A new report from CSIRO’s Energy Transformed Flagship and the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation contains exciting news for oil dependent rural and urban Australians. This podcast explains how plant matter which is currently wasted can be easily harnessed to make fuels at an equivalent cost of oil at $US40-60 a barrel
Australian consumers have been given a new advocate to represent their interests in the telecommunications sphere. Consumer law and small business experts have joined forces with representatives of indigenous and disabled Australians to form a new peak body aimed at giving the community a stronger platform to raise concerns about telecommunications issues. The federal Government announced the new organisation, the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN), today
Search giant Google today defended the incomplete Australian coverage provided by its Street View add-on to its Google Maps and Earth tools, after launching the service early Tuesday morning. Street View allows users of Google Maps and Earth to view street-side photos of the geographic locations they are viewing with the tools. The service has previously been available in the US and several other countries, but Australia only received the additional functionality today
The Knights Templar are demanding that the Vatican give them back their good name and, possibly, billions in assets into the bargain, 700 years after the order was brutally suppressed by a joint venture between the Pope and the King of France. If the Holy See doesn’t comply, the warrior knights, renowned for liberating the Holy Land, will deploy that most fearsome of weapons: a laborious court case through the creaking Spanish legal system
Criminals who use firearms may find it much harder to evade justice in future, thanks to an ingenious new bullet tagging technology developed in the UK. The tiny tags — just 30 microns in diameter and invisible to the naked eye — are designed to be coated onto gun cartridges. They then attach themselves to the hands or gloves of anyone handling the cartridge and are very difficult to wash off completely. Crucially, some of these nanotags
also remain on the cartridge even after it has been fired. This should make it possible to establish a robust forensic link between a cartridge fired during a crime and whoever handled it
A gravity tractor
could deflect an Earth-threatening asteroid if it was deployed when the asteroid was more than one orbit away from the potential impact, according to a new study. If the space rock was found heading straight for Earth, a combination of techniques — including a gravity tractor — might save the day. The study, carried out by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, shows that the weak gravitational pull of a nearby spacecraft could deflect a hypothetical asteroid 140 metres across, big enough to cause regional devastation if it hit Earth
Scientists have identified the world’s smallest snake — a reptile about 4 inches long and as thin as spaghetti that was found lurking under a rock on the Caribbean island of Barbados. The new species, named Leptotyphlops carlae, is smaller than any of the other 3,100 previously known snake species, according to Pennsylvania State University biologist Blair Hedges, who also had helped find the world’s smallest frog and lizard. It is one of about 300 different species of threadsnake and is a dark brownish gray with two yellow stripes, Hedges said. It was determined to be a newly identified species due to genetic differences from other snakes and its unique color pattern and scales
Researchers and academics in Australia have been given a ten-fold bandwidth boost thanks to a network upgrade by Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet). The improvements will see users’ 1Gbps link increased to 10Gbps. At this speed, it’s about 10,000 times faster than normal ADSL2+ connections,
AARNet chief executive Chris Hancock said
A Filipino scientist says he has created a new composite building board made of chicken feathers that could be a major breakthrough for the construction industry in Asia
The FBI removed computer records from the C Burr Artz Library this week. Darrell Batson, director of Frederick County Public Libraries, said two FBI employees came to the downtown Frederick library either Wednesday or Thursday. The agents removed two public computers from the library’s second floor. They told him they were taking the units back to their office in Washington, DC
Researchers have found what appear to be remnants of pigment in fossilised feathers, opening the possibility of reconstructing the colors of many long-extinct animals
The EFF has announced Switzerland, a tool for testing if your ISP is interfering with your Net connection . It’s command-line only at this point. Of course the tool is FOSS, and you can contribute to it via its SourceForge project
Brian May, guitarist for Queen for the last 30 years, submitted his thesis for a PhD in astrophysics. The news now is that the thesis has been published. You, too, can read all about the population of tiny asteroids and space dust that cause the Zodiacal light. The completed thesis appears as the book A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud
. May was awarded his PhD last summer and accepted a position as chancellor at a British university in November — via Slashdot
After witnessing countless corparate attempts to patent common practices or trademark common terms, and seeing the resulting PR fallout, one would think that companies would just stop trying. Dell, however, seems to think that it should be able to trademark the term cloud computing
, a phrase that entered the tech lexicon many years ago to describe software processing that takes place on a distributed network, such as the Internet
A massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch is inching along with $12 million in government funding and donations of network capacity by two major research organisations
When TorrentFreak reported about the leak of a BuckCherry track last week, and specifically the band’s response to it, they hinted that this could be a covert form of self-promotion. Indeed, after a few days of research they found out that the track wasn’t leaked by pirates, but by Josh Klemme, the manager of the band
Apple has at last issued a patch for the DNS flaw considered one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities ever to affect the Internet. On Friday, Apple posted a security advisory saying that the patch will fix Apple’s implementation of the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) DNS server in Mac OS X v10.4.11, Mac OS X Server v10.4.11, Mac OS X v10.5.4 and Mac OS X Server v10.5.4. The DNS flaw allows an attacker to execute a cache poisoning attack, where traffic to a legitimate domain name is redirected to a malicious one after an attack on a DNS server. The user can type in the correct name for a Web site, but get a fake one instead, which can enable a phishing attack. While some users might notice if they’re directed to a odd-looking Web page, many people could be successfully fooled
Mozilla has announced the release of >Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1, Shiretoko
, for developers and testers. Built on the pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, Shiretoko includes a variety of new features. Called an early developer milestone
, the release includes bug fixes, improved Web standards support, Text API for the Canvas Element, support for border images and JavaScript query selectors, and improvements to the tab-switching function and the Smart Location Bar. Shiretoko is available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux
Ever try to remember who you bumped into at the store a few days back? Or exactly what the company president said at the morning meeting? Well, you’re not alone. And IBM researchers are working on software that just may help you better recollect all the forgotten pieces of your life. This week, the company unveiled software that uses images, sounds and text recorded on everyday mobile devices to help people recall names, faces, conversations and events. Dubbed Pensieve, the software organises bits of collected information, stores them and then helps the user extract them later on
A US scientist has developed a new way of powering fuel cells that could make it practical for home owners to store solar energy and produce electricity to run lights and appliances at night. A new catalyst produces the oxygen and hydrogen that fuel cells use to generate electricity, while using far less energy than current methods. With this catalyst, users could rely on electricity produced by photovoltaic solar cells to power the process that produces the fuel
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