A mammal that is the daughter of two female parents has been created for the first time. Until now such a feat had been considered biologically impossible. But the mouse, called Kaguya, was born without the involvement of any sperm or male cell — only female eggs were needed — via GeneWeb
Carlos Machuca, a tamale-maker, killed his drinking buddy, cut up his body and boiled him in herbs, according to police who fear he may have been turning him into tamales. Officers found a man’s mutilated corpse in the living room and body parts simmering in saucepans on the patio
Researchers have set a new data transmission record over the Internet2’s high-speed backbone. The new record announced Tuesday at the Spring 2004 Internet2 member meeting in Arlington, was for transmitting data over nearly 11,000 km at an average speed of 6.25 Gb/s. This is nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection. The network link used to set the record spans from Los Angeles to Geneva, Switzerland
Russia may be about to perform a dramatic policy U-turn in ratifying the Kyoto climate change protocol despite months of saying that it would cause irreparable damage to its booming economy. Such a decision would allow the United Nations treaty to finally become legally binding and leave America isolated on the world stage as an environmental sinner
Yahoo has fixed a bug in its Web based e-mail system that would have allowed attackers to seize control of users’ e-mail accounts
A flaw in TCP, the most popular communications protocol for sending data on the Net, could let attackers shut down connections between servers and routers, according to an advisory released Tuesday by Britain’s national emergency response team
An AOL job listing indicates intentions to recharge its neglected portal and Web browser, and take Netscape in a dramatically different direction
John Howard had the bone pointed at him as part of a warning by embattled ATSIC chairman Geoff Clark yesterday that he was not welcome in western Victoria. Moorap, an Aboriginal woman from the Tjapwuurrong people, from Mortlake, performed the traditional ceremony yesterday morning as the Prime Minister arrived in Colac
Allowing a big-budget Hollywood movie team to film in sensitive areas of the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area is evidence the Carr Government is prepared to sacrifice irreplaceable areas of wilderness to commercial operators. The Carr Government has established many new wilderness areas but now appears to want a return on its investment and is opening the door to more commercial operations.
Greens MLC Ian Cohen said it is unacceptable that the production team of the movie Stealth will use explosives in sensitive wilderness areas in the Blue Mountains and called on Environment Minister Bob Debus to intervene
Public Patent Foundation, a little-known public interest group, last week asked the US government to revoke a Microsoft patent that covers the company’s Windows file system
The Australian Greens have renewed their call for the voting age to be reduced from 18 to 16 but with non-compulsory voting for those under 18 years
Telstra’s appetite for acquisitions appears unsated by last week’s boardroom bloodletting, with the company in talks with rival Hutchison Telecommunications to buy its Orange mobile phone business for about $250 million
The recent US-Australia Free
Trade Agreement Chapter 17 (IP) locks Australia into our existing DMCA-style laws and extends them further: banning access control
circumvention, extending copyright, guaranteeing penalties greater than actual damages for deliberate copyright infringement, committing us to recognising patents whether a product or process, in all fields of technology
, etc. Linux Australia has produced a draft position paper (rough HTML version), has a how to help page, and started a petition
How hard would it be to swing an election by hacking computerised voting machines? How valuable would it be? Counterpane.com’s Bruce Schneier did the math, and the results are even scarier than he expected them to be
31 August is the release date for Invader Zim – Volume 2: Progressive Stupidity. Like the first disc, the list price on this release will be US$24.95, and the reported running time is 225 minutes. Also of interest is a shot of what they say was the proposed
cover art for Volume 2… before it was rejected by the brain donors at Nickelodeon
An Austrian man cut off his toes, fried them up and ate them between two slices of bread after getting high sniffing butane gas. When ambulance men arrived he offered to share his meal with them, passing over a toe and saying: It tastes like chicken, do you want some, there’s a few still left over.
A police spokesman added: He told the ambulance men that he had more toes than he needed and didn’t think he would notice if he got rid of a few
As if I wasn’t already addicted to online news feeds, Newsmap is a rolling visual representation of the Google News stream — via Die Puny Humans
Newsmap… provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe. Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. It’s objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media.
Inkjet printers can produce a nice enough colour photo at an affordable price for the home user, but the images are far from stable as you’d know if you’ve ever gotten one wet. Darren Barefoot has tracked down a printer using superior dye sublimation printing process at a fairly reasonable price:
Most home colour printers use inkjet technology. Essentially, this sometimes messy screening process involves shooting tiny dots of ink at a piece of paper. There’s a superior approach to colour printing called dye sublimation. Basically, it involves using a heating element to heat dye impregnated in a ribbon to over 350 degrees, at which point it turns into a gas and migrates into the surface of the specially coated photo paper. Temperature controls how much dye transfers at any point on the paper. One critical aspect of this approach is that the dots on the page can be of variable sizes.
Until now, the cost of dye sub has been restricted to professional printers and photo developers. I read today, via Engadget, about the HiTi 730PS. It’s a dye sub printer for the home, capable of printing images up to 6 x 8 inches. The prints cost about 40 cents each, and the printer starts at US$368. I haven’t actually seen these printers in action, but apparently they offer a vastly superior print quality for a decent price. The printer also includes an LCD display, so that you don’t have to download your images to your computer before printing.
Tim Berners-Lee, British inventor of the World Wide Web, has won Finland’s first Millennium Technology Prize. Berners-Lee, who heads the World Wide Web Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, revolutionised the Internet in 1991 when he devised a way to organise, link and browse Net pages
Amazon has entered the search engine fray with the beta launch of its A9 portal, enabling broad-based Web inquiries, as well as delivering results from the company site and a host of personalised services
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