Australia Post will no longer be accepting packages that contain lithium batteries by air. The batteries have been classified as dangerous, leading the International Civil Aviation Organisation to enact more stringent controls. This follows on the exploding laptop batteries debacle of 2006, prompting a recall, and further recalls in 2008 and 2009. Lithium batteries may still be sent by road, but only if they are lithium-ion and rated for 2 grams, 100-Watt-hours or under. Most devices should fall under this requirement, although in the
official document
(PDF) Australia Post mentions that Equipment will not be safe to send if it contains more than two batteries/four cells — six-cell batteries being common in laptops
eBay is working on software to replace the guts of Skype but is worried that it may not succeed, may lose a court battle with Skype’s founders over rights to the core technology and may need to do something drastic in the next few years. The company said in a regulatory filing yesterday that if it fails in both the legal and technical avenues it’s pursuing then continued operation of Skype’s business as currently conducted would likely not be possible
In a daring experiment in Europe, scientists used mosquitoes as flying needles to deliver a vaccine
of live malaria parasites through their bites. The results were astounding: Everyone in the vaccine group acquired immunity to malaria; everyone in a non-vaccinated comparison group did not, and developed malaria when exposed to the parasites later
The music industry knows how to hang out itself, even if it lacks the correct length pf rope. EMI, certainly reeling from declining physical album sales like the other Big 4 record labels, is now apparently telling independent album retailers that it will no longer sell them CDs
New software developed at the Georgia Institute for Technology can identify spam before it hits the mail server. The system, known as SNARE (Spatio-temporal Network-level Automatic Reputation Engine), scores each incoming e-mail based on a variety of new criteria that can be gleaned from a single packet of data. The researchers involved say the automated system puts less of a strain on the network and minimizes the need for human intervention while achieving the same accuracy as traditional spam filters
An internet filter installed by the education department gave students access to pornographic material — but blocked educational sites. One site a Year 10 student opened while searching for a type of bird contained graphic sexual material and was only barred on Monday after inquiries from The Daily Telegraph. George Cochrane said his school-aged son and daughter, who study by distance education from their farm in Grenfell, were horrified by the sites they could access. Other educational sites and harmless web pages for the local member of parliament — and even Education Minister Verity Firth’s own site — have been blocked by the filter
Getting ordinary plastic bags to rot away like banana peels would be an environmental dream come true. After all, we produce 500 billion a year worldwide and they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. They take up space in landfills, litter our streets and parks, pollute the oceans and kill the animals that eat them. Now a Waterloo teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster — in three months, he figures. Daniel Burd’s project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found a practical way to help the environment
Microsoft and Yahoo have reached an agreement on a search and advertising deal, with an announcement expected as soon as today, according to US media reports. The deal, which follows Microsoft’s unsuccessful bid to buy Yahoo’s search business for $1bn (£610m) last year, is not thought to involve any upfront payment. Instead, as previous speculation had suggested, it will focus on a revenue-sharing deal between the two companies. According to reports, Bing, Microsoft’s newly launched search engine, will become Yahoo’s default search service
With anti-piracy outfits warning those who share copyrighted content and ISPs threatening to pull the plug on alleged offenders, many file-sharers have decided to protect themselves by going anonymous. To accommodate this growing demand, ItsHidden is now offering a free VPN targeted at those who want to protect their privacy online
The same blue food dye found in M&Ms and Gatorade could be used to reduce damage caused by spine injuries, offering a better chance of recovery, according to new research. Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center found that when they injected the compound Brilliant Blue G (BBG) into rats suffering spinal cord injuries, the rodents were able to walk again, albeit with a limp. The only side effect was that the treated mice temporarily turned blue
Rocket-driven spacecraft normally use strong, heavy-metal mountings to hold their fuel tanks in place within the fuselage. But there may be a better way. Burt Rutan, the aerospace pioneer whose firm Scaled Composites is designing civilian suborbital spacecraft for Virgin Galactic, is using an alternative technique to secure the fuel tanks in order to keep the weight of the space plane down. Rutan says the use of heavy mountings can be avoided completely by careful design of the tank and fuselage. His idea, described in a US patent granted last month, is to glue the fuel tanks to the inside of the craft
