The stunning metallic green sheen of the jewelled beetle
is produced by microscopic cells in its exoskeleton. Researchers reporting in the journal Science have revealed that, with no green pigments, these structures make the beetle appear iridescent green. These cells, they said, were almost identical to hi-tech liquid crystals
News Limited has decided to replace its web publishing system, Open Text-owned Vignette, with rival FatWire. Vignette will be replaced over the next few months, according to sources. Vignette has been acquired by Open Text, which announced the completion of the acquisition yesterday. It promised to continue supporting Vignette products and the company’s install base
Internet service provider Karoo, based in Hull, has changed its policy of suspending the service of users suspected of copyright violations. The about face was made following a BBC story outlining the firm’s practice. Karoo issued a statement on Friday, saying that it has been exceeding the expectations of copyright owners
The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal. Past research has shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals
Bats use sonar to navigate and hunt. Many have been killed by wind turbines, however, which their sonar doesn’t seem to recognise as a danger. Surprisingly, radar signals could help keep bats away from wind turbines, scientists have now discovered
Today is a big day in Zappos history. This morning, our board approved and we signed what’s known as a ‘definitive agreement’, in which all of the existing shareholders and investors of Zappos (there are over 100) will be exchanging their Zappos stock for Amazon stock. Once the exchange is done, Amazon will become the only shareholder of Zappos stock. Over the next few days, you will probably read headlines that say ‘Amazon acquires Zappos’ or ‘Zappos sells to Amazon’. While those headlines are technically correct, they don’t really properly convey the spirit of the transaction. (I personally would prefer the headline ‘Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree…‘)
By adding fluorescent dyes to DNA and then spinning the DNA strands into nanofibres, researchers at the University of Connecticut have made a new material that emits bright white light. The material absorbs energy from ultraviolet light and gives off different colours of light — from blue to orange to white — depending on the proportions of dye it contains
The attorney general in Brussels has concluded a three year investigation into the money trails at the the local music royalty collecting agency SABAM. The attorney general concluded that the copyright group is not paying the artists the money owed to them, and will prosecute five managers for forgery of documents and abuse of trust
Google has begun operating a data centre in Belgium that has no chillers to support its cooling systems, a strategy that will improve its energy efficiency while making local weather forecasting a larger factor in its data centre management
New Technology to Make Digital Data Self-Destruct
A group of computer scientists at the University of Washington has developed a way to make electronic messages self destruct
after a certain period of time, like messages in sand lost to the surf. The researchers said they think the new software, called Vanish, which requires encrypting messages, will be needed more and more as personal and business information is stored not on personal computers, but on centralised machines, or servers
The identities of more than four million Britons are being offered for sale on the internet. Highly sensitive financial information, including credit card details, bank account numbers, telephone numbers and even PINs are available to the highest bidder. At least a quarter of a million British bank and credit card accounts have been hacked into by cybercriminals, exposing consumers to huge financial losses
A new ultrasound device, used in conjunction with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), allows neurosurgeons to precisely burn out small pieces of malfunctioning brain tissue without cutting the skin or opening the skull. A preliminary study from Switzerland involving nine patients with chronic pain shows that the technology can be used safely in humans. The researchers now aim to test it in patients with other disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease
The notorious Kazaa peer-to-peer file sharing service is back from the dead three years after it was shut down by the music industry in a $150 million lawsuit. But the software looks entirely different this time around, with users forced to pay for their music instead of trading tracks illegally
A Texas startup plans to build a data centre powered by energy from huge wind farms in the Texas panhandle and the Gulf of Mexico. Baryonyx Corp.has been awarded three wind energy leases for 8,000 acres onshore in Dallam County, Texas and another 38,000 acres in the Gulf of Mexico, the company said. Baryonyx has also acquired 8 acres of land in Stratford, Texas for its data center project
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, Google Earth 5.0 now incorporates the landscape and terrain of our closest and dearest celestial relative, the Moon. Earth’s moon, often known as the Moon, or simply just Moon
for short, is the rocky, cooler companion to the star of our local cosmic show, the Sun. And if you’re familiar with Google Earth 5.0, you’ll know what to expect of its appearance within this update
The blog of Anthony Wesley, an Australian amateur astronomer, has what may be the first photos of a recent comet or asteroid impact on Jupiter, near the south pole. These photos are 11 hours old. The ones at the bottom of the page show three small dark spots in addition to the main dark mark. The Bad Astronomy blog picked up the story a few hours later — but cautions that what we’re seeing may not be an impact event
The detailed service records of 250,000 medieval soldiers — including archers who served with Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt — have gone online. The database of those who fought in the Hundred Years War reveals salaries, sickness records and who was knighted. The full profiles of soldiers from 1369 to 1453 will allow researchers to piece together details of their lives
In response to rumours circulating the internet about a flesh eating
robot project, Cyclone Power Technologies Inc and Robotic Technology Inc would like to set the record straight: This robot is strictly vegetarian. RTI’s patent pending robotic system will be able to find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment. Despite the far-reaching reports that this includes human bodies
, the public can be assured that the engine Cyclone has developed to power the EATR runs on fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings and wood chips — small, plant-based items for which RTI’s robotic technology is designed to forage. Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions, and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI
They sometimes call national security the third rail of politics. Touch it and, politically, you’re dead. The cliché doesn’t seem far off the mark after reading Mark Klein’s new book, Wiring up the Big Brother Machine … and Fighting It. It’s an account of his experiences as the whistleblower who exposed a secret room at a Folsom Street facility in San Francisco that was apparently used to monitor the Internet communications of ordinary Americans
A new paper by Montreal researchers is providing evidence that the gene variants found in some non-cancerous tissues may differ from those present in blood samples from the same individual. The researchers, who were studying a condition called abdominal aortic aneurysm, or AAA, found that SNPs in a gene called BAK1 were different in aortic tissue than in blood samples, even in samples taken from the same individuals
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