Michelle Khine couldn’t afford the $100,000 fabrication gear to make micro-fluidic chips needed for chip-based diagnostic tests. She turned to Shrinky Dinks and found a new way to solve the problem — via Boing Boing
An official with Brazil’s electricity regulator has confirmed that large scale blackouts in 2005 and 2007 were caused by people hacking into the computers that control the electricity grid
Designed to scan the heavens thousands to billions of light-years beyond the solar system for gamma rays, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has also picked up a shocking vibe from Earth. During its first 14 months of operation, the flying observatory has detected 17 gamma-ray flashes associated with terrestrial storms — and some of those flashes have contained a surprising signature of anti-matter
Norwegian ISP Telenor doesn’t have to block access to file-sharing site The Pirate Bay, according to a ruling from the district court for Asker and Bæ?¶rum on Friday. The entertainment industry has been trying to get Telenor to block The Pirate Bay since February, when it sent a warning letter to the operator. But Telenor has maintained that there is no legal basis for any ISP to act in the interests of digital intellectual-property rights holders by blocking individual web sites, and now the district court has sided with that notion
The technology relies on recognising a pheromone — or scent signal — produced in sweat when a person is scared. Researchers hope the fear detector will make it possible to identify individuals at check points who are up to no good. Terrorists with murder in mind, drug smugglers, or criminals on the run are likely to be very fearful of being discovered. However, calm they might appear on the surface, their bodies could give them away
It has been many weeks since the popular semi-private BitTorrent tracker Demonoid went offline. The site’s owner claimed the downtime was due to hardware issues and warned of the loss of both torrents and user data. Today, however, there is hope on the horizon, as Demonoid’s tracker is now up and running again
The newly formed Australian Pirate Party came out swinging yesterday with a release criticising the international discussions currently being held in Korea to cement an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. These discussions had their roots back in 2006 when the US and Japan floated the idea of a new treaty to help build joint intellectual property rules to fight counterfeiting and piracy. June 2008 saw Australia included along with other countries
For the last decade or so, Internet service providers have been dealing with requests to block access to pornographic or copyright-infringing Web sites, or in China, ones that dare to criticise the government. Now a US House of Representatives bill is taking the unusual step of requiring Internet providers to block access to online financial scams that fraudulently invoke the Securities Investor Protection Corporation — or face fines and federal court injunctions. The House Financial Services Committee approved the legislation on Wednesday by a 41 to 28 vote
An ambitious plan to map the genomes of 10,000 vertebrates has been unveiled, which could change the way we treat disease, protect ecosystems and understand human development. Scientists say the proposed genomic zoo
is the largest study of its kind ever attempted and aims to answer questions about vertebrate evolution and the role of genes
European Internet users accused of illicit file-sharing will not be disconnected on the whims of the entertainment industries. After an all night session European Union lawmakers agreed on a compromise text. Those accused will be entitled to a fair and impartial
procedure, which will include the right to be heard
PayPal used its inaugural PayPal X Innovate 2009 conference in San Francisco to officially announce the PayPal X program to release APIs allowing developers to integrate PayPal seamlessly into third-party applications
Scientists have engineered a more intelligent rat, with three times the memory length of today’s smartest rats. Reseachers bred transgenic over-expression of the NR2B gene, which increased communication between the rat’s memory synapses. Activating a crucial brain receptor for just a fraction of a second longer produces a dramatic effect on memory, as proven by the rat’s longer memories of the path through a maze — via Slashdot
An Iron Age treasure hoard unearthed by a metal-detecting amateur has been unveiled. The four gold Iron Age neck ornaments, or torcs, date from between the 1st and 3rd Century BC and are said to be worth an estimated £1m. They were discovered in September by first-time
metal-detector enthusiast David Booth in a field in Stirlingshire. The find is the most important hoard of Iron Age gold in Scotland to date
The winner of this year’s Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger, has labelled the Federal Government’s asylum-seeker policy illegal and immoral
NASA technology that allows the Hubble telescope to focus on distant stars now offers LASIK eye surgery patients customised options for fine-tuned night vision, superior image contrast and sight even beyond 20/20. Approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2001, wavefront technology is the newest LASIK innovation that ophthalmologists are using not only to correct eyesight, but also to peer into the physical structure of patients’ eyes and locate the exact sources of their vision problems
Internet Explorer 6 has finally been surpassed by Firefox according to the latest worldwide market share numbers
Visa is a step closer to ending the signature scrawl for retail purchases, with all new credit cards to contain a computer chip designed for use with a PIN for greater security from January. Visa general manager Chris Clark said the aim was to move entirely to chip and PIN technology, with signatures no longer accepted from April 2013
Toyota has created two flower species that absorb nitrogen oxides and take heat out of the atmosphere. The flowers, derivatives of the cherry sage plant and the gardenia, were specially developed for the grounds of Toyota’s Prius plant in Toyota City, Japan. The sage derivative’s leaves have unique characteristics that absorb harmful gases, while the gardenia’s leaves create water vapour in the air, reducing the surface temperature of the factory surrounds and, therefore, reducing the energy needed for cooling, in turn producing less carbon dioxide
NSW police uploaded their first video exclusive — of a violent attack on a bus driver — to thousands of Twitter users. The Twitter experiment follows police posting a video of an assault on YouTube. It has become one of the 50 most viewed videos in Australia
Ben Sparrow and Joshua Zoshi met at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, while completing their MBAs. Their company, Saltworks Technologies, has set up a test plant beside the sea in Vancouver and will open for business in November. Existing desalination plants work in one of two ways. Some distil seawater by heating it up to evaporate part of it. They then condense the vapour — a process that requires electricity. The other plants use reverse osmosis. This employs high-pressure pumps to force the water from brine through a membrane that is impermeable to salt. That, too, needs electricity. Even the best reverse-osmosis plants require 3.7 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy to produce 1,000 litres of drinking water. Mr Sparrow and Mr Zoshi reckon they can produce that much fresh water with less than 1 kWh of electricity, and no other paid-for source of power is needed. Their process is fuelled by concentration gradients of salinity between different vessels of brine. These different salinities are brought about by evaporation
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