Sweden’s government has presented a bill to give its defence intelligence agency powers to monitor any e-mail or phone call into or out of the country. The National Defence Radio Establishment currently listens in on military communications and needs a court order for any other surveillance. The government says conversations within Sweden would remain untouched
Australian researchers say they have found a previously undiscovered species of taipan. The young snake has been found in the central deserts of Western Australia as part of a biodiversity survey. It was initially thought to be a brown snake, but Professor Steve Donellan from the South Australian Museum says DNA testing revealed it to be an unknown species of taipan. He says there are only two other known species of taipan in Australia, and the last one was found 125 years ago
Scientists from the Northern Territory Menzies School of Health Research say they have discovered an effective treatment for the strain of malaria found in the Asia-Pacific region. The treatment combines a Chinese herbal extract and a longer-acting anti-malarial drug used to combat the more deadly strain of the disease found in Africa
Serbian vampire hunters have acted to prevent the very remote possibility that former dictator Slobodan Milosevic might stage a come-back — by driving a three-foot stake through his heart — via The Pagan Prattle
A new DNA test will help police in the UK solve rape cases even when the attacker has not left any traces of sperm. The test looks for the genetic hallmark of other cells present in semen, such as skin and immune cells. Its developers at Birmingham’s Forensic Science Service say the test will help provide DNA evidence in a further 90 sexual assault cases a year
Launched in 2001, A123 leveraged research initiated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to commercially develop lithium-ion batteries that incorporate nanotechnology in the electrodes. The result is a new generation of batteries that deliver up to 10 times longer cycle life, five times more power and dramatically faster charge times over conventional high-power battery technology
Apple may sell zippy notebook computers later this year that use the same type of fast memory as music players and digital cameras, driving down prices of hard-disk drives, according Shaw Wu, an analyst at American Technology Research. A shift to flash memory in place of much slower hard-disk drives would eliminate one headache for consumers: lengthy start-up times when turning on computers
The prototype of a short-range gigabit wireless chip, which promises more than 2Gbps throughput speeds and costs just AU$10, will be unveiled by the end of this year, according to researchers from National ICT Australia
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created the world’s first material that reflects virtually no light
. This anti-reflection technology is based on nanomaterial and could lead to the development of more efficient solar cells, brighter LEDs and smarter
light sources. In theory, if a room were to be coated with this material, switching on the lights would only illuminate the items in the room and not the walls, giving a sense of floating free in infinite space
VMware is introducing a public beta version of ACE 2 Enterprise Edition, an upgrade of its two-year-old ACE program for virtualising desktop computers so they can run multiple software or operating systems. One of the new features is Pocket ACE, which allows the user to store the ACE desktop virtualisation tool on a USB drive, a portable hard drive or an Apple iPod, plug it into a remote computer and run the virtualisation software on that computer
Most people just grumble and hit delete, but when Gordon Dick received a spam message advertising Internet services, he fought back. The 30-year-old Web marketing specialist from Edinburgh sued the sender, Transcom Internet Services, in small-claims court. The court ordered the company to pay $1,445 in damages and $1,190 in court costs. If someone was throwing stones through your window, would you just ignore it?
Dick said. It’s anti-social behaviour and they shouldn’t be doing it in the first place
The sale of imitation samurai swords could be banned by the end of the year in the UK. Importing or hiring the weapons could also be made illegal following a string of samurai sword attacks in recent years. Breaching the ban, which is targeted at cheap imitation samurai swords rather than the more expensive genuine collectors’ items made by licensed swordsmiths in Japan, would result in up to six months in jail and a £5,000 fine
Access to YouTube has been suspended in Turkey following a court order. The ban was imposed after prosecutors told the court that clips insulting former Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had appeared on the site. According to Turkish media, there has been a virtual war
between Greek and Turkish users of the site, with both sides posting insulting videos
Google is developing a program to help academics around the world exchange huge amounts of data. The firm’s open source team is working on ways to physically transfer huge data sets up to 120 terabytes in size. Google sends scientists a hard drive system and then copies it before passing it on to other researchers
OpenID has gained two more high profile Internet company supporters. WordPress announced their support and 37Signals support is nigh. These two organisations join Digg, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, LiveJournal, MediaWiki and others in their support of OpenID
Japan’s public broadcaster NHK reported late last week that the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry plans to introduce Linux for use within classrooms across the country in the near future
The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalises the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned
Dell is considering offering the Linux operating system as an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows on its personal computers. The PC maker said it received more than 100,000 customer requests for Linux in a suggestion box
posted on Dell’s Web site less than three weeks ago
As of today, the Ubuntu development branch includes a tool called Proprietary Drivers manager
that makes it easy for users to activate proprietary drivers. Together with the graphical frontends to Beryl and Compiz this will make the activation and experience of the 3D desktop very pleasant
Our closest invertebrate relative, the humble sea squirt, can regenerate its entire body from just tiny blood vessel fragments. The entire regeneration process, which in part resembles the early stages of embryonic development, can produce an adult sea squirt in as little as a week. The finding could illuminate not only the evolutionary origins of regeneration in all organisms, but also subsequent changes to it during vertebrate evolution
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