Science & Technology

CNN | With more than 12 times the traffic capacity of the nearest competing system, the Cisco CRS-3 is designed to transform the broadband communication and entertainment industry by accelerating the delivery of compelling new experiences for consumers, new revenue opportunities for service provid...

Newsroom | Cisco will host a live media, blogger and industry analyst webcast Tuesday, March 9, at 8:00 a.m. (PST) to make a significant announcement that will forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments. 

Physorg | A team of scientists at MIT have discovered a previously unknown phenomenon that can cause powerful waves of energy to shoot through minuscule wires known as carbon nanotubes. The discovery could lead to a new way of producing electricity, the researchers say.

F-Secure | Windows 7 is slightly more difficult because it has full ASLR (address space layout randomization) and a smaller attack surface (for example, no Java or Flash by default). Windows used to be much harder because it had full ASLR and DEP (data execution prevention). But recently, a talk...

Computer World | Narus is developing a new technology that sleuths through billions of pieces of data on social networks and Internet services and connects the dots.  The new program, code-named Hone, is designed to give intelligence and law enforcement agencies a leg up on criminals who ar...

Life Hacker | Lifehacker readers, you're in luck today; if you've ever wondered what a real life MacGvyer does for a living, I'm about to show you. I work with Limor at my "other" job designing educational electronics. It's a dream come true.

Space.com | Vast pockets of water ice numbering in the millions of tons have been discovered at the north pole of the moon, opening up another region of the lunar surface for potential exploration by astronauts and unmanned probes, NASA announced Monday.

National Center for Science Education | House Concurrent Resolution 1009, now under consideration in South Dakota's legislature, borrows language from antievolution legislation in encouraging teachers to present "a balanced and objective" presentation of global warming, and two NCSE staffers re...

International Business Times | While traditional chemical based rockets could bring men to Mars in just over three years, the new VASIMR engine could cut that travel time to just 39 days.

Softpedia | According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, a moving mass should create another field, called gravitomagnetic field, besides its static gravitational field. This field has now been measured for the first time and to the scientists' astonishment, it proved to be no less ...

Torrent Freak | Last year the BitTorrent search engine isoHunt lost in court against the MPAA. A Californian court ruled that isoHunt was guilty of inducing copyright infringement and granted summary judgment. IsoHunt, however, does not intend to crack so easily as it sets course towards an app...

Sydney Morning Herald | And yet, in his first day in Parliament since announcing on the weekend details of the government's transport blueprint, the only question from the Labor benches to Transport Minister Dave Campbell concerned a fanciful claim the Herald had somehow hacked a top secret webs...

Guardian | It's only Tuesday and already it's been an interesting week for the world of digital rights. Not only did the British government changed the wording around its controversial 'three strikes' proposals, but the secretive anti-counterfeiting treaty, Acta, was back in the headlines. Mea...

Brookhaven National Laboratory | Recent analyses from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a 2.4-mile-circumference “atom smasher” at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, establish that collisions of gold ions traveling at nearly the speed of light have ...

Engadget | Those two blocks can power the average high-consumption American home -- one block can power the average European home. At least that's the claim being made by K.R. Sridhar, founder of Bloom Energy, on 60 Minutes last night.

New Scientist | To generate the gas Thomas Nann and colleagues at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, dip a gold electrode with a special coating into water and expose it to light. clusters of indium phosphide 5 nanometres wide on its surface absorb incoming photons and pass elec...

Boing Boing | Someone has uploaded a PDF to a Google Group that is claimed to be the proposal for Internet copyright enforcement that the USA has put forward for ACTA, the secret copyright treaty whose seventh round of negotiations just concluded in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Gizmodo | Infinitec has created a USB stick that contains an 802.11n module capable of creating an ad hoc network through any device's USB port. But on the receiving end, it appears as nothing more complicated than a flash drive.

Gizmodo | The Pirate Bay is dead. So is TorrentSpy, MiniNova, Suprnova and many other public BitTorrent trackers. But the most savvy and obsessive file hoarders don't care about that stuff; they wouldn't be caught dead using public trackers.

Electronista | FCC chairman Julius Genachowski at a conference today launched (PDF) an effort to boost the speed of Internet access in the US to 100Mbps and higher. Dubbed 100 Squared, it would provide at least 100Mbps access to 100 million homes in the US.

Nanowerk | Researchers in Germany and the UK have discovered symmetry hidden in solid state matter at very small scales. The findings, published in the journal Science ("Quantum Criticality in an Ising Chain: Experimental Evidence for Emergent E8 Symmetry"), indicate that symmetry involves the g...

ABC | Scientists in the US have developed a new flexible and lightweight solar cell, which uses a fraction the amount of silicon used in conventional cells, while still achieving high light conversion rates.  Reporting in journal Nature Materials Professor Harry Atwater of the Caltech and c...

BBC | In this week's recall of the Toyota Prius, there is no faulty mechanical component. All that's necessary is a quick software update to recalibrate the electrically generated pedal "feel" in its braking system. Which just goes to show how deeply computer control is embedded in today's cars...

Physorg | Neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology and their colleagues have tied the human aversion to losing money to a specific structure in the brain-the amygdala.

News.com | The Super Mario Bros games are among the most popular ever produced by Nintendo with millions of copies sold around the world.  Super Mario Bros Wii, which was due for official release on November 12, 2009, was copied and offered by Burt online from November 6.