A major network technology vendor has revealed the potential for Labor’s $43 billion national broadband network to radically reshape the internet and pay-TV industries. Ericsson Australia and New Zealand multimedia strategy chief Kursten Leins said the network was likely to contain the intelligence and design that would allow the NBN company to let IPTV players bypass internet service providers and bolt directly on to the fibre access network. That would remove a crucial economic obstacle to the success of IPTV — the ISP broadband tariffs that sit between IPTV players and consumers
There’s a growing chorus of calls to send astronauts to Mars rather than the moon, but critics point out that such trips would be long and gruelling, taking about six months to reach the Red Planet. But now, researchers are testing a powerful new ion engine that could one day shorten the journey to just 39 days. Traditional rockets burn chemical fuel to produce thrust. Most of that fuel is used up in the initial push off the Earth’s surface, so the rockets tend to coast most of the time they’re in space. Ion engines, on the other hand, accelerate electrically charged atoms, or ions, through an electric field, thereby pushing the spacecraft in the opposite direction. They provide much less thrust at a given moment than do chemical rockets, which means they can’t break free of the Earth’s gravity on their own
Chicago resident Amanda Bonnen sent a 16-word tweet on Twitter about mould in her apartment, and now the landlord has sued for $50,000. A spokesperson for the landlord said, We’re a sue first, ask questions later
organisation. Horizon wants Bonnen to pay $3,125 per word for publishing false and defamatory information on Twitter
Transparent aluminium, a sci-fi material brought to 20th century Earth by the crew of The Enterprise in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, turns out to exist after all — if you see in X-rays. To create this exotic state of matter, researchers at the FLASH facility in Hamburg, Germany, took a thin piece of aluminium foil and blasted it with an X-ray laser that can generate about 10 million gigawatts of power per square centimetre. At standard temperature and pressure, solid aluminium is a lattice of ions, with a sea of free electrons in between. The FLASH beam had enough energy to knock an electron out of each ion and set it free, while the photon got absorbed in the process
Google has sold its once-coveted 5% stake in AOL to Time Warner for $283 million, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing made public this week, taking a $717 million loss on the $1 billion Google paid for the AOL share in 2005. The transaction was completed earlier this month and reported in the SEC filing, which also disclosed additional details on AOL’s finances. The Time Warner unit had a loss of $1.53 billion in 2008, but reported a profit of nearly $83 million in the first quarter of 2009
For nearly three months, malware planted by hackers on servers operated by Network Solutions intercepted more than 573,000 credit and debt card numbers used to services rendered by the domain registration and hosting service provide
A eucalyptus-like tree that grows in New Zealand is still defending itself from a giant bird that died out about 500 years ago. The lancewood tree changes its appearance twice in its lifetime — an adaptation, a new study suggests, that prevented it from being eaten by flightless moas. As a seedling, the lancewood tree (Pseudopanax crassifolius) sprouts small, brown, blotchy leaves. Then, as a sapling, its leaves grow into footlong spears with tiny barbs along the edge. Finally, the adult lancewood, which can reach a height of 20 meters, sports rounded, nondescript green leaves. Many scientists think that the tree evolved these metamorphoses to avoid moas, the main herbivores on the islands and a relative of emus and ostriches that humans hunted to extinction
More than half of the Internet service providers (ISPs) taking part in the Federal Government’s ISP filtering trial have reported minimal speed disruptions or technology problems. Of the nine participating ISPs, iPrimus, Netforce, Webshield, Nelson Bay Online and OMNIconnect told ARN they had seen no slowdowns in Internet speeds or problems with the filtering solutions in place. Of the remaining four ISPs, Tech2U and Highway1 were unable to respond by time of publication while Unwired and Optus refused to comment
Russia’s most powerful business lobby moved to clamp down on Skype and its peers this week, telling lawmakers that the Internet phone services are a threat to Russian businesses and to national security. In partnership with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s political party, the lobby created a working group to draft legal safeguards against what they said were the risks of Skype and other Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone services
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