A prototype artificial skin used to heal wounds has been developed by British researchers. Writing in the journal Regenerative Medicine, UK-based company Intercytex said it had produced promising results in early trials. It said the skin seemed to incorporate itself much better with real tissue than any other skin substitutes tried in the past. The researchers hope it might provide an alternative to skin grafts
The UK government has announced that it will publish guidance for schools on how creationism and intelligent design relate to science teaching, and has reiterated that it sees no place for either on the science curriculum. It has also defined Intelligent Design
, the idea that life is too complex to have arisen without the guiding hand of a greater intelligence, as a religion, along with creationism
Google is taking a novel approach to global censorship by asking US trade officials to treat Internet restrictions as international trade barriers, similar to other hurdles to global commerce
The giant pengiun fossil, which was discovered in Peru and is described today in detail by scientists reveals a creature that was over 1.5 metres tall and weighed as much as a person. The 36 million year old tropical bird’s intimidating appearance was topped off with powerful forearms, a chunky neck and a potentially vicious 18 centimetre long spear-like beak. The discovery of the giant penguin is also shaking up scientists’ understanding of penguin evolution. The finds indicate that penguins made the journey to equatorial regions much earlier in their evolutionary history than researchers had realised
The trailer for the upcoming movie Babylon 5: The Lost Tales — Voices in the Dark has been posted at the official Babylon 5 site. For more on the creation of the film, the CG Society has an ongoing series of articles about the production’s effects development — via Slashdot
Recognising the threat of China’s growing online community, Chinese President Hu Jintao called in January for the Internet to be purified
, and the government has since launched a number of online crackdowns. One cannot truly say that the Internet in China is becoming more and more free, because at the same time as the development of citizen journalists, the government finds ways of blocking or censoring content,
said Julien Pain, who monitors Internet freedom issues for Reporters Without Borders
Researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have created a model teleportation system using quantum dots. According to recent research, tiny clusters of atoms known as quantum dots may be excellent media for quantum teleportation, a physics phenomenon in which information — in the form of a quantum state, a very specific mathematical signature of an atom — can be transmitted almost instantaneously to a distant location without having to physically travel through space
Google is in acquisition discussions with telephone management startup GrandCentral. The basic idea around GrandCentral is one phone number for all your phones, for life
. If you use GrandCentral you can give out a single phone number. What happens when that person calls that number depends on his/her relationship to you, and what you are doing at the time
Some ISPs are resorting to a new tactic to increase revenue: inserting advertisements into web pages requested by their end users. They use a transparent web proxy (such as this one) to insert javascript and/or HTML with the ads into pages returned to users. Neither the content providers nor the end-users have been notified that this is taking place, and I’m sure that they weren’t asked for permission either — via Slashdot
Mars will be transformed into a shirt-sleeve, habitable world for humanity before century’s end, made livable by thawing out the coldish climes of the red planet and altering its now carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. How best to carry out a fast-paced, decade by decade planetary facelift of Mars — a technique called terraforming
— has been outlined by Lowell Wood, a noted physicist and recent retiree of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a long-time Visiting Fellow of the Hoover Institution
According to Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group, Vista is far more secure than competing platforms — or even previous Windows iterations
The union movement’s hard men are babes alongside John Howard’s mob. Really. Profanity in a blue singlet is meaningless, comparatively. The real goons in public life are mostly in parliamentary politics, whatever their ideological allegiance, and not on the shop floor. There is a stunning quote in the book The Hollow Men that says: We assume politicians are without honour. Not that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political life.
The quote comes from a woman, Adrienne Rich, and is quoted by Nicky Hager in his book on New Zealand politics published last year. It is Hager’s book which details how involved in the 2005 New Zealand election were Australia’s Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor, Howard’s two favourite political machine men for hire. Crosby Textor’s New Zealand client, the National Party, failed only narrowly to defeat Helen Clark’s Labour Government.
Three days ago, on the eve of our Federal Parliament going into its winter recess for six weeks, Labor’s Anthony Albanese tried to force an urgency debate the instant the House of Representatives assembled for the day’s business. What the Opposition wanted was the Government to come clean
on the secret propaganda machine
of six to eight taxpayer-funded staffers whom that morning’s issue of The Bulletin claimed have worked “under the radar” for seven years in the Sydney CBD ministerial office of Howard’s Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock.
