Science & Technology

ARS Technica | West Virginia's Charleston Gazette has been hopping mad this week as one of its reporters learned that the state has been sticking 1,064 high-end $22,600 routers into “little public institutions as small as rural libraries with just one computer terminal.”

TodayIFoundOut.com | If you presumed that the reasoning behind such an act was “because we can”, you are absolutely correct.  That is exactly why the U.S. wanted to do it, in order to one-up the Soviet Union, who were perceived as leading the space race at the time.

CNN | The license goes to Google, the Silicon Valley technology giant known more for its search engine and e-mail service that nonetheless has been known to dive into other big ideas such as space elevators to Internet-enabled glasses.

CNN | Wind turbines have long produced renewable energy but a French engineering firm has discovered another eco-purpose for the towering structures.  Eole Water claims to have successfully modified the traditional wind turbine design to create the WMS1000, an appliance that can manufacture drinking water from humid air.

New Scientist | It's not a bird or a plane: it's an unusual flying object that propels itself by flipping inside out. Created by engineers at Festo in Esslingen, Germany, the floating band filled with helium takes on different shapes while expanding and contracting to generate thrust and move through the air.

Electronic Frontier Foundation | On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Until now, your Google Web History (your Google searches and sites visited) was cordoned off from Google's other products.

IT World | The SOPA and PIPA bills that went down in flames earlier this year for their unbearable intrusiveness, used content piracy as an excuse to give the government powerful tools with which to censor Internet content.

ARS Technica | Canada's conservative government has re-introduced an Internet surveillance bill that would allow the government to obtain information about Internet subscribers—without a warrant. The legislation would require service providers to provide law enforcement with IP addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and other information on demand.

Physorg | Today, more than ninety years after Staudinger’s discovery – for which the chemist was honoured with the Nobel Prize in 1953 – about 150 million tons of plastics are manufactured every year. A gigantic industry developed, without whose products our daily life is no longer imaginable.

Network World | Yet as of today, www.wikipedia.org remains nestled in the GoDaddy bosom, according to WhoIs directory records, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by some, including users of Reddit, which along with Wikipedia was among the most high-profile and active SOPA opponents.

Webestigate | Even as the protests against Apple’s workers mistreatment practice are surging incessantly, there are still thousands of Chinese job seekers who are lining up in front of the gates of Foxconn, the company’s major product manufacturer in China, hoping that they will be hired to work on iPhone 5 production.

Science Daily | Memories in our brains are maintained by connections between neurons called "synapses." But how do these synapses stay strong and keep memories alive for decades? Neuroscientists at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have discovered a major clue from a study in fruit flies: Hardy, self-copying clusters or oligomers of a synapse protein are an essential ingredient for the formation of long-term memory.

MSNBC | As of Friday (Jan. 20), the mysterious robotic X-37B spacecraft has been aloft for 321 days, significantly outlasting its stated mission design lifetime of 270 days. But it may stay up for even longer yet, experts say, particularly if the military views this space mission — the second ever for the hush-hush vehicle — as something of an endurance test.

Dunhill | Virtually indestructible, the dunhill Biometric Wallet will open only with touch of your fingerprint.
it can be linked via Bluetooth to the owner’s mobile phone – sounding an alarm if the two are separated by more than 5 metres! This provides a brilliant warning if either the phone or wallet is stolen or misplaced.

PC World | If you don't like the idea of hackers being able to communicate better, hacker activist Nick Farr said knowledge is the only motive of the project, which also includes the development of new electronics that can survive in space, and launch vehicles that can get them there.

Geet Friends | How did this happen?  In the year 2000, Paul Pantone was offered many millions of dollars to sell off his rights to GEET.  Paul was clearly threatened that there would be serious consequences to his future if he did not.

Just when you think they couldn’t surprise and delight, Anonymous & Antisec deliver… On the eve of Christmas LulzXmas News broke today of a massive hack by Antisec forces of whitehat security firm stratfor. As of this post, the stratfor.com site is unavailable but those interested can view a mirror of the deface. Anonymous hackers posted this youtube video at the top of the defaced page:

Instructables | Finally you can do something with that old LCD monitor you have in the garage.  You can turn it into a privacy monitor! It looks all white to everybody except you, because you are wearing "magic" glasses!  All you really have to have is a pair of old glasses, x-acto knife or a box cutter and some solvent (paint thinner)

American Association for the Advancement of Science | Diederik Stapel was suspended from his position at Tilburg University in the Netherlands in September after three junior researchers reported that they suspected scientific misconduct in his work. Soon after being confronted with the accusations, Stapel reportedly told university officials that some of his papers contained falsified data.

