It takes a lot of energy to split hydrogen out from the other atoms to which it binds, either in natural gas or water. Which means energy analysts are skeptical about the overall energy balance of cars fueled by hydrogen. Ohio University researcher Geraldine Botte has come up with a nickel-based electrode to oxidise (NH2)2CO, otherwise known as urea, the major component of animal urine. Because urea’s four hydrogen atoms are less tightly bound to nitrogen than the hydrogen bound to oxygen in water molecules, it takes less energy to break them apart — via Slashdot
A Telstra business service will once again call Australia home after complaints were raised by customers. A Telstra spokesman on Wednesday said the Philippines-based service, which had operated for about six months, had not satisfied Telstra’s Australian customers
After Spain virtually ruled out imposing a 3-strikes
regime for illicit file-sharers, the entertainment industries said they would target 200 BitTorrent sites instead. Now a judge has decided that sharing between users for no profit via P2P doesn’t breach copyright laws and sites should be presumed innocent until proved otherwise
Google is removing the beta
label from many of its key services, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Talk and Google Video for Business. The move is seen as a way to attract large businesses to Google Apps, its suite of messaging and productivity applications. For most users of Gmail and Google Calendar, today’s news is little more than a lifting of the beta
label for these already-reliable Google services. But Google says removing the beta
label is a big deal for the businesses that it hopes will switch to Web-based Google services — and away from software-based services offered by Microsoft and IBM
Cyber criminals based in Ukraine stole $415,000 from the coffers of Bullitt County, Kentucky this week. The crooks were aided by more than two dozen co-conspirators in the United States, as well as a strain of malicious software capable of defeating online security measures put in place by many banks
The winner of 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is David McKenzie, a 55-year-old Quality Systems consultant and writer from Federal Way, Washington. A contest recidivist, he has formerly won the Western and Children’s Literature categories. His winning entry was the appalling: Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the ‘Ellie May’, a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests
Ad Astra Rocket Company has successfully demonstrated operation of its VX-200 plasma engine first stage at full power and under superconducting conditions in tests conducted today at the company’s Houston laboratory. This achievement is a key milestone in the engine’s development and the first time a superconducting plasma rocket has been operated at that power level
Shares in the online ad firm Phorm have fallen by more than 40% after BT said it had no immediate plans to use the service that tracks online behaviour. Phorm serves up adverts related to a user’s web browsing history, which it monitors by taking a copy of the places they go and search terms they look for
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have made a new kind of solar cell by growing an array of upright nanoscale pillars on aluminium foil. They make bendable solar cells by encapsulating the entire cell inside a transparent, rubbery polymer. The design, the researchers suggest, could lead to solar cells that cost less than conventional silicon photovoltaics. The nanopillars allow the researchers to use cheaper, lower-quality materials than those used in conventional silicon and thin-film technologies. What’s more, the technique used to make the cells could be adapted to make rolls of flexible panels on thin aluminum foil, cutting manufacturing costs
About 800 pages of the earliest surviving Christian Bible have been recovered and put on the internet. Visitors to the website www.codexsinaiticus.org can now see images of more than half the 1,600-year-old Codex Sinaiticus manuscript. Fragments of the 4th Century document — written in Greek on parchment leaves — have been worked on by institutions in the UK, Germany, Egypt and Russia. Experts say it is a window into the development of early Christianity
In a move that has raised eyebrows among established players in the classified real-estate business, Google Australia has unveiled a new tool on its mapping service that will directly link buyers and renters to available property. The Google Maps feature, which launched today in Australia and New Zealand, will host free listings supplied by real-estate agents and publishers
The computer security industry historically borrows military defence concepts to combat digital threats, literally creating war rooms where experts follow attacks in progress on huge screens with phones ringing off the hook. Not so at Google’s Postini e-mail security service provider unit. Instead, computerised systems monitor 3 billion messages per day that flow in and out of customer systems and pass through Postini’s thousands of machines in data centres around the US and in Europe before hitting the Internet. The Postini system is highly automated, distributed, and scalable, characteristic of all of Google’s operations
The Venice free wi-fi project [Google translation] was announced by the deputy mayor, Michele Vianello, and represents the beginning of a series of further steps for the development of digital citizenship
and to make Venice an engine for development of innovation based on collaboration. Residents can access the wireless network using the user name and password obtained by registering on the site www.cittadinanzadigitale.it
It was the story of an e-mail heard around the world. You may remember Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim who expressed opposition in an e-mail to his member of parliament. That e-mail went back to his employer, TF1, who then promptly fired him because of his political views back in May. Now, Bourreau-Guggenheim is suing TF1 for discrimination
Crown Prosecution Service lawyers are advising officers to source information from the online encyclopedia which could potentially result in flimsy evidence being presented in criminal trials. The site is edited by hundreds of thousands of people and is occasionally prone to mistakes
Although It has taken homo sapiens several million years to evolve from the apes, the useful information in our DNA, has probably changed by only a few million bits. So the rate of biological evolution in humans, Stephen Hawking points out in his Life in the Universe lecture, is about a bit a year. By contrast,
Hawking says, there are about 50,000 new books published in the English language each year, containing of the order of a hundred billion bits of information. Of course, the great majority of this information is garbage, and no use to any form of life. But, even so, the rate at which useful information can be added is millions, if not billions, higher than with DNA.
This means Hawking says that we have entered a new phase of evolution. At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information.
But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and particularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred
Those who swear by vinyl say that records provide a warmer sound compared to compact discs, and that the larger packaging and gatefold artwork offer a superior tactile experience (and certainly to digital downloads). But where’s the love for the 8-track, those bulky blasts from the past which sounded fine enough in your El Camino, and which broke down classic albums indiscriminately into four programs. Don’t look now, but the cartridges are back, brought by a band from the same era, Cheap Trick. This month the boys of the Budokan release their new album, The Latest, not only in CD and vinyl, but in a long-departed format as fashionable as Tang, bell-bottoms and porn-star mustaches
The original CompuServe service, first offered in 1979, was shut down this past week by its current owner, AOL. The service, which provided its users with addresses such as 7,3402,3633 and was the first major online service, had seen the number of users dwindle in recent years. At its height, the service boasted about having over half a million users simultaneously on line. Many innovations we now take for granted, from online travel (Eaasy Sabre), online shopping, online stock quotations, and global weather forecasts, just to name a few, were standard fare on CompuServe in the 1980s
According to the W3 News Archive, the charter for the XHTML2 Working Group — set to expire on December 31st, 2009 — will not be renewed. What does this mean? XHTML2 will never be a W3C recommendation, so get on the HTML 5 bandwagon now. According to the XHTML FAQ, however, the W3C does plan for the XML serialization of HTML to remain compatible with XML
. Looks like with HTML 5, we’ll get the best of both worlds — via Slashdot
Space trading game Eve Online has suffered a virtual version of the credit crunch. One of the game’s biggest financial institutions lost a significant chunk of its deposits as a huge theft started a run on the bank. One of the bank’s controllers stole about 200bn kredits and swapped them for real world cash of £3,115. As news of the theft spread, many of the bank’s customers rushed to remove their virtual cash
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