It has long been known that the Toxoplasma gondii parasite alters its host’s behaviour, but now it seems the way it alters it depends on the sex of the host. A common parasite can increase a women’s attractiveness to the opposite sex but also make men more stupid. Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women. On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls
Over at The Frosty Mug Revolution, PJ Doland makes a compelling case for a new HTML attribute in the spirit of the highly-regarded nofollow
attribute promoted by Google — the NSFW attribute (rel=nsfw
). His original idea has been refined and expanded by positive comments from readers, resulting in a semantic solution to the issue he raises in the original post. Content creators can apply the attribute to paragraph tags, div tags, or any other block-level element. Doing so will indicate that the enclosed content is not safe for work. Visitors will be able to configure their browsers to block display of just the content enclosed by the flagged block-level element. This isn’t about censorship. It is about making us all less likely to accidentally click on a goatse.cx link when our boss is standing behind us. It is also about making us feel more comfortable posting possibly objectionable content by giving visitors a means of easily filtering that content — via Slashdot
The first deliveries of Clocky, which runs away from drowsy owners who don’t get up in time, were made just in time for Christmas, and one early user says the clock, which was an Internet sensation when it was first announced, is appropriately aggravating
This New Year’s Eve, at midnight on the dot, hundreds of millions of pages of US government secrets will be revealed. Or at least they’ll no longer be official secrets — it may actually take months or more for the National Archives and Records Administration to make those pages available for public consumption
The AACS DRM used in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray has been cracked. The program allows one to decrypt and dump the video for play on a users hard drive, or it can be burned to a blank HD-DVD and played on a stand-alone player
Two-hour flights to the other side of the world may seem like a scene from a science fiction movie; but the technology is in place, and a plane that can do just that is currently in development. While it looks like a scene from a flight simulator, the Astrox space plane is the real deal, and the Astrox Corporation says it could revolutionise the transportation industry. Traveling as fast as Mach 25 with at least 30 minutes of space shuttle-like views while in orbit is the highlight of this plane, and the Astrox Corporation, along with their partners, are claiming to have finally overcome their largest problem, mixing fuel
Samsung, the world’s third-largest maker of mobile phones and a force in the notebook and display markets as well, has engineered a fuel cell that can power a notebook computer for up to a month
25 years ago, TV series Blake’s 7
— and most of its characters — were killed off. But now the cult programme is coming back from the dead in a series of newly penned hour-long audio episodes, which will initially be podcast in five-minute segments. It is hoped that they will be followed by a mini-series, Blake’s 7: Legacy, to be set 30 years after the bloodbath on the planet of Gauda Prime, which ended the original 52-episode run
Microsoft has managed to rankle its critics again, this time over a set of patent applications that cover one of blogging’s key technologies — a technology that Microsoft did not invent. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, lets bloggers, owners of news sites and other content providers notify their readers when new content is published
Former US President Gerald Ford, who was swept into office after the Watergate scandal and later pardoned Richard Nixon, died at age 93
The world’s top spy chiefs — including the heads of the CIA and British, Australian and Canadian agencies — have been meeting in secret in New Zealand — via Monsters and Critics
Ironically, web sites that feature the TRUSTe security certificate are twice as likely to contain badware as web sites without a security certificate, alleges spyware researcher Ben Edelman in a new report
Microsoft sent some holiday cheer in the direction of security vendors this week by releasing new APIs for developers working to create software that can interact with Windows Vista
In the grand tradition of if you value your sanity, don’t look
, I bring you Celine Dion butchering AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long
.
This is wrong on so many levels.
I think I need to go beat my head on the keyboard until the soothing sound of broken bone and plastic makes her horrible screeching go away.
There are some things you just cannot unhear. You have been warned.
Shoe Money has an interesting post about how his server got hacked via an old file in an unused subdirectory. After a bit of digging, he discovered how the hacker found the vulnerable code via Google’s Code Search, thanks to site maps and a poorly secured server. I pretty much fell into the same trap with some old unsecure directories leftover from a previous buggy software update and that was without the horror of site maps thrown in
Optical microchips that can store light for short periods of time before sending it on its way have been constructed for the first time by researchers at IBM in the US. The work is an important breakthrough for chip designers who hope one day to use optical buffers
in superfast processors that rely on photons instead of electrons for their processing power
For the first time the rising ocean levels have washed away an inhabited island. Lohachara island was at one point home to some 10,000 people. It, along with several other spits of land near the Indian mainland, is now permanently underwater. As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities. Eight years ago the first uninhabited islands — in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati — vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented
Singer James Brown, known as the Godfather of Soul
, has died at the age of 73. He was admitted to hospital in Atlanta after being diagnosed with severe pneumonia but died at 0145 local time (0645 GMT). The star was famous for hits including I Got You (I Feel Good), Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag and Living in America
If you don’t believe that Santa Claus can deliver presents to millions of homes in a single night, Larry Silverberg, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University, explains that Santa’s society of elves has an understanding of physics and engineering that exceeds our own. In fact, Santa Claus and his crew really can deliver presents in one night because of their advanced knowledge of electromagnetic waves, the space/time continuum, nanotechnology, genetic engineering and computer science. For example, he doesn’t carry presents. He uses a nano-toymaker to fabricate toys grown atom by atom inside the children’s homes
The Department of Defence has taken the step of blocking HTML-based email. They are also banning the use of Outlook Web Access email clients. The DoD is making this move because HTML messages can easily be infected with spyware and executable lines of code that enable hackers to access DoD networks
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