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
If you’re into keeping tabs on irony, check this out. Amazon apparently sent out its robotic droogs last night, deleting copies of the George Orwell novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four from Kindles without explanation, then refunding the purchase price. As you can imagine, a lot of people caught in the thick of Winston and Julia’s love story aren’t very happy — and rightfully so — the idea that we own
the things we buy is pretty fundamental to… ownership. We’re not sure exactly what happened, but it seems that the publisher of said novels, MobileReference, has changed its mind about selling content on the Kindle, and poof! Amazon remotely deleted all previously purchased copies. It’s all a bit Orwellian, is it not?
On 1 September, Millenniata, a start-up company based in Springville, will release a new archive disk technology to preserve data at room temperature for 1,000 years. It’s like writing onto gold plates or chiselling information into stone. Dubbed the Millennial Disc, it looks virtually identical to a regular DVD, but it’s special. Layers of hard, persistent
materials (the exact composition is a trade secret) are laid down on a plastic carrier, and digital information is literally carved in with an enhanced laser using the company’s Millennial Writer, a sort of beefed-up DVD burner. Once cut, the disk can be read by an ordinary DVD reader on your computer
It is an axiom that on the Internet nobody knows that you are a dog
. By the same token, it is all but impossible to know whether you are from North Korea or South Korea. That puzzle is plaguing law enforcement investigators in several nations who are now hunting for the authors of a small but highly publicised Internet denial-of-service attack that briefly knocked offline the Web sites of some United States and South Korean government agencies and companies
The Queensland Police plans to conduct a wardriving
mission around select Queensland towns in an effort to educate its citizens to secure their wireless networks. Wardriving
refers to the technique of searching for unsecured wireless networks by driving the streets armed simply with a laptop or smartphone seeking network connections. When unsecured networks are found, the Queensland Police will pay a friendly visit to the household or small business, informing them of the risks they are exposing themselves to
Discovered 13 years ago, and officially added to the periodic table just weeks ago, element 112 finally has a name. It will be called copernicium
, with the symbol Cp, in honour of the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Copernicus deduced that the planets revolved around the Sun, and finally refuted the belief that the Earth was the centre of the Universe. The team of scientists who discovered the element chose the name to honour the man who changed our world view
Popular social networking site Facebook is breaching Canadian law by holding on to users’ personal information indefinitely, a report has concluded. An investigation by Canada’s privacy commission found the US-based website also gave confusing or incomplete
information to subscribers. Facebook says it is aiming to safeguard users’ privacy without compromising their experience of the site
Cash machines offer an ever-growing menu of services beyond merely dispensing money. For tampering criminals, this now includes a squirt of pepper spray in the face. The extreme measure is the latest in South Africa’s escalating war against armed robbers who target banks and cash delivery vans. The number of cash machines blown up with explosives has risen from 54 in 2006 to 387 in 2007 and nearly 500 last year. The technology uses cameras to detect people tampering with the card slots. Another machine then ejects pepper spray to stun the culprit while police response teams race to the scene. But the mechanism backfired in one incident last week when pepper spray was inadvertently inhaled by three technicians who required treatment from paramedics
Senator Stephen Conroy is a man on a mission. Undeterred that his absurd plans to filter the Internet have earned him the dubious title of Internet Villain of the Year, he is now promising to find a solution to the file-sharing problem
by bringing parties together who are already at war, or have little respect for him and his plans
On Tuesday evening more than 300 confidential Twitter documents and screenshots landed in TechCrunch’s inbox. The documents include employment agreements, calendars of the founders, new employee interview schedules, phone logs and bills, alarm settings, a financial forecast, a pitch for a Twitter TV show, confidentiality agreements with companies such as AOL, Dell, Ericsson, and Nokia, a list of employee dietary restrictions, credit card numbers, Paypal and Gmail screen shots, and much more
Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company, has reached a settlement with the State of New York over its attempts to fake positive consumer reviews on the Web. The company had ordered employees to pretend they were satisfied customers and write glowing reviews of its face-lift procedure on Web sites, according to the attorney general’s statement. Lifestyle Lift also created its own sites of face-lift reviews to appear as independent sources
Our brains can rewire themselves in just seconds to compensate for a break in incoming data, suggesting they are even more flexible than previously thought
Tough new laws aimed at clamping down on identity fraud are being drafted by the NSW government. Almost half a million Australians lost a combined $997 million to personal identity fraud in the last year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The ABS attributed the crime wave to the rapid expansion of internet technology, and electronic data sharing and storage
The mobile phone company Nokia is being hit by a growing economic boycott in Iran as consumers sympathetic to the post-election protest movement begin targeting a string of companies deemed to be collaborating with the regime. Wholesale vendors in the capital report that demand for Nokia handsets has fallen by as much as half in the wake of calls to boycott Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) for selling communications monitoring systems to Iran
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