A new species of giant carnivorous plant has been discovered in the highlands of the central Philippines. The pitcher plant is among the largest of all pitchers and is so big that it can catch rats as well as insects in its leafy trap. The botanists have named the pitcher plant Nepenthes attenboroughii, after British natural history broadcaster David Attenborough
By slamming materials together, scientists have made a mineral that is found naturally only in meteorites and the deep layers of Earth’s mantle. Their successful shock
experiment reveals new clues about the formation of our early Solar System
Failing to find a larger company to acquire it, Nambu Network will shut down its link shortening service. Tr.im has thousands of users and creates tens of thousands of URLs per day for social media users
Facebook has acquired fellow Silicon Valley startup FriendFeed, in the clearest sign yet that it plans to extend its lead over rivals such as MySpace and Twitter. The world’s largest social networking company said it was acquiring its Californian neighbour for an undisclosed sum — believed to be in the tens of millions of dollars — in an attempt to hire the best engineers
Come September, some customers of Australian Capital Territory internet service provider TransACT will be able to select a 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload broadband service. The data charges alone, excluding charges that any of the 11 ISPs that can deliver services across its network, will be $89.95 per month
A new procedure to turn blocks of wood into artificial bones has been developed by Italian scientists, who plan to implant them into large animals, and eventually humans. Wood-derived bone substitute should allow live bones to heal faster and more securely after a break than currently available metal and ceramic implants. The researchers chose wood because it closely resemble the physical structure of natural bone, which is impossible to reproduce with conventional processing technology
Whistleblower web site Wikileaks has published in full the Vodafone/2degrees story censored earlier this week by the New Zealand Commerce Commission. Wikileaks has provided several links to access the full story, from countries outside New Zealand, including Sweden, US, Finland, the Netherlands and Tonga. The organisation said that the file it had made available for download directly affects the country’s telecommunications regulations
Unknown hackers broke into the web site of the Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF) this week, in what appeared to be a similar attack to one perpetrated last week on the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF)
A notorious patent case about a technology that allows people to search multimedia content may finally be coming to a close. Earlier this week, a judge ruled that two patents initially awarded to Encyclopedia Britannica are invalid. The patents were built on the infamous 5,241,671 patent first unveiled by Compton’s NewMedia in 1993 at the Comdex trade show. That patent, which covered the retrieval of information from multimedia content and is now owned by Britannica, would have been relevant to the many companies selling multimedia CD-ROMs at the time
Medical abortion is about to become more widely available across Australia, after not-for-profit sexual health organisation Marie Stopes International won the right to use the so-called abortion pill
RU486 in its clinics. From today the drug, also known as mifepristone, will be offered as an alternative to surgical abortion by 14 doctors at MSI’s nine centres in Victoria, NSW, the ACT, Western Australia and Queensland. It will be used only at less than nine weeks’ gestation, under prescribing and import rights granted by the Therapeutic Goods Administration. Marie Stopes said the TGA had relaxed rules compared with previous prescribing rights
As researchers rush to commercialise printable batteries that pattern organic semiconductors onto paper-thin, flexible substrates, a German team claims to be on-track for a 2010 product launch. Scientists at the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems together with colleagues from Chemnitz University of Technology and Menippos GmbH (all based in Chemnitz, Germany) collaborated on product development. They are targeting applications such as smart credit cards with battery-powered displays to show balances and other account information. Fraunhofer’s batteries use zinc anodes and manganese cathodes, which react with one another to produce electricity. The materials slowly dissipate over the lifetime of the battery, making them suitable for short-term applications like greeting cards with built-in music players
Looking into Iran’s portion of the Internet is not an easy task. But the network security firm Arbor Networks recently released traffic data for both internal and external-facing Internet service providers in the country. This data shows that the country continues to filter Internet traffic and that its ISPs can filter larger quantities of data than before
A teenager sent by his parents to a boot camp to cure his Internet addiction died after he was beaten by camp supervisors. The three teachers who allegedly beat Deng Senshan, 16, were detained by local police Sunday, according to Deng Fei, the boy’s father, a businessman from Ziyuan county
The long-absent PC brand Gateway has been re-launched in Australia, attempting to target the fashion-conscious consumer. Acer, who acquired Gateway in 2007, has positioned the cow-patterned brand at the style-conscious, realigning the Acer brand for the tech-savvy, while its Emachines division will be targeted at the budget-oriented
user. There are no plans to bring the Packard Bell brand into Australia. Unlike in the past, Gateway machines will be found in retail stores rather than a direct sales model, with Harvey Norman listed as the major launch partner
A massively co-ordinated
attack on web sites including Google, Facebook and Twitter was directed at one individual, it has been confirmed. Facebook told BBC News that the strike was aimed at a pro-Georgian blogger known as Cyxymu
Malaysia is considering the establishment of an Internet filter, similar to China’s abandoned Green Dam
project, a source familiar with the process told Reuters on Thursday. News of the proposal emerged within days of police arresting nearly 600 opposition supporters at a weekend rally denouncing a government that has ruled this Southeast Asian country for 51 years. A vibrant Internet culture has contributed to political challenges facing the government, which tightly controls mainstream media and has used sedition laws and imprisonment without trial to prosecute a blogger
In the latest phase of the nanotechnology revolution, scientists have built a collection of minuscule objects from DNA, including toothed gears, curved tubes, and a wireframe beach ball five millionths of a centimetre in diameter. As well as being able to hold vast amounts of information, DNA is tough and flexible, making it an attractive candidate for use as a nanomaterial. Advances in molecular biology in recent decades have meant that scientists are well equipped to work with DNA and program it to do whatever they want
Nicotine enhances attention and memory in schizophrenics, says a study that supports the development of new treatments which could relieve symptoms and prevent smoking-related deaths. A strong link between schizophrenia and smoking — with over three times as many schizophrenics smoking (70 to 90%) as the population at large — prompted scientists to investigate the link
Micro-blogging service Twitter and social networking site Facebook have been severely disrupted by hackers. Twitter was taken offline for more than two hours whilst Facebook’s service was degraded
, according to the firms. The popular sites were subject to so-called denial-of-service attacks on Thursday, the companies believe
A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on 3 August in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe
, and that Prince’s companies encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life
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