What happens when your satellite navigation system in your car gives you bad advice on which road you should take? In Britain, these systems have been directing drivers down a road near the (aptly named) town of Crackpot that is strewn with boulders and has an unprotected 100ft dropoff on one side. The locals are worried someone’s going to go off the edge
China’s environment ministry has ordered cleanups at 20 chemical and petrochemical enterprises, including CNPC and units of Sinopec, after they were found to pose serious safety threats
A brightly plumaged parrot and a long-tailed forest mouse unique to the Philippines have been discovered in the vanishing rainforest of a tiny tropical island
The construction of 402 homes might finally signal the end of the 28-year red wolf breeding programme at the Graham site. Local zoo officials want to move the wolves to protected land at Northwest Trek near Eatonville, but that hinges on a $550,000 federal appropriation at a time when money is tight
The competition watchdog has rejected Telstra’s proposed charges for connecting and disconnecting broadband ISPs’ access to its basic copper wire
Open Source Development Labs is previewing work that attempts to make life easier for software companies by bridging GNOME and KDE, the two competing graphical interfaces most widely used with Linux
New Greenpeace research shows that McDonald’s are partners in forest crime that is creating a trail of destruction right into the heart of the Amazon rainforest — via Warren Ellis
Scientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago. Palaeontologists have said that the find, a crocodile-like animal called the Tiktaalik roseae and described today in the journal Nature, could become an icon of evolution in action — like Archaeopteryx, the famous fossil that bridged the gap between reptiles and birds
Police in China are investigating whether the discovery of more than 120 human skulls may be part of a growing trade in macabre handicrafts — via Warren Ellis
A Republican controlled committee has defeated a bill that would have guaranteed fair access and stopped companies like AT&T and Verizon from charging high-bandwidth sites for allowing their customers to have priority access to them
Anti-terrorism detectives escorted a man from a plane after a taxi driver had earlier become suspicious when he started singing along to a track by punk band The Clash. Detectives halted the London-bound flight at Durham Tees Valley Airport and Harraj Mann, 24, was taken off. The taxi driver had become worried on the way to the airport because Mann had been singing along to The Clash’s 1979 anthem London Calling
, which features the lyrics Now war is declared — and battle come down
while other lines warn of a meltdown expected
— via Boing Boing
The Australian Consumers Association has savaged the federal Government’s plans for the full roll-out of digital television services as part of its media reforms
Lou Slaughter, the chief executive of GigaBeam, a technology company in Herndon, Virginia, has come up with millimetre-wave technology, which transmits data over wireless connections at one gigabit per second – 1,000 times as fast as a DSL connection
In Sweden, a new political party — the Pirate Party — is pushing a platform that would abolish patents and free creative works from copyright protections after five years, instead of the 50 to 100 years typically associated with a creator’s exclusive rights
Apple Computer said on Wednesday that it has released a public beta version of Boot Camp, software that enables Microsoft Windows XP to run natively on Intel-based Macs
Australia’s screen culture — from Alvin Purple
to home video of Queen Elizabeth’s 1954 royal tour — will be available online from next year. In a collaboration aimed at increasing the Australian public’s knowledge of their audiovisual heritage, more than 1000 clips from film and television programs and radio broadcasts will be available on a web site. Associated scripts, interviews and oral histories will also be available as education material
The movie download firms Movielink and CinemaNow have made a deal with the big five studios to ensure that downloads will coincide with DVD releases at Blockbuster and WalMart. Unlike previous deals, these will be full purchase downloads, and not merely for a rental period. The move is aimed at stemming the rising tide of pirate downloads, and DRM will be in force to prevent copying the movies to DVD. The first batch of downloadable movies will include Brokeback Mountain
, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
and King Kong
. The drawback is that they’ll be DRMmed, Windows-only and twice the price of DVDs
Telemarketers will have to abide by a national Do Not Call register in 2007, after the federal government announced it would soon introduce legislation to protect consumers
A red-faced Australian nudist who tried to set fire to what he thought was a deadly funnel web spider’s nest ended up with badly burnt buttocks — via Rogue Sun
Bladders engineered in the laboratory from patients’ own cells and then implanted into the body have succeeded in their first clinical trial. It is the first time a discrete, complex organ has been grown and transplanted into people — the researchers are now working on hearts and pancreases
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