A highly confidential Home Office disc has been found on a laptop computer sold on eBay. Police are investigating after the disc - which was hidden between the keyboard Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 9:52 am
The Bamboo phone is not only biodegradable, but when it is thrown in the compost, seeds stored within it are released and begin to sprout new shoots. [Core77 via Trendhunter] Once the phone is no... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 9:39 am
With more than 1 billion phones sold globally for the first time, 2007 was a banner year for mobile phone sales, reports Conputerworld. "Worldwide sales of mobile phones ended up surpassing 1.15 billion... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 9:35 am
A Taliban threat to attack Afghan telecoms companies is the latest sign of paranoia from militants who fear their mobile phones will betray their hiding places. Reuters reports. "The Islamist militia... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 9:34 am
According to The Daily Yomiuri, several companies are offering language-learning services as an option to the usual video games or e-mail. "Recent advances in cell phone technology have resulted in sound... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 9:25 am
By Evan Ackerman This, right here, is the solution to all violent conflicts everywhere. When real weapons eventually, inevitably, are replaced by glitter guns, peace will reign and 70s pop icons will once... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 9:18 am
djasbestos writes "NASA is planning to smash a spacecraft into the Moon in order to look for hydrogen deposits in the poles. More notably, it will impact with significantly greater force (100x, per the article) than previous Moon collisions, such as by the Lunar Prospector and Smart-1 probes. Admiral Ackbar was unreachable for comment as to the exact location and size of the Moon's thermal exhaust port."
A town hall is celebrating victory after reclaiming its website from the clutches of a gang of Kosovan freedom fighters. Hackers promoting the cause of the newly... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 9:06 am
By Evan Ackerman Have you ever noticed that there are surveillance cameras everywhere nowadays? Doesn’t it make you feel all warm and fuzzy and safe in the knowledge that our little sisterish government... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:52 am
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Two industry groups representing China's local musicians and songwriters have filed a lawsuit against the country's Web search leader, Baidu.com Inc, accusing it of... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:48 am
LONDON (Reuters) - British cable operator Virgin Media added 24,400 customers in its fourth quarter, posted underlying operating income ahead of targets and said it was well placed for... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:43 am
Spotted on Ubergizmo, a Camel cigarette cell phone case. Related: - A Chinese Cell Phone Cigarette Case Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:42 am
Crowdsourcing firm Kluster officially launched yesterday at the TED conference, which is underway this week in Monterey, California. Founder Ben Kaufman, who bankrolled the company in part with money... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:30 am
0227b_Microsoft_EU The European Union's longest-running fight with Microsoft Corp. neared an end Wednesday as regulators imposed a record $1.3 billion fine on the world's largest... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:08 am
By Andrew Liszewski In an effort to improve the nerdy image of the accordion Roland has added a few high-tech upgrades and improvements to their FR-2b model. Unfortunately though the only thing I know... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:03 am
By Easton, Peter A subsidiary of EMCOR Group Inc. has been awarded a contract to provide mechanical construction services for a new 24 million gallon per day water treatment plant in Gilbert, Ariz. The value of the contract is $88.5 million. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Don Behm, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Feb. 28--Milwaukee police are investigating the apparently intentional disruption of Milorganite fertilizer production this week at the Jones Island sewage treatment plant. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Plenderleith, Don Remediation of an old military landfill illustrates trends in environmental engineering. By Don Plenderleith Managing environmental impacts is a high priority for Canada's Department of National Defence. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Anonymous Political responses to economic problems can do more harm than good. The US government is now rushing together a political fix for an economy unraveling at surprising speed. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Watkins, Eric The US Minerals Management Service has begun an evaluation of the environmental issues associated with future federal Outer Continental Shelf lease sales for oil and gas exploration in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off Alaska. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Kash, Jeffrey P In the period 1985 to 1996, agricultural conservation policy in the United States underwent a fundamental transition from a focus on policy design elements that emphasized short-term economic returns for farmers and long-term productivity to a focus on design elements that emphasized systemic environmental concerns. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Stan Finger, The Wichita Eagle, Kan. Feb. 28--The extradition papers have been filed, and now Kansas officials are waiting for Mexico to extradite Israel Mireles. Mireles, 24, faces murder, rape and sodomy chargesin the Nov. 24 death of Emily Sander, 18, of El Dorado. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Dion Lefler, The Wichita Eagle, Kan. Feb. 28--A development just northwest of Wichita that had drawn protest early on passed the Sedgwick County Commission Wednesday with little complaint. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By The Lexington Herald-Leader, Ky. Feb. 28-- Kentucky American Water and its allies like to portray the $160 million building plan the company has pending before the state Public Service Commission as the logical culmination of 20 years of study. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Anonymous Find Tolerances Capability: With ToleranceCalc 5.0, users of any popular computer-aided design system can get quick answers to two questions: Will the product perform as expected when dimensional tolerances are stacked up? Will the product be cost effective to manufacture? The application can be run at any stage of the design process. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Lisa Sink, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Feb. 28--ELM GROVE -- The Village Board has voted to stop publishing legal notices in any newspaper and instead will post local government information on bulletin boards at three public buildings and on the village Web site. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
