Enormous deep-sea squid emit blinding flashes of light as they attack their prey, research shows. Taningia danae’s spectacular light show was revealed in video footage taken in deep waters off Chichijima Island in the North Pacific
Doctors at a Texas military base are testing a procedure on wounded Iraq veterans that may allow them to regrow portions of lost fingers. The procedure involves treatments with a fine powder called extracellular matrix, which is taken from the bladders of pigs. The substance is what cells latch on to in mammals to allow them to divide and grow into tissue. Scientists who developed the procedure say the substance appears to activate latent biological processes in humans that encourage healing and tissue regeneration. They said the processes are active in human fetuses, which have the ability to regenerate and grow new parts, but the ability becomes dormant after birth
Not more than two months after discovering a means to extract the HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc volume keys
to decrypt AACS DRM on individual films, we’re now getting word that DRM hacker arnezami has found the processing key
used to decrypt the DRM on all HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc films
That bit in our American Holiday Video where we were attacked by the rednecks in the Alabama petrol station: I realise now that I should have seen it coming. We’d been warned by some American modernists — ie; Californians — that the southerners wouldn’t take kindly to any of our light mockery of the things they hold dear — Bush, heterosexuality, NASCAR, Country and Western, short hair… But I never really believed they would take it quite that badly
An official replica of the Maltese Falcon used in promo photos for the 1941 film has been stolen from John’s Grill in San Francisco. The statue was nabbed out of a locked cabinet where it was on display with signed Dashiell Hammett books and other rarities. John’s Grill proprietor John Konstin has put up a $25,000 reward for its return
An animal lover was mauled to death by cheetahs after entering their cage at a zoo in northern Belgium. Karen Aerts, 37, of Antwerp, was found dead in the cage, Olmense Zoo spokesman Jan Libot said. Police said they ruled out any foul play. Authorities believe Aerts, a regular visitor to the zoo, hid in the park late Sunday until it closed and managed to find the keys to the cheetah cage. Karen loved animals. Unfortunately the cheetahs betrayed her trust,
Libot said
Google’s YouTube and a company called Live Digital will offer no refuge to users who uploaded pirated copies of Fox Television’s 24
and The Simpsons
onto their video platforms. A 20th Century Fox Television spokesperson said that Google and Live Digital complied with subpoenas issued by the US District Court in Northern California and disclosed to Fox the identities of two individuals who illegally uploaded entire episodes of 24
prior to its broadcast and DVD release
A European-funded project has been launched to store electricity created from wind in refrigerated warehouses used to store food. As the production of wind energy is variable every day, it cannot easily be accommodated on the electrical grid. So the Night Wind
project wants to store wind energy produced at night in refrigerated warehouses and to release this energy during daytime peak hours. The first tests will be done in the Netherlands this year. And as the cold stores exist already, practically no extra cost should be incurred to store as much as 50,000 megawatt-hours of energy
Google quietly added a small feature to Gmail this week called Mail Fetcher. When that feature launched, Gmail became perfect. Mail Fetcher allows users to access non-Gmail email accounts from within the Gmail interface. If you have a Yahoo email account, and a work email account, etc., you can simply access that email from within Gmail, using POP settings. Gmail will now work in a very similar way as Outlook does on the PC desktop
While the US continues to hash out concerns over the Real ID Act, which aims to create a national ID by standardising state driver’s licenses, China has already implemented a massive online ID database, which they say will help prevent fraud. Anyone can now send a text message or visit the country’s population information centre’s web site, to check if the name and the ID number of a person’s identity card match. If they do match the ID card-holder’s picture also appears, said the Ministry, adding that no other information is available to ensure a citizen’s privacy is protected. Completed at the end of 2006, China’s population information database, the world’s largest, contains personal information on 1.3 billion citizens. Giving public accessing to the database is also designed to correct mistakes if an individual discovers that their name, number and picture don’t match — via Slashdot
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defence and the Army that seeks more information on a military web censorship unit called the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell (AWRAC) after the DOD failed to answer the EFF’s Freedom of Information Act request in an expedited fashion. AWRAC’s existence was revealed last October in an Army News Service piece that described the unit. The AWRAC team monitors hundreds of thousands of web sites each month and contacts webmasters and bloggers about any security concerns
Call them old fashioned, but the founding members of The Who don’t think the Internet is the future of rock, are unhappy about radio’s narrow musical focus, and convinced live music is what it is all about
Everybody needs a Violet for opening jars.
Yahoo this week debuted a new service called Pipes that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line. Reactions from a number of internet-thinkers are very positive. Tim O’Reilly has an extensive post about why he likes Pipes, and he sees it as a manifestation of ideas that have been circulating for some time now — via Boing Boing
Reports are surfacing that EMI is in negotiations with some of the leading music stores to offer a substantial portion of its music catalogue without DRM, with an announcement due as early as today. Under one scenario, music stores like Napster, Real Rhapsody, and others would fork over sizable advance payments in exchange for the right to sell music as unprotected MP3s. Another industry source reports that EMI was also discussing the possibility of selling MP3s on MySpace
Upstart search engine Powerset has just secured an exclusive license for natural language processing technology from Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. It’s a move that some are claiming will allow the small firm to someday challenge Google
A computer that carries out calculations using tiny bubbles instead of electricity has been developed by US researchers. The microfluidic
computer performs calculation by squeezing bubbles through tiny channels etched into a chip. It can perform all of the logical operations needed to make a general-purpose computer. In practise, such a computer would be much bigger than a PC and about a thousand times slower. Nevertheless, the bubble-based computer could lead to improved microfluidic technology for chemical analysis
Google’s e-mail service is almost ready to accept all comers, nearly three years after the online search leader shook up the Internet by offering users an unprecedented amount of free storage and displaying ads based on the content of the correspondence. Effective Wednesday, the Mountain View-based company removed the invitation-only restrictions on its Gmail service in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Brazil. Google opened up the service last year in several other parts of the world, including Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and Egypt. Invitations to open a Gmail account are still required in North America, Asia and most parts of the South America, but Google spokeswoman Courtney Hohne said those restrictions will be lifted very soon
. Even then, Gmail will retain a beta
tag to signify the company still considers the service to be in a testing phase
A pulse of light can be stopped, transported, and restarted again using a cloud of super-cold atoms, US researchers have shown. The technique could ultimately be used for advanced computing devices or gravity detectors. The experiments demonstrate physicists’ increasing ability to manipulate light. Being able to control it in this way could be useful for optical or quantum computers — via Warren Ellis
The DNS Root Servers were attacked overnight. It looks like the F, I, and M servers felt the attack and recovered, whereas G (US Department of Defence) and L (ICANN) did less well
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