Schoolboy Hibiki Kono climbs a sheer brick wall after turning himself into Spiderman — with the help of two £14.98 Tesco Value vacuum cleaners. Clever Hibiki, 13, made his incredible climbing machine in school technology lessons. The lad, who is a big fan of the superhero, spent five months designing and making the gadget. He attached two giant suckerpads to the 1,400-watt cleaners — and uses the vacuum suction to grip the wall and support his weight
Crystal skulls have long had a fringe following, and the most famous of them is one named for the explorer-author Frederick A Mitchell-Hedges. Mitchell-Hedges claimed to have found the skull somewhere in Central America in the 1930s, but his adopted daughter Anna later said she found it under a fallen altar or inside a pyramid at the Maya site of Lubaantún in British Honduras (now Belize) some time in the 1920s. Neither of their contradictory accounts is true. In fact, like all the other crystal skulls thus far examined, it is a modern creation, despite its nearly mythical place in the minds of devotees
Australia’s peak science body stands to reap more than $1 billion from its lucrative Wi-Fi patent after already netting about $250 million from the world’s biggest technology companies, an intellectual property lawyer says. The CSIRO has spent years battling 14 technology giants including Dell, HP, Microsoft, Intel, Nintendo and Toshiba for royalties and made a major breakthrough in April last year when the companies opted to avoid a jury hearing and settle for an estimated $250 million. Now, the organisation is bringing the fight to the top three US mobile carriers in a new suit targeting Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile. It argues they have been selling devices that infringe its patents
This week Ottawa will try once again to update Canada’s copyright law that Industry Minister Tony Clement says has holes big enough to drive a Mack truck through
. The Copyright Act of Canada has not had a significant rewrite since 1988, at a time when the Internet was still in its infancy and an iPad was just a twinkle in some inventor’s eye. The trick — one the Conservatives and Liberals before them couldn’t master — is to find a balance between right of consumers’ and the rights of the artists or creators to not have their work ripped off
Is Google responsible for giving out bad directions through its Google Maps service? We’re about to find out. After Googling walking directions for a trip in Park City, Utah, Lauren Rosenberg claims she was led onto a busy highway, where she was struck by a vehicle. She’s now suing Google for damages
Ten engineering students from Britain hope to tackle the Pan-American Highway — all 15,000 miles of it — in the last thing you’d think to do it in: an electric car. Not just any electric car, mind you, but one originally designed for racing. Racing Green Endurance, which consists entirely of students at Imperial College London, has converted a Radical SR8 to battery electric power. As if that weren’t impressive enough, they plan to spend three months driving it from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Tierra Del Fuego to show people that EVs can be quick, they can be cool and they can go the distance
An Australian Aboriginal rock art may depict a giant bird that is thought to have become extinct some 40,000 years ago, thereby making it the oldest rock painting on the island continent. The red ochre drawing was first discovered two years ago, but archaeologists were only able to confirm the finding two weeks ago, when they first visited the remote site on the Arnhem Land plateau in north Australia
Government agencies are exposing taxpayers to fraud through gaps in their control and reporting of embezzlement, identity theft, leaks and privacy breaches. One in seven federal departments and agencies does not have a fraud-control plan, the Australian National Audit Office discovered in a joint investigation with the Australian Institute of Criminology
The Ebola virus first emerged in 1976, striking fear with the uncontrollable bleeding it causes and mortality rates up to 90 percent. Ever since then, scientists have been struggling to find a way to treat the infection or protect against it. A team led by Thomas Geisbert of Boston University has used an experimental drug to protect monkeys from death after injecting them with massive doses of the most lethal strain of Ebola. We were stunned,
Geisbert says. I’ve been working with this virus for my whole career — 23 or 24 years — and we’ve had some mild successes where maybe we could go up to 50 percent protection,
he said. But I was really shocked that we got complete protection
Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper Dennis Hopper has died at the age of 74 following a battle with prostate cancer. Known for such cult classics as Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now and Blue Velvet, Hopper embodied the image of the Hollywood icon. Hopper died on Saturday morning surrounded by friends and family at his home in Venice, California
