A team of pioneering South Korean scientists have succeeded in producing the polymers used for everyday plastics through bioengineering, rather than through the use of fossil fuel based chemicals. Polymers are molecules found in everyday life in the form of plastics and rubbers. The team, from the prestigious KAIST University and the Korean chemical company LG Chem, led by Professor Sang Yup Lee focused their research on Polylactic Acid (PLA), a bio-based polymer which holds the key to producing plastics through natural and renewable resources
Spam king Alan Ralsky has been sentenced to more than four years in prison for fraud and violating the CAN-SPAM Act. The Department of Justice said Ralsky’s spam was difficult to trace, and a Cisco researcher said Ralsky was one of the first to use botnets. Progress is being made against spam, with traffic down this year from 2008
Researchers have demonstrated a prototype device that can rid hands, feet, or even underarms of bacteria, including the hospital superbug MRSA. The device works by creating something called a plasma, which produces a cocktail of chemicals in air that kill bacteria but are harmless to skin. A related approach could see the use of plasmas to speed the healing of wounds
The mental and emotional storm that struck America on 11 September 2001 with the attacks on New York and Washington has been recreated with the release of more than half a million pager messages sent on that day. The whistleblowing web site Wikileaks published the messages over a 24-hour period beginning on Tuesday at dawn, releasing them in batches in chronological order as if in real time. The massive archive includes thousands of messages from US officials including Pentagon workers and New York police, as well as members of the public from all over America, which together provide an insight into the initial chaos and confusion, followed by a dawning horror as 9/11 unfolded
The BBC has said it has no intention
of charging for online news, in a declaration that is unlikely to please James Murdoch and his father Rupert as they prepare to start charging for News Corporation content on the internet
Police officers in England and Wales have made arrests just to get people on to the DNA database, a retired police superintendent has claimed. He told the Human Genetics Commission (HGC) this was the norm
. It wants new guidance for police to regulate when it is appropriate to take a sample of DNA
Mobile operators are unable to comply with proposed anti-copyright theft legislation that requires them to identify unlawful file-sharers. In the wake of the Digital Economy Bill, published on Friday, Mobile Broadband Group chief Hamish MacLeod told ZDNet UK that the government’s plans to force ISPs to hand over customer data to rights holders and potentially disconnect persistent infringers would apply to mobile operators. However, he said, operators have a problem with identification [of unlawful downloaders] to the telephone
Australia’s financial transactions regulator has given eBay subsidiary PayPal Australia until May next year to bulletproof its online payment service against money launderers and terrorism financiers
Allianz Australia expects to save more than $1 million by switching from Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Linux for key applications. The move involves dropping the traditional Wintel (Windows-Intel) platform for a virtualised IBM mainframe running on Linux. The migration is part of a $4m technology infrastructure overhaul to match Allianz’s growing business requirements
For parents too stretched to make sure their offspring are perfectly turned out at all times, it may just be the scientific cover they’ve been waiting for. They will now be able to answer the disapproving tuts of their more fastidious friends by pointing to research which gives biological backing to the old adage that the more germs a child is exposed to during early childhood, the better their immune system in later life
Google’s dual-pronged operating-system strategy will likely produce a single OS down the road, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin
After the report last week that Brazil’s e-voting machines had withstood the scrutiny of a team of invited hackers, reader ateu writes with news that a hacker has shown that the Linux-based voting machines aren’t perfectly safe; he was able to eavesdrop on them (translated from Portuguese) by means of Van Eck phreaking — via Slashdot
Australians who believed their home phone numbers were permanently protected from unsolicited marketing calls by joining the Do Not Call database may find themselves receiving fresh phone sales pitches next year, as the first entries on the national register expire. More than 4 million telephone numbers will be registered on the government database by the end of this year if growth patterns continue. But the three-year time limit on registrations will lapse for more than 1 million numbers, initially listed when the database opened in May 2007
Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times journalist, is calling for a boycott of Microsoft’s Bing. They have censored search requests at the request of the Chinese Government. The difference is that Bing has censored all searches done anywhere in simplified Chinese characters (the characters used in mainland China). This means that a Chinese speaker searching for Tiananmen anywhere in the world now gets the impression that it is just a lovely place to visit — via Slashdot
New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real. Researchers there are developing silicon-and-silk implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning your skin into a screen. The silk substrate onto which the chips are mounted eventually dissolves away inside the body, leaving just the electronics behind. The silicon chips are around the length of a small grain of rice — about 1 millimetre, and just 250 nanometres thick. The sheet of silk will keep them in place, molding to the shape of the skin when saline solution is added
AOL said that it plans to reduce its workforce by a third over the next several months. The company, which is based in New York but maintains a large campus in the Dulles area, employs about 6,900 people. The company is hoping to get as many as 2,500 workers to depart voluntarily and is offering extra severance pay to people who leave by the end of December
Engineering researchers at the University of Arkansas have developed a unique and robust method to prevent cloning of passive radio frequency identification tags. The technology, based on one or more unique physical attributes of individual tags rather than information stored on them, will prevent the production of counterfeit tags and thus greatly enhance both security and privacy for government agencies, businesses and consumers
Lord Mandelson will present the Digital Economy Bill to the public, which among other things is aimed at reducing illicit file-sharing. According to parts of the bill that leaked today, the legislation could lead to jail terms for file-sharers and unprecedented power for the entertainment industries
X-Flex is a new kind of wallpaper: one that’s quite possibly stronger than the wall it’s on. Invented by Berry Plastics in partnership with the US Army Corps of Engineers, this lifesaving adhesive is designed for use anyplace that’s prone to blasts and other lethal forces, like in war or natural-disaster zones, chemical plants or airports. To keep a shelter’s walls from collapsing in an explosion and to contain all the flying debris, you simply peel off the wallpaper’s sticky backing, apply the rollable sheets to the inside of brick or cinder-block walls, and reinforce it with fasteners at the edges. Covering an entire room can take less than an hour
Staff at mobile phone company T-Mobile passed on millions of records from thousands of customers to third party brokers. Details emerged after the firm alerted the information commissioner, who said his office was preparing a prosecution
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