One of the potentially useful things that a living cell can do is pump ions across its membrane. Simon Levinson, a biophysicist at the University of Colorado Medical School in Denver, US, says this generates a potential difference and so could be exploited to make a biobattery. Levinson believes that kidney cells, which are particularly good at transporting ions, could be well suited to making a miniature battery. This would be formed by stacking up large numbers of cell layers to boost the voltage and current they can produce
IBM says it has made a breakthrough in converting electrical signals into light pulses that brings closer the day when supercomputing, which now requires huge machines, will be done on a single chip. In research published on Thursday in the journal Optics Express, IBM said it had produced electro-optic modulators 100 to 1,000 times smaller than comparable silicon photonics modulators and small enough to fit on a processor chip. By connecting processing cores on a chip by light instead of with wires, the problems of high energy consumption and heat generated by multi-core chips could be bypassed, enabling leaps in computing power
Every year about 1,500 people in the US have surgical objects accidentally left inside them after surgery, according to medical studies. To prevent this potentially deadly problem, Loyola University Medical Centre is utilising a new technology that is helping its surgical teams keep track of all sponges used during a surgical procedure. Each sponge has a unique bar code affixed to it that is scanned by a high-tech device to obtain a count. Before a procedure begins, the identification number of the patient and the badge of the surgical team member maintaining the count are scanned into the counter. When a sponge is removed from a patient, it is scanned back into the system. A surgical procedure cannot end until all sponges are accounted for — via Slashdot
An English court has banned a teenage boy from posting abusive or insulting comments on a social networking web site after judging his participation in the network to be anti-social. Norwich Youth Court in eastern England issued an Anti-Social Behavior Order (Asbo) against a local 17-year-old implicated in petty criminal boasting on the online community Bebo
You know you’ve really made it as an online entity when an entire country bans your site. In terms of a rite of passage, it’s just after the wide-spread adoption and critical mass stages (which of course is followed by random companies banning you, and mainstream newspapers writing about studies on how inefficient the economy has become since your company’s existence). Twitter now joins the lauded halls of the sites banned for presumably speaking too freely; the United Arab Emirates has decided that its residents shall tweet no more
The Seven Network is putting its digital house in order with plans to beef up its high-definition channel next week and early testing under way for its TiVo personal video recorder. Seven is expected to start broadcasting at least 50 hours of programming on its high-definition digital channel, Seven HD, from Monday and has advertising booked to begin the following Saturday
Facebook is allowing its 55 million users to permanently turn off its Beacon
advertising program, which tracks their activities
Flickr members now can edit pictures online using Picnik’s online tools, a significant change in the ability and focus of the photo-sharing site. A new edit this
option on each photo’s page takes Flickr members to a powered by Picnik
screen that permits them to change exposure, colors, sharpness, and other attributes, as well as add text, whiten teeth, fix red-eye, crop, and resize. The features duplicate those already available on Picnik’s site
Microsoft is pulling back from a system that disables programs on users’ computers if it suspects the software is pirated, opting instead for a gentler approach based on nagging alerts. Microsoft said Monday it will roll out the new version of Windows Genuine Advantage with the first service pack
for Windows Vista, due in the first quarter of 2008
Google is making changes to its European launch of Street View to
protect the privacy of those it photographs, may do the same for US version
Britain’s domestic intelligence agency is warning that cybercrime perpetrated by China is on the rise following hacking attacks against Rolls-Royce PLC and Royal Dutch Shell PLC. MI5 recently sent letters to some 300 banks and accounting and legal firms warning that state organisations
of China were plying their networks for information. The UK government refused to confirm the letters
SixApart tonight announced the sale of journal/blogging service Livejournal to Russia-based SUP. Original LJ founder Brad Fitzpatrick has chimed in on the situation: This is pretty cool because — They’re ridiculously excited about LiveJournal, and have been for awhile (they previous purchased advertising rights in Russia, but ended up doing a bunch of Russia-specific LJ development as well). They want to throw a lot of resources at LiveJournal in terms of product development and engineers. ‘LiveJournal.com, Inc’ now stands alone again, focusing on nothing but LJ. Sounds like I’ll have more LJ influence (via new role as advisory board member) than I’ve had recently
— via Slashdot
Ageing may be as important to electronics as it is to good wine. A plastic transistor doubles its performance if simply left to sit at room temperature for a week. Cheap to mould, pentacene transistors are a promising candidate for organic electronics. However, when they are being built, molecules can misalign to form defects, which trap electrons and slow the transistors down
As if DRM needed more of a hint to get its coat and leave, Amazon is set to announce a promotional giveaway of one billion MP3s during next year’s Super Bowl. Billboard was first to note that this announcement signals an all-out offensive on DRM, which is made even more powerful by parallel pressures brought by Wal-Mart. In a bid for more of the digital download space, the brick-and-mortar retailer heavyweight has reportedly given an ultimatum to some of the largest record labels, including Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment, to provide more of their respective music catalogues in MP3 format (that is, without DRM) next year
Jimmy Wales made an announcement yesterday night at a Wikipedia party in San Francisco: Creative Commons, Wikimedia and the FSF just agreed to make the current Wikipedia license compatible with Creative Commons (CC BY-SA). As Jimbo puts it, This is the party to celebrate the liberation of Wikipedia
— via Slashdot
As part of its ongoing effort to keep a clean index Google is soliciting the help of web browsers to let them know when we find malware in the index. Celebrated Google hacker Johnny Long thinks it’s a good idea, though he doesn’t think it’ll stop real hackers. Most in search of malware for offensive use know the good stuff — it ain’t distributed through public Web … It’s distributed through dark Web servers, peer-to-peer networks, IRC channels, torrents and the like. Google’s efforts will not affect how skilled hackers get access to malware
— via Slashdot
Long-time users of Perl for their public web sites, and having successfully used Ruby on Rails for internal websites, the BBC have fused the two by creating a Perl on Rails that has the advantages of rapid development that Rails brings, while performing well enough to be used for the Beeb’s high-traffic public websites. This is already powering one of their web sites, and is set to be used in the controversial iPlayer project as well — via Slashdot
This week, Deutsche Grammophon, the classical music recording giant that’s owned by Universal Music Group, launched its own DRM-free online music store
The Million Book Project, an international venture led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has completed the digitisation of more than 1.5 million books, which are now available online
Micron Technology, maker of DRAM and flash memory, this week unveiled its plans to come out with solid-state drives. The drives function like regular hard drives, but instead of storing data on spinning disks, the data gets stored on NAND memory chips — the kind found in cameras and MP3 players
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