A ban on smoking in enclosed public places has begun across Wales. Pubs, restaurants, offices and public transport are all covered by the ban, which came into force at 0600 BST. Those found smoking can face on-the-spot fines of £50, while those in charge of premises could also be fined for allowing smoking. A similar ban is already in force in Scotland. Northern Ireland will follow suit on 30 April, and England will follow on 1 July
Pulp mill protesters have waved placards and screamed no pulp mill
at a rally in Launceston’s Albert Hall. Police say about 3,000 people attended the rally. The protesters called on federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull to reject Gunns Limited’s plans for a pulp mill at Bell Bay in northern Tasmania
Artist Nadine Jarvis can fabricate pencils from carbon left over by incinerating human remains — it’s part of a larger research project into post mortem
. She notes that 240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash — a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind
— via Boing Boing
EMI’s entire digital music catalogue will be available in premium DRM-free form via iTunes in May, the music label said Monday at a press conference in London. Beatles tunes under EMI’s control, however, are not part of the plan. Major music label EMI Group plans to sell a premium level of digital downloads through Apple’s iTunes Store. For $1.29 per song, consumers will be able to buy higher-quality digital music lacking digital rights management. Higher-quality music files, which will play on any computer and any digital-audio player, will not replace the copy-protected EMI music currently sold through iTunes. Rather, they will complement the standard 99-cent iTunes downloads and will be sold at a premium: $1.29 per song. Consumers who have already purchased EMI tracks containing Apple’s FairPlay copy protection will be able to upgrade them to the premium version for 30 cents, EMI said. Full albums in DRM-free form can be bought at the same price as standard iTunes albums
SonyBMG, the world’s second-biggest music company, will no longer accept hard copy demos from bands. Instead, budding musicians will be asked to sign up to a record label website such as www.columbiademos.co.uk or www.rcademos.co.uk to blog their music, photos and videos
IBM is soon to launch a multimedia browser to make audio and video content accessible to people with vision impairments. Codenamed the Accessibility Browser — or A-Browser — the software was created by a blind employee in Japan. The A-Browser will give blind and partially-sighted people the same control over multimedia content that sighted people have using a mouse. IBM says it will be available later this year and hopes it will be free
Thirty years ago, Luke Skywalker beheld something that scientists are just now realizing is likely quite common in the universe: double sunsets. Astronomers have long known that binary star systems are common. And models suggested that planets could form in these systems, even though there’s a double-tug of gravity on the material that would have to form a planet. Observations from NASA’s Spitzer telescope, show that binary systems are just as likely to be surrounded by planet-forming debris disks are are lone stars
The European parliament’s Commitee for Legal Affairs approved an amendment presented by EMP Nicola Zingaretti, that makes piracy a felony — but only if a monetary profit is made
A California judge handed a victory to Kaleidescape, which manufactures home media servers, ruling that the company’s products do not violate the DVD industry’s CSS license. The company was sued by the DVD Copy Control Association, which said that Kaleidescape’s media servers violate its standard licensing contract
Europe’s biggest drug company has announced it is taking the first steps towards marketing a vaccine in Africa from which it never expects to make money. GlaxoSmithKline says it has begun filing documents with the regulatory authorities concerning its meningitis vaccine called Globorix
The move to open up the application programming interfaces (APIs) to Yahoo Mail is meant to encourage Web developers to build applications that use the mail service. The company expects these third-party mashups
, hybrid software that combines content from more than one source, will bring in more customers
With at least 46 million consumer records accessed by hackers, the TJX case outranks the previous largest case tracked by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse: a June 2005 disclosure by credit card processor CardSystems that hackers accessed accounts of 40 million card holders
Ever feel as though you’re being followed? As if someone is behind you, shadowing your every move? It might be your shadow person
, created by unusual activity in a specific brain region, a new study shows. The paper, published in the British journal Nature, describes the case of a 22-year-old woman with no history of psychiatric problems who was being evaluated for treatment of epilepsy. When a region of her brain called the left temporoparietal junction was electrically stimulated, the woman described encounters with a shadow person
who mimicked her bodily movements — via Warren Ellis
Yahoo has announced that they will be offering unlimited email storage starting this coming May. The launch is all a part of Yahoo’s ten year anniversary. While not all users will see their storage caps disappear right away Yahoo is promising that this feature will eventually reach their entire population
A Norwegian team has made the first piece of hardware that uses evolution to change its design at runtime to solve the problem at hand in the most effective way. By turning on and off its genes
it can change the way it works, and it can go through 20,000 – 30,000 generations in just a few seconds. That same number of generations took humans 800,000 – 900,000 years
Apple is throwing its weight behind the music industry’s efforts to protect the album format by allowing fans to buy complete digital albums without having to pay again for songs they already own. The record industry is keen to maintain the profitable album format, which is under threat as users of web-based music download stores, such as Apple’s iTunes and Napster, prefer to buy individual songs rather than whole albums. Apple said it was introducing a Complete My Album
service that offers customers who want to turn individual tracks into an album a 99-cent credit for every song they have already purchased from the album
A student has been suspended from school in America for coming to class dressed as a pirate. But the disciplinary action has provoked controversy — because the student says that the ban violates his rights, as the pirate costume is part of his religion. Bryan Killian says that he follows the Pastafarian religion, and that as a crucial part of his faith, he must wear full pirate regalia
as prescribed in the holy texts of Pastafarianism — via WWdN: In Exile
Chemists at the University of Washington who have made glasses with lenses that can be transparent or dark, in shades of yellow, green or purple, all at the push of a button. The glasses will let the wearer instantly change the colour of their lenses to virtually any hue by tuning a tiny electronic knob in the frame
A device that uses radio waves to heat the muscle lining of patients’ airways appears to treat their asthma. Just three sessions of the new treatment cut the number of mild asthma attacks in patients by a half during a one-year trial. The probe reduces inflammation in the bronchial tubes, doctors believe, and could lessen asthmatics’ need for steroids. The procedure, known as bronchial thermoplasty, involves inserting a long, thin catheter probe through the nose or mouth to reach the lung airways. Once the probe is in place, the tip is heated using radio waves. This raises the temperature in the muscle tissue of the airway up to 65°C for 10 seconds
Two Kiwi schoolgirls are worldwide celebrities after their school experiment forced an international pharmaceutical and food giant to admit it made false claims about vitamin C levels in Ribena. GlaxoSmithKline, the second-largest food and drug company in the world, was yesterday fined NZ$217,500 in the Auckland District Court after it admitted 15 breaches of the Fair Trading Act
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