Fed up with paying some €100,000 a year to cut the grass on its out-of-town roads with tractor-mowers, the local government of Treviso, near Venice, bought six donkeys to do the work instead
Google will expand its ability for searching books by working with five major libraries, including those at the University of Michigan and Oxford University, as well as the New York Public Library, to digitise out-of-print and copyrighted works
Finally, a miniature hard drive you can drop on the sidewalk. Mini-drive specialist Cornice will unfurl a new 3GB, 25mm diameter hard drive at next month’s Consumer Electronics Show that offers more shock resistance and uses less battery life than its predecessors. The drive is due out in 2005
The contentious Surveillance Devices Act has been passed. The act will allow Federal Police to obtain warrants to secretly install spyware onto users computers enabling them to monitor e-mail, online chats, word processor and spreadsheets entries and even bank personal identification numbers and passwords
Alek’s Christmas Lights Webcam is back again which allows you to: pan/zoom the webcam and control the 17,000 christmas lights — yep, turn ’em on and off and annoy my understanding neighbours!
You’ve got to laugh, because it’s all a hoax. The lights are real, the web control system isn’t
A Chilean judge has formally charged former dictator Augusto Pinochet with homicide and kidnapping in one of many pending cases related to human rights abuses committed during his 17-year rule. Special Judge Juan Guzman says General Pinochet has been declared mentally fit to stand trial in Chile
Purdue University researchers are devising a way to fabricate better artificial bones using carbon nanotubes to mimic the natural fibre-like structure of real bone
Three gun-wielding brain donors tried to rob a woman who was minding her grandsons. The kids happened to be playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The random police soundbites from the game were saying, Stop, we have you surrounded. This is the police.
The burglars, unknowingly, thought this was the actual police, panicked and ran away. The silly buggers were all caught
Australia’s spies are to have their intelligence gathering capacity boosted by a new highly classified IT and communications project being run by the Defence Signals Directorate, which includes database and storage, real time processing and intriguingly, a variety of radio interface technologies. It’s a safe bet that any data gathered will be happily passed on the US and vast bulk will be corporate espionage for a fee and not actual security work
Former CIA Director George Tenet has suggested that access to networks like the World Wide Web might need to be limited to those who can show they take security seriously. The national press were excluded from the event, at Mr Tenet’s request
About 80,000 students and staff are being told to use an alternate browser. The Penn State ITS department sent the alert because the threats are real and alternatives exist to mitigate Web browser vulnerabilities
Eric Harshbarger has built a seven foot tall grandfather clock exclusively from Lego. It keeps accurate time and needs no electricity; it needs to be weight reset every thirteen hours
The first theatrical Babylon 5 movie, The Memory of the Shadows
starts filming in April. The story was written by series creator J Michael Straczynski
A cheap modification to supertankers could help prevent devastating oil pollution if the vessels sink. The new system makes it quick and easy to empty the tanks if the ship ends up on the seabed
If it walks like a flamingo and looks like a flamingo, it is not necessarily a flamingo — or even a close relative. A controversial genetic study suggests we have completely misunderstood how the majority of birds are related, and that some species that look almost identical are not related at all. The discovery comes from an analysis of the evolution of the bird gene beta-fibrinogen. It suggests that the Neoaves, a group that includes all modern bird species except waterfowl, landfowl and flightless birds, actually comprises two distinct lineages called the Metaves and Coronaves, and that many birds which look alike are not in the same lineage
The all free dictionaries project focuses on maintaining free dictionaries (now more than 90 with more than 3,300,000 translations). They are designing a new system which will unite them all into one universal dictionary for all languages. The universal dictionary will be soon available for free under GPL
Scientists working in South Africa say they have identified a gene that controls the human body’s response to HIV. The researchers say the gene determines the body’s response to infections
A coalition of American internet and finance firms and law enforcement agencies has been launched in a bid to halt the growing number of online phishing scams. The group called Digital PhishNet is a collaborative operation of technology, banking, financial services and online auction firms with law enforcement to tackle phishing
, a scheme based on use of faked or spoofed
web sites
A lone whale with a voice unlike any other has been wandering the Pacific for the past twelve years. Marine biologist Mary Ann Daher of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and her colleagues used signals recorded by the US navy’s submarine-tracking hydrophones to trace the movements of whales in the north Pacific. The partially declassified records show that a lone whale singing at around 52 hertz has cruised the ocean every autumn and winter since 1992. Its calls do not match those of any known species, although they are clearly those of a baleen whale, a group that includes blue, fin and humpback whales
Seiko Epson is on schedule to commercialise OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) screen technology for televisions in 2007 but some significant research issues remain. OLED screens produce pictures that proponents say are extremely bright and crisp compared to those shown on PDP (plasma display panels) and LCDs. Another advantage is that OLEDs should be cheaper. However, at present OLED panels don’t last long
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