Torrent Freak | A Spanish judge came to an interesting conclusion in a case dealing with a seller of pirated copies. According to the judge the defendant doesn’t have to pay compensation to the rightsholders because it is not possible to determine to what extent piracy actually decreases sales. On the contrary, the judge suggests that piracy may even boost sales.

Extra Torrent | A few days ago, Ofcom, an independent regulator and competition authority for the communications industries of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, made an announcement, saying that starting with summer 2013 online file-sharers alleged of unauthorized file-sharing of copyrighted content will start receiving notification letters.
 

BBC | US space agency Nasa has funded a study of "tractor beams" to gather samples for analysis in future missions.  The $100,000 (£63,000) award will be used to examine three laser-based approaches to do what has until now been the stuff of science fiction.

WIRED | Against all the odds, Andrea Rossi's E-Cat cold fusion power plant passed its biggest test yesterday, producing an average of 470 kilowatts for more than five hours. (A technical glitch prevented it from achieving a megawatt as originally planned). The demonstration was monitored closely by engineers from Rossi's mysterious US customer, which was evidently satisfied and paid up.

The Washington Times | Word has leaked out that in its new budget, the Obama administration intends to terminate NASA’s planetary exploration program. The Mars Science Lab Curiosity, being readied on the pad, will be launched, as will the nearly completed small MAVEN orbiter scheduled for 2013, but that will be it. No further missions to anywhere are planned.

Physorg | A navigation system making use of something called "True3D" technology has won the top prize in this year's European Satellite Navigation Competition in Munich, Germany. The ESNC is an international innovation contest that awards the best ideas for applications in satellite navigation. There were 401 proposals from almost 50 countries

Torrent Freak | The Helsinki District Court has ordered the Finnish ISP Elisa to block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay. The ISP has to block the domain names and IP-addresses of the world’s most-visited torrent site before the end of next month or face a 100,000 euro fine. Elisa described the court order as vague and ineffective, and has announced that it will appeal the decision.

The Register | "Today we face a series of challenges at the intersection of human rights, connected technologies, business, and government. It's a busy intersection – and a lot of people want to put up traffic lights," said US Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner, speaking at the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Wired | Here's how hard drives work at the moment. The spinning magnetic platters are covered in randomly distributed nanoscopic grains. These work in disorganised clumps of tens to form one bit of data. The latest drive models hold up to 500 gigabits of data to every square inch.

Torrent Freak | New data from the largest ever survey among file-sharers shows that the majority of users on The Pirate Bay value their anonymity online, but only a relatively small group take measures to guarantee their privacy. The use of VPNs and proxies is most common among North American and African users, while people from Central and South America care the least about appearing anonymous online.

Examiner | A darknet website is a closed private network of computers used for file sharing, sometimes referred to as a hidden wiki. Darknet websites are part of the Invisible Web, sometimes called the Deep Web, containing content that is not part of the Surface Web, which is indexed by standard search engines.

ZD Net | This past week it was reported that the hacktivist collective known as Anonymous claimed credit for taking offline over 40 websites used for sharing pedophilia - and for exposing the names and identifying information of more than 1500 alleged pedophiles that had been using the sites.

Kickstarter | The aim of the GVCS is to lower the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing. Its a life-size lego set that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, or in the developing world.

Space.com | On Sept. 17, the 74-year old Holocaust survivor and kidney transplant recipient patiently waited in line with his wife as the doors opened to a large tent structure here at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center.

Wikipedia | Diesel was born in Paris, France in 1858 the second of three children of Theodor and Elise (Strobel) Diesel. His parents were [Bavarian] immigrants living in Paris. Theodor Diesel, a bookbinder by trade, left his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria, in 1848. He met his wife, a daughter of a Nuremberg merchant, in Paris in 1855 and became a leather goods manufacturer there.

Salon.com | An article at the moviemaking technology website Creative Cow reports that the three major manufacturers of motion picture film cameras — Aaton, ARRI and Panavision — have all ceased production of new cameras within the last year, and will only make digital movie cameras from now on.  As the article’s author, Debra Kaufman, poignantly puts it, “Someone, somewhere in the world is now holding the last film camera ever to roll off the line.”

