The engine is on fire, the nose is pointing straight down and, wouldn’t you know it, the canopy is covered in glue: after 54 years, Airfix was crashing and burning yesterday. In a moment poignant to several generations of paint-covered schoolboys and their long-suffering mothers, the company responsible for more arguments over the proper use of a kitchen table than any other has gone into administration — via Feòrag
Gene therapy has eradicated cancer from two dying men using genetically modified versions of their own cells. Both were suffering from advanced melanoma but the technique could be customised to attack other common cancers
Apple Computer’s announcement that Google CEO Eric Schmidt would be joining its board of directors has thrown new light on a longstanding partnership
Remember Hymn? You should, back in the day (like, um, 2004) it allowed you to strip the FairPlay DRM right off iTunes Music Store bought files just like that; well, it’s been a long time in coming, but a new app called QTFairUse6 looks like it can now be used (with some amount of difficulty) to dump iTunes version 6.0.4 – 6.0.5 files of their chastely protection
The 41-year-old Lockheed Martin engineer had complained to his bosses. He had told his story to government investigators. He had called congressmen. But when no one seemed to be stepping up to correct what he saw as critical security flaws in a fleet of refurbished Coast Guard patrol boats, De Kort did just about the only thing left he could think of to get action: He made a video and posted it on YouTube.com — via Slashdot
A century after they were wiped out by hunters and a burgeoning population, wolves have returned to parts of eastern Germany as factories close down, businesses fail and people move out
You can now geotag your photos on Flickr through a reasonably simple to use drag and drop interface. Nifty!
Japanese authorites reported yesterday the first case in Japan of an Apple laptop catching fire and ordered the US company to investigate the trouble involving the faulty Sony batteries and report back within a week
StopBadware.org is accusing AOL of bundling malicious software into its latest free Web browser upgrade, version 9.0, citing a lack of proper disclosure and the inability for users to opt out
LibriVox is the largest of several emerging collectives that offer free or inexpensive audiobooks of works whose copyrights have expired, from Plato to The Wind in the Willows
Google Books has just started offering downloads of their public domain books as PDF files. You can search for free view
books to find other ones
In a deal between Internet giants that are competitors in some markets, Google and eBay announced that Google would begin selling advertising for eBay outside the United States and help eBay shoppers worldwide place calls quickly to online merchants to do business
Engineers moved the giant statute of Pharaoh Ramses II from a congested square in downtown Cairo to its new home near the more peaceful Great Pyramids. Contractors moved the more than 3,200-year-old statue from Ramses Square in an effort to save it from exhaust fumes and other environmental hazards that were causing the 83-ton structure to deteriorate
Two whistleblowers — one in Italy, one in Greece — uncovered a secret bugging system installed in mobile phones around the world. Both met with untimely ends. The resultant scandals have received little press in the United States, despite the profound implications for American critics of the Bush administration — via digg
Known geek and comedy singer/songwriter Weird Al Yankovic has released the first song from his new album Straight Outta Lynwood
for free on his MySpace page. The track is entitled Don’t Download This Song
and tells of the dangers of illegally downloading music from filesharing sites — via Slashdot
Analyst group Gartner believes that virtualisation will allow Microsoft to create a more flexible operating system platform in the future based around modularity
A Turkish hacker seeding usenet groups with trojan horses has made it a habit to hunt down pedophiles trolling the groups. The cases go back to 2000, with the mysterious good samaritan responsible for several arrests. The man now has tacit approval from the FBI for his actions
The Eighth Circuit Appeals Court recently ruled that police may seize cash from motorists, citing that possession of a large sum of cash is ‘strong evidence’ of a connection to drug activity
. Gonzales was never charged with any crime, but his cash was stolen by police anyway — via digg
An 89-year-old man has been left both heartbroken and betrayed after his North York bungalow was stolen from him in the rising wave of title fraud. Paul Reviczky, who fled Hungary in 1957 is one of the latest homeowners to discover that Ontario law favors banks, mortgage companies and purchasers over victims of fraud — via digg
Millions of textbooks and wall-charts across the world will have to be revised, after astronomers yesterday declared that Pluto could no longer be considered a planet. Under historic new guidelines, the solar system has shrunk from nine planets to eight. Scientists decided that tiny Pluto was too puny for its own gravity to pull its orbit into a nearly spherical shape — the orbit is erratic — and so could not be considered a classical planet. Instead, it will be reclassified in a new category of dwarf planets
. This leaves eight classical
planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune
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