Times Online | By building on existing technologies in voice recognition and automatic translation, Google hopes to have a basic system ready within a couple of years. If it works, it could eventually transform communication among speakers of the world’s 6,000-plus languages.

BBC | While doctors know that as people age they are more at risk from diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and heart disease, some people fall prey to these at an earlier age than expected.

CBC | Lachlan Cranswick, 41, who worked at the National Research Council's Canadian Neutron Beam Centre, based at the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited Chalk River Laboratories, has been missing since Jan. 18 from the small community 200 kilometres northwest of Ottawa.

CBC | The chips of moon rock were collected by the Apollo 11 crew and carried to the top of Mount Everest last spring by a former shuttle astronaut, Scott Parazynski. Also on the plaque: a big rock gathered on the summit of Everest during that same expedition.

Technology Review | IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. The prototype devices, made from atom-thick sheets of carbon, operate at 100 gigahertz--meaning they can switch on and off 100 billion times each second, about 10 times as fast as the speediest silicon ...

Technology Review | In 1993, Charlie Bennett at IBM's Watson Research Center in New York State and a few pals showed how to transmit quantum information from one point in space to another without traversing the intervening space.

Ceramic Tech Today | GreenTech reported that some aerogel companies are offering thin blankets that serve as replacements for traditional fiberglass, foam or cellulose insulation. It’s still more expensive upfront but the costs have fallen to the point that it can make sense in certain c...

Sydney Morning Herald | The decision had the potential to impact internet users and the internet industry profoundly as it sets a legal precedent surrounding how much ISPs are required to do to prevent customers from downloading movies and other content illegally.  

Telegraph | The manufacturers of the White Goat machine estimates it costs about 10c (6p) to turn the waste paper into loo paper – equating to about six times cheaper than a roll of Andrex White Toilet Tissue, which usually retails for about 38p.

Physorg.com | The fissure was induced in order present an image which shows the characteristics of the coating. The image shows the SiO2 coating on a filament of a microfibre.  

Computer World | IDG News Service - U.S. federal authorities arrested a 26-year-old man on Thursday for allegedly selling modified cable modems that enabled free Internet access, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

MIT | Now a handful of researchers scattered across the globe are tackling a much more ambitious project: to find connectomes of brains more like our own. The scientists, including several at MIT, are working on technologies needed to accelerate the slow and laborious process that the C. elegans res...

Technology Review | Dow Chemical is moving full speed ahead to develop roof shingles embedded with photovoltaic cells. To facilitate the move, the U.S. Department of Energy has backed Dow's efforts with a $17.8 million tax credit that will help the company launch an initial market test of the produc...

Technology Review | Music lovers may have long forsaken them, but magnetic tapes still reign supreme when it comes to storing vast amounts of digital data. And new research from IBM and Fujifilm could ensure that tape remains the mass storage medium of choice for years to come for at least a decade.

Alternet | One moment there was the hum of a motor in the sky above.  The next, on a recent morning in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, a missile blasted a home, killing 13 people.  Days later, the same increasingly familiar mechanical whine preceded a two-missile salvo ...

Science Daily | What if a jury could decide a man's guilt through mind reading? What if reading a defendant's memory could betray their guilt? And what constitutes 'intent' to commit murder? These are just some of the issues debated and reviewed in the inaugural issue of WIREs Cognitive Science, the...

Mail.com | Davis also denied Thomas-Rasset's request for a new trial. He gave the Recording Industry Association of America seven days to either accept the smaller penalty or to ask for another trial to set new damages.

Mozillazine | Youtube and Vimeo have started offering video playback using the HTML5 <video> element. That is good news for free software, since it means you don't need a closed-source Flash player to play the video [1].

Prefix Magazine | Thinking about file-sharing? Don't. You'll get fined, and crime doesn't pay (unless you rob banks and/or armored cars, then it pays very well). Take it from Jammie Thomas, who was fined $2 million for downloading 24 songs, or anyone else who tried to fight the RIAA.

Chem.info | A new kind of information processing technology inspired by chemical processes in living systems is being developed by researchers at the University of Southampton.  Dr Maurits de Planque and Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner at the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) ...

Torrent Freak | There has been a lot of talk about magnet links since The Pirate Bay decided to include them on their site recently. Various BitTorrent clients quickly added support for these type of links, and recently the first ‘magnet-only’ torrent index opened to the public.  

BBC | The German government has warned web users to find an alternative browser to Internet Explorer to protect security.  The warning from the Federal Office for Information Security comes after Microsoft admitted IE was the weak link in recent attacks on Google's systems.

Boing Boing | The drive to ram through the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is ramping up, with the next meeting set for the end of this month in Mexico. ACTA is an unprecedented copyright treaty (unprecedented in that it reaches farther than previous copyright treaties, and that it is bei...

Herald Sun | The US space agency is launching an investigation after an unspecified amount of cocaine was found Wednesday inside a plastic bag in a Cape Canaveral, Florida shuttle processing facility, Central Florida News 13 reported.

Scientific American | Final proof that Mars has bred life will be confirmed this year, leading NASA experts believe. The historic discovery will come not on Mars itself but from chunks of the red planet here on Earth. David McKay, chief of astrobiology at NASA's Johnson Space Centre in Houston, says...