Sarah West, a Southern Cross University researcher, says technology to recycle water is available in Australia but is hardly being used. She has spent eight months studying water recycling and decentralised sewerage systems overseas. In parts of the United States, commercial laundries and car washes are using recycled water. It is also being used for flushing toilets, garden irrigation and growing vegetables
A man has been arrested outside a Swedish high-security prison after shooting mobile phones into the prison yard with a bow and arrow. The man arrested outside the Norrtaelje prison is believed to have shot as many as five mobile phones over the prison wall. Three arrows were found in the yard, with two phones and a battery charger taped to the arrows
Bruce Sterling ponders the future direction of desktop fabricators and heads off the current printer consumables extortion racket, by suggesting the goop they run on be made from readily available waste products
Why is a TV executive so agitated about online pirates? Because he, like most media honchos, has seen the scary numbers indicating that the next big craze in illegal file-sharing is not music, not movies, but television. Frankly I’m amazed that movies caught on before TV since there’s so much more TV, and they tend to be smaller files than movies — via Slashdot
Tokyo is an impressive city above ground, but one of the most incredible things about this city is it’s mind-bogglingly complex underground. The G-Cans Project is a massive project, begun 12 years ago, to build infrastructure for preventing overflow of the major rivers and waterways spidering the city. The underground waterway is the largest in the world and sports five 32m diameter, 65m deep concrete containment silos which are connected by 64 kilometres of tunnel sitting 50 metres beneath the surface.
The whole system is powered by 14000 horsepower turbines which can pump 200 tons of water a second into the large outlying Edogawa River.
The site is all in Japanese, but if you click around the menus a bit, there are animations and diagrams of how the system works, and other interesting photos of the high-tech control center and turbine facilities. Supposedly the G-Cans project is also meant to be a tourist attraction, and can be visited for free — via Dead Machinery
Downhill Battle has released the first public preview of Blog Torrent a simplified
BitTorrent package that they developed because, Making it easy to blog large video files means that people can share their home movies the same way they share their photos or writings
. Features include: integrated torrent creation and upload, simple non-MySQL installation, and an RSS feed for every tracker. Currently Windows only on the client side, but Mac and Linux versions are in the works
Google has filed a lawsuit against Internet marketing firm, Auctions Expert International, claiming the company defrauded Google’s advertising network with false ad clicks
Designer Sara Cihat creates really cool looking rehabilitated dishware out of finds from second-hand stores which are then cleaned up, re-screened, and glazed to new heights of hipster glory — via design*sponge
DNA profiling has enabled us to link a suspect to a sample of blood, hair or saliva found at a crime scene. But until now, there was no way of knowing when the suspect was there — giving the guilty room to wriggle free. Now a team in America has developed a test that can reveal when a sample was deposited by measuring how quickly certain genetic material breaks down. The test measures two forms of RNA and works with as little as one microlitre of blood. The technique may even be sensitive enough to tell investigators when a fingerprint was left
A plant dubbed the suicide tree kills many more people in Indian communities than was previously thought. The warning comes from forensic toxicologists in India and France who have conducted a review of deaths caused by plant-derived poisons. Cerbera odollam, which grows across India and south-east Asia, is used by more people to commit suicide than any other plant, the toxicologists say. But they also warn that doctors, pathologists and coroners are failing to detect how often it is used to murder people
A unique combination of drugs has made a 15-year-old girl the first known human to survive rabies without vaccination. A team of physicians gambled on an experimental treatment and induced a coma in Jeanna Giese to stave off the usually fatal infection, said Dr Rodney Willoughby, a pediatric disease infection specialist at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin
Anti-war protesters made a mockery of Tony Blair’s key election pledge of security by bursting into a government building just minutes after the Queen had announced new measures to tackle terrorism. As the whole of Whitehall bristled with armed police, three women and a man by-passed supposedly impenetrable security to gain access to the Cabinet Office, which has a direct underground link to No 10 Downing Street
In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins. In Nevada, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human. In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their skulls. These are not outcasts from The Island of Dr Moreau, the 1896 novel by HG Wells in which a rogue doctor develops creatures that are part animal and part human. They are real creations of real scientists, stretching the boundaries of stem cell research.
Biologists call these hybrid animals chimæras, after the mythical Greek creature with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a serpent’s tail. They are the products of experiments in which human stem cells were added to developing animal foetuses. Chimæras are allowing scientists to watch, for the first time, how nascent human cells and organs mature and interact — not in the cold isolation of laboratory dishes but inside the bodies of living creatures. Some are already revealing deep secrets of human biology and pointing the way toward new medical treatments.
But with no federal guidelines in place, an awkward question hovers above the work: How human must a chimæra be before more stringent research rules should kick in?
A man-made flood is roaring through the Grand Canyon in a bold experiment to restore the sandbanks of the Colorado river and to save fish and plants that have been disappearing over the past 40 years. The water is being channelled into the river and down the canyon through four giant steel pipes, carrying badly needed natural sediment with it. The US$3.7m venture, supported by more than a dozen US government agencies and groups, ends tomorrow, but how well it works will not be known for months
It ain’t cheap, but Hiroshi Shimizu has finally shown off his latest electric car; Eliica. It accelerates faster than a Porsche 911 Turbo, and will cruise for 200 miles on a one hour charge. Interestingly, Shimizu believes that the Japanese motor industry is deliberately ignoring his invention and instead focusing on complex hybrids, as a simple electric engine dramatically lowers the cost of manufacturing, and will lead to a flood of cheap, mass produced cars from Chinese factories
Lee Harvey Oswald-wannabes will be able to simulate the assassination of President John F Kennedy when Traffic Games releases the $9.99 JFK Reloaded to coincide with the 41st anniversary of Kennedy’s murder in Dallas. It is despicable
, said a spokesman for Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, the late president’s brother
An amateur palaeontologist has unearthed the biggest dinosaur to be discovered in the British Isles — and possibly Europe — from a cliff overlooking an Isle of Wight beach. Scientists who have just finished analysing the dinosaur’s two neck bones believe it grew to about 66 feet long and weighed up to 50 tons. It lived around 130 million years ago when Britain was subtropical and still connected to Europe and North America
The Charité Artificial Disc is a plastic replacement for one of two discs in the lower back. The Artificial Disc is expected to receive United States FDA approval by the end of the year. This is the first major breakthrough in back surgery since the 1940s,
says orthopedic surgeon Richard Guyer of the Texas Back Institute in Plano — via boingboing
Newspaper advertisements congratulating Australian Idol winner Casey Donovan have mistakenly directed fans to a gay porn web site. Telstra indulged in an overenthusiastic display of censorship by redirecting all Bigpond subscribers through to the Australian address
Primus Telecom has launched a new DSL broadband Internet service claimed to deliver high speed services at up to 6Mbps. The new high-speed Internet service is available to Primus customers in major cities around Australia who are in access range of upgraded facilities installed by Primus Telecom
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