Warren Adelman's colleagues know him as "Thumbs." Like many executives, he is adept at checking e-mail on his BlackBerry and does it almost constantly. Unable to do so during flights, Mr. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
LONDON, February 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- In a video interview, Doug Flynn, CEO of Rentokil Initial, talks about rebuilding the profitability of City Link and progressing the operational improvements made across the group. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
The Thomas Kinkade Network, a leading provider of syndicated advertising management and internet media publishing, announced today that it has reached an agreement with Gilroy, California-based Mainstreet Media (MSM), to launch and market a series of internet broadcast channels to extend its traditional newspaper brands. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Thilmany, Jean Technodigit of Lyon, France, has upgraded its 3DReshaper to version five. The software is used for three-dimensional modeling, reverse engineering, and surface reconstruction. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
A community activist faces a misdemeanor charge for hitting a city official with papers, which had drawn a YouTube audience. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
Google Inc., already the world's most-popular spot for finding websites, is aiming to become the go-to place for creating websites too. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
The software giant, which is ordered to pay $1.36 billion in antitrust case, still faces two new probes. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
Yearly vaccines are recommended for everyone from 6 months to 18 years old. The CDC is expected to adopt the proposal. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
In our post Tim Berners-Lee Says the Time for the Semantic Web is Now, the Web's inventor is quoted as saying that "people are realizing its time to just go do it." But commenter Gregory isn't getting... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 7:59 am
Google, already the world's most popular spot for finding Web sites, is aiming to become the go-to place for creating Web sites too. The Mountain View-based company is taking its first... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 7:59 am
Scientists at a Japanese university said Thursday they believed another planet up to two-thirds the size of the Earth was orbiting in the far reaches of the solar system. The Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 7:21 am
I missed the morning speakers at TED this year, but I caught the afternoon group, who presented talks around the theme "What is our place in the universe?"
Dr. Roy Gould, an astrophysicist from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, and Curtis Wong, principal researcher of Microsoft’s Next Media Research group, kicked it off with a demonstration of the visually delightful World Wide Telescope. It's a virtual telescope that uses real images taken by the Hubble and other telescopes, knitted together seamlessly. You can create tours of the universe and share them with your pals. It'll launch online this spring at worldwidetelescope.org. Visit it now to watch a couple of short videos about it.
Next up was Stanford particle physicist Patricia Burchat who explained that the known universe appears to contain 70% dark energy, 26% dark matter, and only 4% ordinary matter. It's hard to detect particles of dark energy -- its signature in lab tests is "missing energy" -- but it has a power effect: it's making the universe expand faster all the time.
University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward, author of Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future proceeded to scare the bejesus out of everyone with tales of climate-changed mass extinctions through history and how little time we have left until humanity gets wiped out by a supervolcano, an asteroid, or rising CO2 levels. He also reported that a highly toxic gas, hydrogen sulfide, which is in undersea sediments, and which occasionally leaks into the atmosphere and causes massive species wipeouts, might have a future as an emergency medical treatment because it can be used to nearly stop mammalian metabolism without killing. He said it's a "blessing and a curse."
Thankfully, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar followed to tell us that we can all feel better if we remember to breathe, and then Kaki King played guitar.
Tomorrow, the TED Prize session will be broadcast live at 5pm PST. The winners of the TED Prize get $100,000 and are granted a wish to change the world. You can watch the prize session here: Link
Beagle writes "The science of evolution is often misunderstood by the public and a session at the recent AAAS meeting in Boston covered three frequently misapprehended topics in evolutionary history, the Cambrian explosion, origin of tetrapods, and evolution of human ancestors, as well as the origin of life. The final speaker, Martin Storksdieck of the Institute for Learning Innovation, covered how to communicate the data to a public that 'has such a hard time accepting what science is discovering.' His view: 'while most of the attention has focused on childhood education, we really should be going after the parents. Everyone is a lifelong learner, Storksdieck said, but once people leave school, that learning becomes a voluntary matter that's largely driven by individual taste.'"