Thunderbird has a little problem about writing mail in HTML or TEXT format. Once you configured HTML or TEXT format, you cannot switch between them on the fly. So, this is quite nice tip if you want to choose on the fly if write an HTML or TEXT mail. If you would like to send in HTML format, hold the SHIFT key while pressing the REPLY TO button (or the WRITE NEW MAIL one). This will allow you to compose one HTML mail even if you configured your THUNDERBIRD to compose always in TEXT format — via San Baldo
Blizzard founder, Frank Pearce reckons that fighting piracy with DRM is a losing battle. His company — which is responsible for the biggest videogame of all time, the worryingly-addictive online fantasy role player World of Warcraft — is to release Starcraft 2 on 27 July and Pearce has told Videogamer that the title won’t be hobbled with the kind of crazy copy protection schemes which have made Ubisoft very unpopular in gaming circles of late
Three men are facing federal fraud charges for allegedly raking in more than US$100 million while running an illegal scareware
business that tricked victims into installing bogus software. Two of the men, Bjorn Sundin and Shaileshkumar Jain, operated an antivirus company called Innovative Marketing, which sold products such as WinFixer, Antivirus 2008, Malware Alarm and VirusRemover 2008. The third man charged, James Reno, ran Byte Hosting Internet Services, the company that operated Innovative Marketing’s call centres
The National Identity Card scheme will be abolished within 100 days with all cards becoming invalid, Home Secretary Theresa May has said. Legislation to axe the scheme will be the first put before parliament by the new government — with a target of it becoming law by August
Warner Bros has been sued by a German technology firm which claims the movie and television production company pirated its anti-piracy technology. German firm Medien Patent Verwaltung claims that in 2003, it revealed a new kind of anti-piracy technology to Warner Bros that marks films with specific codes so pirated copies can be traced back to their theaters of origin. But like a great, hilariously-ironic DRM Ouroborus, the company claims that Warner began using the system throughout Europe in 2004 but hasn’t actually paid a dime for it
The UK’s Times and Sunday Times are putting up search walls in addition to pay walls. The papers, which plan to start charging users for access to their newly redesigned web sites in late June, will prevent Google and other search engines from linking to their stories. Although they are not the first papers to erect pay barriers around their content, the papers are going a step further by making most of their site invisible to Google’s web crawler. Except for their home pages, no stories will show up on Google
A British scientist claims to have become the first human to be infected by a computer virus, in an experiment he says has important implications for the future of implantable technology. Dr Mark Gasson from the University of Reading infected a computer chip which was then implanted in his hand with the virus and then transmitted it to a PC to prove that malware can move between human and computer
One of the main advantages of OLED is that it can be flexible — so flexible, in fact, that it can be wrapped around a pencil. Taking 2007’s .3mm prototype Sony’s made a new one just 80μm-thick. That’s about ten times the size of a red blood cell, or just a tiny bit thinner than a single hair. The whole OLED measures 4.1-inches in size, and has a 432 x 240 resolution and a contrast ratio of under 1,000:1. It’s another world first, boasting that it’s the first time an OLED panel can still stream video while being rolled up (around a cylinder with a 4mm radius) and stretched
The lead scientists of a Japanese research team said that they have found a material that could be used to make a lower-price super disc with data storage capacity thousands of times greater than a DVD. According to Shin-ichi Ohkoshi, chemistry professor at the University of Tokyo, the material transforms from a black-colour metal state that conducts electricity into a brown semiconductor when hit by light. The material can switch back and forth between the metal and semiconductor states at room temperature when exposed to light, creating an effective on-off function for data storage. The material is made from a new crystal form of titanium oxide
An Australian Federal Police (AFP) operation to rescue a hacked database of 60,000 domain names’ usernames and passwords and 13,000 credit card numbers — to use as evidence — was almost foiled when the hackers were tipped off and went into a deletion frenzy
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