A 12 million digit prime number, the largest such number ever discovered, has landed a voluntary math research group a $100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The number known as a Mersenne prime, is the 45th known Mersenne prime, written shorthand as 2 to the power of 43,112,609, minus 1. A Mersenne number is a positive integer that is one less than a power of two, the group stated
In the hope of helping oncologists remove every piece of tumour tissue during surgery, researchers are developing new imaging tools that work in real time in the operating room. European researchers have now demonstrated that a chemical analysis instrument called a mass spectrometer can be coupled with an electroscalpel to create a molecular profile of tissue during surgery. The researchers have shown that the method can be used to map out different tissue types and distinguish cancerous tissue. The device will begin clinical trials next month
By putting sensors in the brains of mice as they ran through a Quake-derived virtual reality, scientists have found a way to study neurological activity in moving animals. The setup allows for real-time, almost-real-motion tracking of single neurons. That feat has eluded researchers who have a fuzzy, general understanding of brain systems, but little knowledge of how individual cells actually work. They hope that cell-level details will make sense of motion, cognition and other complex mental functions
Australia’s peak science body has earned a $200 million windfall — and counting — from its long-running patent battles with the world’s biggest computer companies. The CSIRO yesterday delivered its best results in five years, recording a surplus of $122 million in the 2009 financial year — more than twice the size of last year’s. It had been budgeting for a $34.2 million loss. Despite the economic downturn, the CSIRO earned $634.8 million in royalties from its own inventions — the largest amount it has ever recorded and a 74 per cent increase on just two years ago. Much of this success relates to a patent granted to it in 1996 that the CSIRO argues is essential for setting up wireless networks. It claims the technology is used in more than 800 million devices right now
Finland’s Ministry of Transport and Communications has made 1-megabit broadband Web access a legal right. According to the report, every person in Finland (a little over 5 million people, according to a 2009 estimate) will have the right of access to a 1Mb broadband connection starting in July. And they may ultimately gain the right to a 100Mb broadband connection. Just more than a year ago, Finland said it would make a 100Mb broadband connection a legal right by the end of 2015. Wednesday’s announcement is considered an intermediate step
Researchers have discovered a magnetic equivalent to electricity: single magnetic charges that can behave and interact like electrical ones. The work is the first to make use of the magnetic monopoles that exist in special crystals known as spin ice. The phenomenon, dubbed magnetricity
, could be used in magnetic storage or in computing
The Guardian newspaper was forbidden by a judge from reporting a question in UK parliament. The press’s freedom to do so has been fought for since at least 1688 and fully acknowledged since the 19th century. At issue was a matter of public record — but the country’s libel laws meant that the newspaper could not inform the public of what parliament was up to. The question concerned the oil trading company Trafigura, the toxic waste scandal they are involved in, and their generous use of libel lawyers to silence those who would report on the whole thing. After tweeters and bloggers shouted about Trafigura all over the Internet, the company’s lawyers agreed to drop the gag request — via Slashdot
Last night, a routine maintenance of Sweden’s top-level domain .se went seriously wrong, introducing an error that made DNS lookups for all .se domain names start failing. The entire Swedish Internet effectively stopped working at this point. Swedish (.se) web sites could not be reached, email to Swedish domain names stopped working, and for many these problems persist still
An international expert on ATM card skimming gangs has warned Australia is seen as a soft target because of large withdrawal limits and old ATM technology. Chief inspector Elvis Tudose, from the Romanian police, delivered the warning at the National Identity Crime Symposium being held on the Gold Coast yesterday. Inspector Tudose told reporters international criminals were willing to take the risk of being caught because the massive profits far outweigh any punishment a first offender is likely to be given in Australia
British sci-fi author Charles Stross has confessed that he has long hated the Star Trek franchise for its relegation of technology as irrelevant to plot and character development — and the same goes for similar shows such as Babylon Five. The problem, according to Stross, is that as Battlestar Galactica creator Ron Moore has described in a recent speech, the writers of Star Trek would simply insert
technology or science into the script whenever needed, without any real regard to its significance; then they’d have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later
— via Slashdot
For the past month, some Mac OS X users have been reporting their personal data missing after logging into their guest accounts, and Apple now says it’s working on finding a fix
Unlucky T-Mobile Sidekick owners lost their contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists and photos this weekend when Microsoft subsidiary Danger suffered a technical glitch. Not all T-Mobile Sidekick owners were impacted, and the actual extent of the data loss is unclear. However, those affected have little hope of recovering lost data, according to Microsoft
A spider that dines almost exclusively on plants has been described by scientists. It is the first-known predominantly vegetarian spider; all of the other known 40,000 spider species are thought to be mainly carnivorous. Bagheera kiplingi, which is found in Central America and Mexico, bucks the meat-eating trend by feasting on acacia plants
Experts believe the device, which is swallowed by the patient and controlled by doctors using a wireless connection, could transform the difficult and invasive process of diagnosing serious conditions. The pill, which contains a tiny camera, is also fitted with tiny legs that can be activated remotely once it is inside the colon or intestine. The legs protrude outwards and are movable in order to make device to crawl
inside the patient like a spider. It can be moved back and forth, giving doctors more flexibility during the examination
Since the financial crisis, Iceland has been forced to retreat back from high octane bubble living to nature. Fortunately, there is a lot of that nature to retreat to. It is a breathtaking world of volcanoes, endless prairies and ethereal winter landscapes. Not, you might think, the most obvious place to stick millions of the world’s computer servers which are, for all their uses, rather less attractive. But the country now wants exactly that — to become home to the world’s computing power. Behind all the large internet companies lurk massive and ever growing data centres chock full of servers churning away. Google for instance is thought to have around a million of the things, but even less IT intensive operations, banks for example, need hundreds of thousands of servers to store all their data
Australian Kindle users will have to pay at least 20 per cent more than Americans for books on the Amazon e-book readers and the local publishing industry has expressed serious reservations about supporting the gizmo
When Jules Verne wrote about a gigantic gun that could be used to launch people into space in the 19th century, no one expected it to become a reality. Now physicist John Hunter has outlined the design of such a gun that he says could slash the cost of putting cargo into orbit. The gun is based on a smaller device Hunter helped to build in the 1990s while at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. With a barrel 47 metres long, it used compressed hydrogen gas to fire projectiles weighing a few kilograms at speeds of up to 3 kilometres per second
The principle behind a novel form of spacecraft propulsion could be tested at the world’s most powerful particle accelerator
The US House of Representatives has taken its last mainframe offline, signaling the end of a computing era in Washington, DC. The last mainframe supposedly enjoyed quasi-celebrity status
within the House data center, having spent 12 years keeping the House’s inventory control records and financial management data, among other tasks. But it was time for a change, with the House spending $30,000 a year to power the mainframe and another $700,000 each year for maintenance and support
Led by Elena Rozhkova, scientists from the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago’s Brain Tumour Centre have developed the first nanoparticles that seek out and destroy glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) brain cancer cells without damaging nearby healthy cells
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