San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to become the first US city to ban plastic bags from large supermarkets to help promote recycling. Under the legislation, beginning in six months large supermarkets and drugstores will not be allowed to offer plastic bags made from petroleum products — via Darren Barefoot
Microsoft is warning users of a new exploit that could allow an attacker to control which sites a user can visit. The vulnerability lies within the Web Proxy Auto Discover (WPAD) component
Just a couple of weeks ago Sandisk introduced a 32GB solid-state drive. Now Samsung has one-upped them, unveiling a 64GB solid-state drive. They are expecting to begin shipping in the second quarter of this year. Samsung says the device can read 64 MB/s, write 45 MB/s, and uses just 0.5 W when operating (0.1 W when idle). In comparison, an 80GB 1.8-inch hard drive reads at 15 MB/s, writes at 7 MB/s, and consumes 1.5 W when either operating or idle
Web sites that feature the TRUSTe security certificate are two times more likely to contain badware than Web sites without any security certification, researcher Ben Edelman alleges
EcoPods are environmentally friendly coffins made from recycled paper. Whether you’re worried about the state of the planet, or just want to be sure that you’ll have an easy climb back out of the grave, should the zombiism take hold, this seems like a good idea — via Boing Boing
A remote-controlled mechanism to launch tiny, liquid-filled darts into the bellies of horses was found buried under the starting gate of a Hong Kong race track. It was a device worthy of Rube Goldberg, or perhaps Wile E Coyote
— via kottke.org
For the first time, physicists have devised a way to make visible light travel in the opposite direction that it normally bends when passing from one material to another, like from air through water or glass. The phenomenon is known as negative refraction and could in principle be used to construct optical microscopes for imaging things as small as molecules, and even to create cloaking devices for rendering objects invisible — via Warren Ellis
A new electronic spacecraft propulsion concept proposes to utilise electrostatically charged and accelerated nanoparticles as propellant. Millions of micron-sized nanoparticle thrusters would fit on one square centimetre, allowing the fabrication of highly scalable thruster arrays — via Nanowerk
St Louis University researchers have concocted batteries fueled by almost any kind of sugar, from tree sap to flat soda, and that could be used to power everything from computers to mobile phones. Their thinking: If sugar can jack up the human body, why not electronics?
Forget WEP and WPA; try switching over to the EM-SEC Coating System, a recently announced paint developed by EM-SEC Technologies that acts as an electromagnetic fortress, allowing a wireless network to be contained within painted walls without fear of someone tapping in or hacking wireless networks. The EM-SEC Coating System is clearly the most secure option aside from stringing out the CAT5, and can be safely used to protect wireless networks in business and government facilities
A company named Tenebraex is helping colour-blind people to travel. But it’s also developing goggles to help soldiers and physicians to see all colours at night, and not only the green colour of current night vision systems. These goggles, which should become available this northern summer, will be sold for about US$6,000 to the Army. But as states one of the founders of the company, with monochrome night vision, blood is the same colour as water
. So these expensive night vision devices might be more targeted to Army physicians than to regular soldiers
A study in the peer-reviewed journal Science shows that mice transgenetically altered with a single human gene are then able to see in full tri-colour vision. Mice without this alteration are normally colour-blind. The scientists speculate that mammalian brains even from animals that have never evolved colour vision are flexible enough to interpret new colour-sense information with just the simple addition of new photoreceptors. Such a result is also indicated by a dominant X chromosome mutation that allows for quad-colour vision in some women
e360 Insight, the spammer that sued Spamhaus, is accused of using a botnet and compromised headers to get their advertising
into the mailboxes of the claimant. These are also the folks that tried to get the Illinois courts to suspend SpamHaus’s domain registration when they wouldn’t play by e360’s rules
Australia’s sluggish broadband speed has drawn the ridicule of business leaders both here and abroad. Australians are typically avid users of new technology once it arrives but the nation’s small population, large land mass and legacy of heavy communications regulation have meant infrastructure plans have been slow to gain traction. Some big names have launched openly scathing attacks on the nation’s broadband speeds in recent months. Rupert Murdoch calls the service a disgrace
and James Packer says installing high-speed broadband should be a top priority for Australia
The spread of cancer and the effect of drugs to combat it could be closely monitored using tiny implants. US researchers are perfecting a way to use microscopic particles which stick to chemicals in cancer cells and show up during scans. Their latest advance is to find a way to keep a supply of the particles inside the body for longer periods. However, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) technique has not yet been tested in humans
For all of his death-defying stunts, Harry Houdini couldn’t escape the Grim Reaper: the unparalleled performer, age 52, expired on Halloween 1926. Many of his trade secrets went with him to the grave — but rumors that Houdini was murdered soon took on a life of their own. Eighty-one years later, Houdini’s great-nephew wants to exhume the escape artist’s body to determine if enemies poisoned his renowned relative for debunking their bogus claims of contact with the dead
The working title of the third Stargate television series has been unveiled. The series currently exists in the form of a one-page treatment of the story and characters, with the title Stargate Universe. The new series has been conceived to be a completely separate, third entity
, executive producer Robert Cooper said in an interview — much more so than Atlantis was. Atlantis was much more of a spin-off series of SG-1 and was sort of born out of SG-1
The biggest whale fossil ever discovered in Italy has been found in one of the country’s finest vineyards. The five-million-year-old skeleton, 33ft (10m) in length, was dug up in the northern grape-growing area of Tuscany
Google’s YouTube is getting another challenge from the media industry, this time as NBC Universal and News Corp join forces to distribute full-length TV shows and other video over the Internet, supported by advertising. The new venture, which doesn’t have a name yet, will also allow users to download movies and TV shows to own and play back whenever they want. At first, however, the focus will be on showing video streams of hit shows — with ads — such as NBC’s Heroes
and Fox’s 24
Doctor Who will return for a fourth series in 2008, executive producer and lead writer Russell T Davies confirmed last night. Series four is officially existing,
he announced at the launch of Series Three in London. I’m very excited, but we have known for ages
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