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc said on Wednesday it is offering a simple Web site publishing tool for office workers to set up and run their team collaboration sites, taking aim at... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 6:12 am
TOKYO (Reuters) - Nintendo Co Ltd's Wii game console outsold Sony Corp's PlayStation 3 nearly 4-to-1 in Japan in February, a game magazine publisher said. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 5:35 am
I'll be blogging from TED 2008 this year, held in beautiful Monterey CA. I drove up from Los Angeles and snapped a few photos along the way.
BLT and homemade minestrone soup was the $7.45 Wednesday lunch special at Ellen's Pancake house, a sparking clean and good cafe in Buellton, CA (a little town 140 miles north of Los Angeles). The workers are friendly and the place is filled with locals. Ellen's is much better than Anderson's Pea Soup across the street where I usually robotically-yet-regretfully eat when I'm passing through.
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's Fair Trade Commission says it has launched an investigation into Sharp Corp and Hitachi Displays on suspicion of a cartel in liquid crystal displays for video... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 5:25 am
Yesterday's rally in Nashville to stop a new copyright bill that would put the expense of policing the movie industry's business model onto universities was a success -- the bill has been stalled and won't be reconsidered for ten days. Now it's time to get mobilized:
Just in the past few days we found out about this Bill they are trying to pass in the TN State Senate. SB3974, sponsored by Sen. Tim Burchett, forces any institution of “higher learning” to monitor all public university students and expel any who access copyrighted content. Since nearly everyone will access some kind of “copyrighted” content online - they will be forced to expel thousands of students from any public university!
Here’s the plan:
[1] Meet up with us next Wednesday (March 5th) to go to Nashville and protest! (5:00 AM - March 5th) we will have a bus - we will leave at 5AM in Knoxville (meet at COPYSHOP).
Gather at 8AM (if you can get there by yourself)
on the corner of 6th and Union St in Nashville!
[2] NOW Email the Senators:
sen.tim.burchett@legislature.state.tn.us
sen.jamie.woodson@legislature.state.tn.us
sen.rusty.crowe@legislature.state.tn.us
Microsoft Corp.'s big bet on Facebook's online social network isn't stopping Chairman Bill Gates from promoting other popular Internet hangouts. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 5:05 am
Two decades ago, Hewlett-Packard Co. launched a printer that would create global demand for what would become one of its most profitable products: ink. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 5:05 am
Google, already the world's most popular spot for finding Web sites, is aiming to become the go-to place for creating Web sites too. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 5:05 am
Google, already the world's most popular spot for finding Web sites, is aiming to become the go-to place for creating Web sites too. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 5:05 am
Google, already the world's most popular spot for finding Web sites, is aiming to become the go-to place for creating Web sites too. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Feb 2008 | 5:05 am
Jacob sez, "I'd like to pass on a nice practical attack against the Chip and Pin system used in most of the world
Saar Drimer, Steven J. Murdoch and Ross Anderson, researchers at the University of Cambridge, have shown how to compromise supposedly tamper-proof Chip and PIN terminals. With a paperclip, off the shelf electronics, and basic technical skills, fraudsters can capture card details and PINs, then create counterfeit cards. The full results of the team are published their academic paper and were featured on BBC Newsnight."
Link
(Thanks, Jake!)
SEATTLE _ Four teens have been charged with rape in the alleged assault of a 16-year-old Bellevue, Wash., girl last November. According to Bellevue police, the attack was described in messages on the Internet. The youths were all 17 when the alleged assault was reported. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Feb 2008 | 5:00 am
By Michael Liedtke SAN FRANCISCO -- Unable to topple Google Inc. on its own, Microsoft Corp. is trying to force crippled rival Yahoo Inc. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Feb 2008 | 5:00 am
By Dan Caterinicchia WASHINGTON -- U.S. and European antitrust regulators aren't likely to prevent Microsoft from buying Yahoo, analysts said Friday, though scrutiny of the deal could drag on for months. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Feb 2008 | 5:00 am
Republican former South Dakota lieutenant governor and potential Senate candidate Steve Kirby made his fortune running a scandal-wracked business that harvested collagen from corpses donated for medical research and using it for cosmetic products and penis-enlargements:
Collagenesis specialized in processing donated skin off cadavers into cosmetic surgery products, and was subject to a blistering five-part investigative series by the Orange County Register beginning on April 17, 2000. “Burn victims lie waiting in hospitals as nurses scour the country for skin to cover their wounds, even though skin is in plentiful supply for plastic surgeons,” read the lede of the Register report. “The skin they need to save their lives is being used instead for procedures that could wait: supporting bladders, erasing laugh lines and enlarging penises.”..
