powers

An antiviral drug widely used to treat hepatitis B causes some people with HIV to become rapidly resistant to their medication. The finding could have major implications for over four million people worldwide who are jointly infected with hepatitis B and HIV

01 March 2007

The useless twats at Channel Ten claim to have signed Torchwood. What a nightmare. I can see it now; the show will overhyped in a manner contrary to its style prior to screening, butchered beyond belief when it does air, suffer from unannounced timeslot changes before being banished to 2:00am, then it'll be ditched halfway through its run with no further word. Where the hell was Aunty while Ten was poaching on their patch?

Hoping to get a jump on Google and other competitors, Adobe plans to release a hosted version of its popular Photoshop image-editing application within six months. The online service is part of a larger move to introduce ad-supported online services to complement its existing products and broaden the company reach into the consumer market

New technology developed by Keio University researchers that creates artificial bacterial DNA that can carry more than 100 bits of data within the genome sequence. The researchers claimed that they encoded e= mc² 1905! on the common soil bacteria, Bacillius subtilis. The bacteria-based data storage method has backup and long-term archival functionality

Search


Archives