A Norwegian team has made the first piece of hardware that uses evolution to change its design at runtime to solve the problem at hand in the most effective way. By turning on and off its genes
it can change the way it works, and it can go through 20,000 – 30,000 generations in just a few seconds. That same number of generations took humans 800,000 – 900,000 years
Apple is throwing its weight behind the music industry’s efforts to protect the album format by allowing fans to buy complete digital albums without having to pay again for songs they already own. The record industry is keen to maintain the profitable album format, which is under threat as users of web-based music download stores, such as Apple’s iTunes and Napster, prefer to buy individual songs rather than whole albums. Apple said it was introducing a Complete My Album
service that offers customers who want to turn individual tracks into an album a 99-cent credit for every song they have already purchased from the album
A student has been suspended from school in America for coming to class dressed as a pirate. But the disciplinary action has provoked controversy — because the student says that the ban violates his rights, as the pirate costume is part of his religion. Bryan Killian says that he follows the Pastafarian religion, and that as a crucial part of his faith, he must wear full pirate regalia
as prescribed in the holy texts of Pastafarianism — via WWdN: In Exile
Chemists at the University of Washington who have made glasses with lenses that can be transparent or dark, in shades of yellow, green or purple, all at the push of a button. The glasses will let the wearer instantly change the colour of their lenses to virtually any hue by tuning a tiny electronic knob in the frame
A device that uses radio waves to heat the muscle lining of patients’ airways appears to treat their asthma. Just three sessions of the new treatment cut the number of mild asthma attacks in patients by a half during a one-year trial. The probe reduces inflammation in the bronchial tubes, doctors believe, and could lessen asthmatics’ need for steroids. The procedure, known as bronchial thermoplasty, involves inserting a long, thin catheter probe through the nose or mouth to reach the lung airways. Once the probe is in place, the tip is heated using radio waves. This raises the temperature in the muscle tissue of the airway up to 65°C for 10 seconds
Two Kiwi schoolgirls are worldwide celebrities after their school experiment forced an international pharmaceutical and food giant to admit it made false claims about vitamin C levels in Ribena. GlaxoSmithKline, the second-largest food and drug company in the world, was yesterday fined NZ$217,500 in the Auckland District Court after it admitted 15 breaches of the Fair Trading Act
San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to become the first US city to ban plastic bags from large supermarkets to help promote recycling. Under the legislation, beginning in six months large supermarkets and drugstores will not be allowed to offer plastic bags made from petroleum products — via Darren Barefoot
Microsoft is warning users of a new exploit that could allow an attacker to control which sites a user can visit. The vulnerability lies within the Web Proxy Auto Discover (WPAD) component
Just a couple of weeks ago Sandisk introduced a 32GB solid-state drive. Now Samsung has one-upped them, unveiling a 64GB solid-state drive. They are expecting to begin shipping in the second quarter of this year. Samsung says the device can read 64 MB/s, write 45 MB/s, and uses just 0.5 W when operating (0.1 W when idle). In comparison, an 80GB 1.8-inch hard drive reads at 15 MB/s, writes at 7 MB/s, and consumes 1.5 W when either operating or idle
Web sites that feature the TRUSTe security certificate are two times more likely to contain badware than Web sites without any security certification, researcher Ben Edelman alleges
EcoPods are environmentally friendly coffins made from recycled paper. Whether you’re worried about the state of the planet, or just want to be sure that you’ll have an easy climb back out of the grave, should the zombiism take hold, this seems like a good idea — via Boing Boing
A remote-controlled mechanism to launch tiny, liquid-filled darts into the bellies of horses was found buried under the starting gate of a Hong Kong race track. It was a device worthy of Rube Goldberg, or perhaps Wile E Coyote
— via kottke.org
For the first time, physicists have devised a way to make visible light travel in the opposite direction that it normally bends when passing from one material to another, like from air through water or glass. The phenomenon is known as negative refraction and could in principle be used to construct optical microscopes for imaging things as small as molecules, and even to create cloaking devices for rendering objects invisible — via Warren Ellis
A new electronic spacecraft propulsion concept proposes to utilise electrostatically charged and accelerated nanoparticles as propellant. Millions of micron-sized nanoparticle thrusters would fit on one square centimetre, allowing the fabrication of highly scalable thruster arrays — via Nanowerk
St Louis University researchers have concocted batteries fueled by almost any kind of sugar, from tree sap to flat soda, and that could be used to power everything from computers to mobile phones. Their thinking: If sugar can jack up the human body, why not electronics?
Forget WEP and WPA; try switching over to the EM-SEC Coating System, a recently announced paint developed by EM-SEC Technologies that acts as an electromagnetic fortress, allowing a wireless network to be contained within painted walls without fear of someone tapping in or hacking wireless networks. The EM-SEC Coating System is clearly the most secure option aside from stringing out the CAT5, and can be safely used to protect wireless networks in business and government facilities
A company named Tenebraex is helping colour-blind people to travel. But it’s also developing goggles to help soldiers and physicians to see all colours at night, and not only the green colour of current night vision systems. These goggles, which should become available this northern summer, will be sold for about US$6,000 to the Army. But as states one of the founders of the company, with monochrome night vision, blood is the same colour as water
. So these expensive night vision devices might be more targeted to Army physicians than to regular soldiers
A study in the peer-reviewed journal Science shows that mice transgenetically altered with a single human gene are then able to see in full tri-colour vision. Mice without this alteration are normally colour-blind. The scientists speculate that mammalian brains even from animals that have never evolved colour vision are flexible enough to interpret new colour-sense information with just the simple addition of new photoreceptors. Such a result is also indicated by a dominant X chromosome mutation that allows for quad-colour vision in some women
e360 Insight, the spammer that sued Spamhaus, is accused of using a botnet and compromised headers to get their advertising
into the mailboxes of the claimant. These are also the folks that tried to get the Illinois courts to suspend SpamHaus’s domain registration when they wouldn’t play by e360’s rules
Australia’s sluggish broadband speed has drawn the ridicule of business leaders both here and abroad. Australians are typically avid users of new technology once it arrives but the nation’s small population, large land mass and legacy of heavy communications regulation have meant infrastructure plans have been slow to gain traction. Some big names have launched openly scathing attacks on the nation’s broadband speeds in recent months. Rupert Murdoch calls the service a disgrace
and James Packer says installing high-speed broadband should be a top priority for Australia
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