Kirby’s niche industry had proven financially lucrative. Collagenesis could take the skin off one cadaver and convert it into $36,000 of a gel injected to smooth wrinkles and inflate lips. Its lone competitor, a firm called LifeCell, estimated its potential revenues from such skin at $200 million a year — 10 times what it would earn if it focused on life-saving burn applications instead of cosmetic surgery.
Bob Bjarke likes the fortune he got in his cookie (from a recent dinner at Papajin in Chicago) so much he created a website called www.thebestfortunecookieever.com to show it off.
Wired has gotten hold of an incredibly disturbing set of photos from the US torture crimes at Abu Ghraib. Does anyone really believe that this was just a couple of rogue operators? If I wanted to reduce the number of jihadis in the world, I'd start by making sure that stuff like this didn't happen -- I can think of no better recruiting boost for Al Quaeda than prisons like Abu Ghraib.
As an expert witness in the defense of an Abu Ghraib guard who was court-martialed, psychologist Philip Zimbardo had access to many of the images of abuse that were taken by the guards themselves. For a presentation at the TED conference in Monterey, California, Zimbardo assembled some of these pictures into a short video. Wired.com obtained the video from Zimbardo's talk, and is publishing some of the stills from that video here. Many of the images are explicit and gruesome, depicting nudity, degradation, simulated sex acts and guards posing with decaying corpses. Viewer discretion is advised.
The Surveillance Light is a floor-lamp whose three poseable heads are built into the chassis of CCTV cameras. You could be incredibly sneaky and put actual webcams into the housings as well.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winner in economics, says the Iraq war has cost $3 trillion so far. According to the Guardian, "three trillion could have fixed America's social security problem for half a century."
Some time in 2005, Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, who also served as an economic adviser under Clinton, noted that the official Congressional Budget Office estimate for the cost of the war so far was of the order of $500bn. The figure was so low, they didn't believe it, and decided to investigate. The paper they wrote together, and published in January 2006, revised the figure sharply upwards, to between $1 and $2 trillion. Even that, Stiglitz says now, was deliberately conservative: "We didn't want to sound outlandish."
So what did the Republicans say? "They had two reactions," Stiglitz says wearily. "One was Bush saying, 'We don't go to war on the calculations of green eye-shaded accountants or economists.' And our response was, 'No, you don't decide to fight a response to Pearl Harbour on the basis of that, but when there's a war of choice, you at least use it to make sure your timing is right, that you've done the preparation. And you really ought to do the calculations to see if there are alternative ways that are more effective at getting your objectives. The second criticism - which we admit - was that we only look at the costs, not the benefits. Now, we couldn't see any benefits. From our point of view we weren't sure what those were."
Not sure what's going on over at Twitter, but when I attempt to access the site, each new refresh logs me in as some other seemingly random user, generates a seemingly random series of users I'm not "following," and the top post shown says something about a tiny penis, and following a hack, no matter how many refreshes I hit. (shrugs). Screengrab. Update: oh, nevermind. But Scott Beale wins in "best coverage of downtime in 100 chars or less."
coondoggie writes "Even with its increased hiring estimates of 1,200 patent examiners each year for the next 5 years, the US Patent and Trademark Office patent application backlog is expected to increase to over 1.3 million at the end of fiscal year 2011 the Government Accounting Office reported today. The USPTO has also estimated that if it were able to hire 2,000 patent examiners per year in fiscal year 2007 and each of the next 5 years, the backlog would continue to increase by about 260,000 applications, to 953,643 at the end of fiscal year 2011, the GAO said. Despite its recent increases in hiring, the agency has acknowledged that it cannot hire its way out of the backlog and is now focused on slowing the growth of the backlog instead of reducing it. This too is but one of the goals of the Patent Reform Act currently making the rounds in the US Senate."
From resurrected TV shows and killer schoolgirls to advanced wine accoutrements and a nose-hair trimmer for the future, see what's got us all agog this month.
Wired.com is publishing several rarely seen photos of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, taken from a video shown by psychologist Philip Zimbardo at the TED conference in Monterey, California.
Psychologist Philip Zimbardo will speak Thursday afternoon at the TED conference about parallels between his infamous 1971 "prison experiment" at Stanford and prisoner abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq more than 30 years later. Wired.com has an exclusive video from Zimbardo's talk, featuring Abu Ghraib photos he says are previously unseen.
