A shopper at a Wal-Mart in Falmouth made a mysterious find on the shelves Saturday night: a wallet with a collection of human teeth in it, police said. The man was shopping at the Teaticket Highway store just after 9.30 pm when he found the 10 teeth in a zippered compartment of a wallet, said Kimberly Pacheco, a clerk at the Falmouth Police Department. The teeth were determined to be from an adult; one of them had a filling, police said. The customer brought the wallet to the attention of a sales clerk but left the store without giving his name. Police said they cannot perform DNA tests on the teeth because there was no blood or gum tissue attached
NSW state corporation RailCorp has threatened a Sydney software developer with legal action if he fails to withdraw a train timetable application that is currently the second most popular application in its category in Apple’s App Store
Clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill, currently being debated by the UK Parliament, would allow any Minister by order to take from anywhere any information gathered for one purpose, and use it for any other purpose. Personal information arbitrarily used without consent or even knowledge: the very opposite of Data Protection
. An Information Sharing Order
, as defined in Clause 152, would permit personal information to be trafficked and abused, not only all across government and the public sector — it would also reach into the private sector. And it would even allow transfer of information across international borders. NO2ID has launched a Facebook group to challenge this threat to data protection — via Slashdot
Two weeks ago the music industry, headed by the IFPI, gave Norway’s largest Internet provider Telenor an ultimatum; block access to The Pirate Bay within 14 days or we will take you to court. The ISP has now announced that it wont give in to IFPI’s demands, lawsuit or not
The ethical debate over embryonic stem cell use may soon be moot, thanks to a Canadian team of researchers who, together with a team out of Scotland, has found a safe way to grow stem cells from a patient’s own skin. The revolutionary finding, described in a paper published yesterday by the international science journal Nature, means doctors may be one step closer to treating a multitude of diseases, including Alzheimer’s, diabetes and Parkinson’s
UK Justice Secretary Jack Straw has been criticised by a security vendor for using a Hotmail account for government business — an account that was subsequently hacked by Nigerian scammers
A solar power milestone was reached when First Solar Inc brought its manufacturing costs for solar panels down to $1 per watt. But a study from the University of California and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs suggests that this might be the bottom for a price-point — if solar power is ever going to scale up to become competitive with other forms of energy
The Government’s plan to introduce mandatory internet censorship has effectively been scuttled, following an independent senator’s decision to join the Greens and Opposition in blocking any legislation required to get the scheme started. The Opposition’s communications spokesman Nick Minchin has this week obtained independent legal advice saying that if the Government is to pursue a mandatory filtering regime legislation of some sort will almost certainly be required
. Senator Nick Xenophon previously indicated he may support a filter that blocks online gambling websites but in a phone interview today he withdrew all support, saying the more evidence that’s come out, the more questions there are on this
It’s been a rough week for the RIAA as massive layoffs are about to cost many employees their job. On top of that, the anti-piracy outfit is being sued for abusing the legal system for its war on piracy, civil conspiracy, deceptive trade practices, trespassing and computer fraud
Internode has announced it will offer fibre to the home Internet at up to 100Mbps to homes in OptiComm estates. The fibre connection is installed by OptiComm when building the estates, and Internode will offer retail broadband and phone services on it. Broadband will be available at 25, 50 and 100Mbps, and the speeds will not vary depending on distance
Scientists at Pennsylvania State University and Virginia Commonwealth University are producing hydrogen by exposing clusters of aluminium atoms to water. Rather than relying on the electronic properties of the aluminium, this new process depends on the geometric distribution of atoms within the clusters and requires the presence of Lewis acids and Lewis bases in those atoms. Unlike most hydrogen production processes, this method can be used at room temperature and doesn’t require the application of heat or electricity to work
An octopus managed to pry loose a water-control valve at the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium, flooding the facility with more than 200 gallons of saltwater. The valve is inside the sea creature’s tank, and officials think the octopus grabbed hold of it while exploring. A worker arriving in the morning found water overflowing out of the tank and a lovely little lake
on the floor — about 3 inches of water that damaged newly installed carpets, as well as walls and facades
ISPs have rejected a call by childrens’ charities to implement the government’s approved blocklist for images of child sexual abuse, because the list does not stop anyone who wants to accessing such material
Last year, a group of Iranian physicists made the extraordinary discovery that motors can be made of nothing more than a thin film of water sitting in a cell bathed in two perpendicular electric fields. The unexpected result of this set up is that the water begins to rotate. Divide the water into smaller cells and each rotates too. The team at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran have a number of fascinating videos of it in action. They raise an interesting question: the electric fields are static, so what’s making the water move? Now Vlad Vladimirov at York University in the UK and a couple of droogs from Russia have delved into the hydrodynamics to work out what’s putting the oomph in this motor. The key turns out to be the scale on which the effect takes place
When the world’s largest fuel cell exhibition, FC EXPO 2009, kicks off in Tokyo, Sony will be there showing off the latest revision of its hybrid fuel cell technology. The system contains both a methanol fuel cell and a Li-on battery, enabling it to intelligently switch between power from the battery, fuel, or even both under high-draw circumstances. Sony will have two sizes on display: a portable model that could keep you talking on your mobile for a week, and a heftier interior
model that could do the same for a month. The company’s even attached a bottle of methanol to a wireless speaker, resulting in infinite placement possibilities and a groovy light show to boot. If that weren’t enough, the company will be demonstrating an updated, more efficient version of its sugar battery, which can be powered by Coca-Cola
Google has apologised for the two and a half hour Gmail outage on Tuesday morning, and admitted that the cause was down to datacentre maintenance
Google’s Gmail was down for hours overnight, one of the longest e-mail outages for the search giant. Gmail is the third most popular e-mail service, with 113 million users, and the outage could mean a refund for Google’s business customers. Google postings said Gmail had some problems
, and an analyst said Google needs to correct them
Ireland’s largest ISP won’t block The Pirate Bay — the embattled BitTorrent search engine and tracker — absent a court order. Eircom is aware of copyright infringement issues but will not block The Pirate Bay unless major record labels can obtain a court order requiring it and other ISPs (Internet service providers) to do so
The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia reports that all of its user data was irretrievably lost in the 30 January database crash that knocked the service offline. That means that users who were unable to recover their bookmarks through publicly available tools (including other social media sites and the Google cache) have lost all their data. Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff said last week that the service’s MySQL database included nearly half a terabyte of data
The University of Adelaide has decided to replace an in-house email system with Gmail for its more than 16,000 students. The non-financial
agreement with Google will allow all undergraduate, honours and postgraduate coursework students to change over from their University of Adelaide email account to a new Google account from 16 March this year and will also allow them to use Google Calendar and Google Talk instant messaging
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