Torrent Freak | Today, UK ISP BT and representatives from the MPA will appear at the High Court to thrash out the final stage of the ground-breaking web-blocking case against Newzbin2. But in a surprise last-minute move, a David and Goliath battle seems to be on the cards. A Newzbin2 user has stepped up to defend his site by intervening in the blocking process, and is reportedly already being bullied by his Hollywood opponents with threats of bankruptcy.

Extreme Tech | Oh graphene! The cheap, easy-to-manufacture one-atom-thick sheet of carbon can add yet another weird, fantastical, and possibly life-changing ability to its list of characteristics: it has an incredibly sensitive thermoelectric response to light. In layman’s terms: graphene, when struck by light of almost any wavelength, can produce an electric current.

University of Berkeley | Did you know that social networking sites like Facebook, Google+, and Twitter can track your visits to any web page that uses the familiar "Like", "Follow", or "+1" buttons, even if you do not actually click these buttons?

Physorg | CNTs have such unique properties, such as having the density of air but the strength of steel, that they have been extensively studied and put forward for numerous applications; however it is their exceptional ability to conduct heat and transfer it to surrounding areas that makes them an ideal material to exploit the so-called "mirage effect".

Physorg | In a letter published by the British science journal Nature, researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands reported they had identified the molecular mechanism by which the bugs do their fuel-trick.

Torrent Freak | Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has won its landmark court case against News-Service.com, one of the leading Usenet providers. The Amsterdam court ruled that the Usenet provider, which offers its network to Binverse and Usenext among others, has to delete all infringing content from its servers. This decision is similar to the one that effectively shut down the BitTorrent site Mininova, and it could mean the end of one of the leading providers of Usenet access.

Physorg | New analysis of data sent back by the SPICAM spectrometer on board ESA's Mars Express spacecraft has revealed for the first time that the planet's atmosphere is supersaturated with water vapour. This surprising discovery has major implications for understanding the Martian water cycle and the historical evolution of the atmosphere.

Electronic Frontier Foundation | Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a trio of data security and data breach notification bills. One of the bills, which was sponsored by Committee Chairman Senator Leahy, includes a crucial amendment [pdf] to clarify that it's not illegal under the notoriously vague Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to violate agreements like website terms of service or acceptable use policies.

Gizmodo | I just can't believe this is happening for real, but according to Professor Jack Gallant—UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the research published today in the journal Current Biology—"this is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery. We are opening a window into the movies in our minds."

Associated Press | One of the very pillars of physics and Einstein's theory of relativity - that nothing can go faster than the speed of light - was rocked Thursday by new findings from one of the world's foremost laboratories.

The Register | Researchers have discovered a serious weakness in virtually all websites protected by the secure sockets layer protocol that allows attackers to silently decrypt data that's passing between a webserver and an end-user browser.

Physorg | Used in Hollywood and the advertising industry to create exotic special effects, ferrofluids are seemingly magical materials that are both liquid and magnetic at once. In a study published today in Physical Review B, Yale electrical engineering professor Hur Koser and colleagues from the University of Georgia and Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrate for the first time an approach that allows ferrofluids to be pumped by magnetic fields alone. The invention could lead to new applications for this mysterious material.

Wired | A pair of buildings on Plantation Drive sits just past the tractor-supply store, right in front of the barn belonging to the local women's college. From the street, the cream-colored structures don't look like much more than typical office buildings; only a wire fence distinguishes them from their neighbors. Inside, however, is a laboratory and fabrication facility where engineers produce one of the U.S. military's most important advantages over its foes: the ability to see in the dark, when others are all but blind.

Video: Vibration speaker is a magic audio frequency fixture. It is quite different from the traditional one which base on electromagnetic coils.  It makes any hard surface play euphonious musical notes, such as wood, glass, floor, metal surface, etc. You can hear various materials around you, which play different music quality in different sides, and you will enjoy yourself in the freedom of music. The new sound principle will bring a new musical life style to you.

BBC | A new polymer jelly could be the next big step forward for lithium batteries.  The jelly replaces the volatile and hazardous liquid electrolyte currently used in most lithium batteries.  Researchers from the University of Leeds hope their development leads to smaller, cheaper and safer gadgets.  Once on the market, the lithium jelly batteries could allow lighter laptop computers, and more efficient electric cars.