An anonymous reader writes "Former FBI Agent Patrick J. Dempsey warns that the Internet has become a sanctuary for cyber criminals and the only way to rectify this is to create a second, more secure Internet. Dempsey explains that, in order to successfully fight cyber crime, law enforcement officials need to move much faster than average investigators and cooperate with international law enforcement officials. The problem is various legal systems are unprepared for the fight, which is why he claims we must change the structure of the Internet."
cperciva writes "The first release from the new 7-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, has been released. FreeBSD 7.0 brings with it many new features including support for ZFS, journaled filesystems, and SCTP, as well as dramatic improvements in performance and SMP scalability. In addition to being available from many FTP sites, ISO images can be downloaded via the BitTorrent tracker, or for users of earlier FreeBSD releases, FreeBSD Update can be used to perform a binary upgrade."
High-tech solutions for saving power (or generating your own power) abound in this gallery of new and proposed products on display at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco.
jason writes "Mozilla has been working hard at making Firefox 3 faster than its predecessor, and it looks like they might be succeeding. They've recently added some significant JavaScript performance improvements that beat out all of the competition, including Opera 9.5 Beta. And it comes out to be about ten times faster than Internet Explorer 7! Things are really starting to fall into place for Firefox 3 Beta 4 which should be available in the next week or two."
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Scientist Charles Bauschlicher and his research team have found a new way to look for 'diamonds in the sky'. It may not be romantic, but diamonds shine especially brightly in the 3.4 to 3.5 micron and 6 to 10 micron infrared ranges, which should make NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope the perfect tool to see them with. Though less common and more monopolized on earth, diamonds are surprisingly common in outer space and the nanometer-sized bits comprise 3% of all the carbon found in meteorites. That means that if meteorite composition is representative of interstellar dust, that dust would contain about 10 quadrillion (1 * 10^16) nanodiamonds per gram."
Joe Ganley writes "You are a programming superstar, and you are looking for work. I recognize this happens relatively rarely, which is part of my problem. But stipulating that it happens, how do I, as a company looking to hire such people, connect with them? Put another way, how do you the programming superstar go about looking for a company that seems like one you'd like to work for? The company I work for is a great place to work; we only hire really great people, we work on hard, interesting problems, and we treat our employees well. We aren't worried about retention or even about how to entice people to work here once we've found them. The problem is simply finding them. The signal-to-noise ratio of the big places like Monster and Dice is terrible. We've had much better luck with (for example) the Joel on Software job boards, but that still doesn't generate enough volume." What methods have other people used to find the truly elite?
The Centers for Disease Control tracks influenza, but not the common cold -- and a particularly nasty form of the cold seems to be spreading in the United States. Help us figure out how widespread it really is with this poll.
coondoggie writes to tell us NetworkWorld is reporting that one researcher seems to think that a military robot arms race may be imminent between both governments and terrorists. "We are beginning to see the first steps towards an international robot arms race and it may not be long before robots become a standard terrorist weapon to replace the suicide bomber, according to professor Noel Sharkey, from the Royal United Services Institute Department of Computer Science. [...] Currently there is always a human in the loop to decide on the use of lethal force. However, this is set to change with the US giving priority to autonomous weapons - robots that will decide on where, when and who to kill, according to the professor."
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to EE Times, a California-based company called QuantumSphere has developed nanoparticles that could make hydrogen cheaper than gasoline. The company says its reactive catalytic nanoparticle coatings can boost the efficiency of electrolysis (the technique that generates hydrogen from water) to 85% today, exceeding the Department of Energy's goal for 2010 by 10%. The company says its process could be improved to reach an efficiency of 96% in a few years. The most interesting part of the story is that the existing gas stations would not need to be modified to distribute hydrogen. With these nanoparticle coatings, car owners could make their own hydrogen, either in their garage or even when driving."
Dr. Roy Gould, an astrophysicist from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, and Curtis Wong, principal researcher of Microsoft’s Next Media Research group, kicked it off with a demonstration of the visually delightful World Wide Telescope. It's a virtual telescope that uses real images taken by the Hubble and other telescopes, knitted together seamlessly. You can create tours of the universe and share them with your pals. It'll launch online this spring at worldwidetelescope.org. Visit it now to watch a couple of short videos about it.
Jacob sez, "I'd like to pass on a nice practical attack against the Chip and Pin system used in most of the world
Saar Drimer, Steven J. Murdoch and Ross Anderson, researchers at the University of Cambridge, have shown how to compromise supposedly tamper-proof Chip and PIN terminals. With a paperclip, off the shelf electronics, and basic technical skills, fraudsters can capture card details and PINs, then create counterfeit cards. The full results of the team are published their academic paper and were featured on BBC Newsnight."
Link
(Thanks, Jake!)
Comment by Dr. Bruce Betts Director of Projects at The Planetary Society
