Gorillas have been found, for the first time, to be a source of HIV. Previous research had shown the HIV-1 strain, the main source of human infections, with 33m cases worldwide, originated from a virus in chimpanzees. But researchers have now discovered an HIV infection in a Cameroonian woman which is clearly linked to a gorilla strain
Westpac and St George banks have joined the National Australia Bank in discounting their overdrawn fees
Fifteen senior Australian climate scientists have hit back at the resurgence of climate scepticism among the nation’s politicians and the media, warning that the threat from climate change is real, urgent and approaching a series of tipping points
where it will feed on itself. New findings suggest that the situation is, if anything, more serious than the assessment of just a few years ago
, say the scientists, who include the CSIRO’s Dr Michael Raupach and Dr John Church, along with the Australian National University’s Professor Will Steffen, who recently completed a report on climate change science for the Federal Government
Without a way to store their power, no number of solar panels will free a home from the electrical grid. Researchers at Utah-based Ceramatec have developed a new battery that can be scaled up to store 20 kilowatt-hours–enough to power an average home for most of a day. An easy sell for solar users, but it could also allow the grid-bound to stockpile energy during less expensive off-peak hours. The new battery runs on sodium-sulfur — a composition that typically operates at greater than 600 F. Sodium-sulfur is more energetic than lead-acid, so if you can somehow get it to a lower temperature, it would be valuable for residential use,
Ralph Brodd, an independent energy conversion consultant, says
The Futurama
characters won’t be sporting new voices after all. The five Futurama
cast members — John DiMaggio, Billy West, Katey Sagal, Maurice LaMarche and Tress MacNeille — have just sealed pacts with 20th Century Fox TV to return to the show as it reboots with 26 new episodes for Comedy Central. Both the actors and 20th are believed to have found a compromise. Move comes after 20th put out a casting call earlier this month to find replacement actors for the show
Downloads of the hard-charging Firefox browser have topped one billion as the Mozilla Foundation’s browser gains on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The figure includes the current Firefox 3.5 back to the first version in 2004, and Firefox now has an estimated 31 percent of the market. The Mozilla Foundation plans to celebrate the Firefox milestone
MI5 has closed up a flaw on its web site that could have opened up visitors to malicious attacks, the UK intelligence agency said. The web site suffered a cross-site scripting vulnerability that could have allowed hackers to inject code into the site and redirect users to malicious pages
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
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