It was the same day the Herald’s Phillip Coorey wrote a front-page story headlined, Exposed: the secret business plot to wreck Labor. Coorey told of a confidential
three-page document which outlined how the Coalition’s chief pollster, Mark Textor
, had been hired by the Business Council of Australia to devise and co-ordinate
an advertising campaign costing at least $6.5 million
to support the Howard Government’s contentious industrial relations laws.
In Parliament, Albanese’s attempt to force an urgency debate listed 10 key points the Opposition wanted Ruddock to detail to Parliament, including the relationship between
the secret political unit
in his office and the federal secretariat of the Liberal Party and the Crosby Textor
political research organisation. The Government would have none of it.
It used its numbers, in a series of three votes, to kill the debate. Later, during question time, Howard batted away three questions on the Coorey story without answering any of them. Instead he spent his time trashing the union movement and insisting that Crosby and Textor, as heads of a private business, are entitled to do work for clients other than the Liberal Party
— via The Sydney Morning Herald
Dell took notice earlier this year when customers and the media reiterated complaints over the glut of crapware, or preinstalled PC software, packaged with new computers. Many PC makers said they do offer ways for consumers to wipe a new computer’s slate clean. But this week, Dell announced it would hand more control over to customers during the purchase process. Dell.com customers buying an XPS system, Inspiron notebook or Dimension desktop can select a no software preinstalled
option. This will eliminate productivity, ISP, photo and music software, but not everything
As many as 1500 Pentagon computers were brought offline on Wednesday in response to a cyber attack. Defence Secretary Robert Gates reported of the fallout both that the attack had no adverse impact on department operations
and that there will be some administrative disruptions and personal inconveniences
. When asked whether his own e-mail had been compromised, Gates responded, I don’t do e-mail. I’m a very low-tech person
— via Slashdot
A small New York state college will be the site of the first large-scale wireless LAN based on the draft 802.11n high-throughput standard. Within the next two weeks, Morrisville State College will start initial testing of thin access points from Meru, plus the vendor’s existing 802.11abg devices and early models of its recently announced 11n device, the AP300. Even at this stage, the net is posing intriguing new challenges for Morrisville, Meru and IBM Global Technology Services, the systems integrator for the project
The founder of Creative Commons, the Stanford lawyer behind the Eldred vs Ashcroft
case, and the author of ‘Code’ has spent the last 10 years working tirelessly on behalf of limited copyright terms, net neutrality, and the public domain. Tuesday, Lawrence Lessig announced on his blog that he has decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism
from fighting the good fight for the public domain to fighting the good fight against corruption and the influence of big money’s effects on legislation in general — via Slashdot
For months, the industry has been calling on Microsoft to ease restrictions forcing customers to use only the priciest versions of Windows Vista for desktop virtualisation, which it had planned this week before changing its mind at the last minute
Google employees Brian Rakowski and Garrett Casto from the Antiphishing and Antimalware Teams have announced that the company is opening up its Safe Browsing API to the public. The Safe Browsing API allows easy access to Google’s updated blacklist of suspected phishing and malware-infested web pages. The blacklists are the same ones used in Google’s antiphishing plug-in for the Firefox web browser, as well as Google Desktop
EMI’s recently-appointed senior vice president of digital Lauren Berkowitz has confirmed significant success with the company’s move to sell DRM-free tracks through iTunes
In a quiet industrial park in Petaluma, a startup called Raydiance is miniaturising a type of laser that generates an ultrashort burst of photons so intense that it can vapourise matter without creating heat. CEO Barry Schuler, who founded Raydiance based on technology that arose from military research, says it could be used for any number of purposes, such as removing tattoos without burning the skin or killing cancer cells without affecting healthy ones. Now, Schuler is ready to proclaim that the Raydiance laser — which looks like an ordinary slide projector — could spawn an industry based on using brief bursts of photons to poke clean holes, with no burn marks, in anything from skin to steel
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