Descendants of extinct mammals such as the giant woolly mammoth might one day walk the Earth again. It isn’t exactly Jurassic Park, but Japanese researchers are looking at the possibility of using sperm from frozen animals to inseminate living relatives.
After the recent release of AOL search logs, Paul Boutin used the site splunkd.com to analyse the logs. His analysis groups searchers into seven categories: The Pornhound, the Manhunter, the Shopper, the Obsessive, the Omnivore, the Newbie, and the Basketcase. My favorite example search is in the Basketcase category: i hurt when i think too much i love roadtrips i hate my weight i fear being alone for the rest of my life
— via Slashdot
E-mail in-boxes are under a new kind of spam attack. This new spam has confused many people due to its lack of advertising, viruses, or request for personal information. One popular theory is that these innocuous blocks of text, often drawn from popular literature, are being used to un-train
spam filters to allow more malicious spam through in the future
Nuclear bombs can kill people even if they’re not used. In the US alone, the Department of Energy estimates that more than 2,500 billion litres of groundwater are contaminated with uranium as a consequence of nuclear weapons production. In Uranium ‘pearls’ before slime
, scientists from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory say they discovered that some common bacteria could convert deadly heavy metal into less threatening nano-spheres
. In fact, these bacteria can convert soluble radioactive uranium into a non-toxic solid form called uraninite. Still, more research needs to be done before using these bacteria on a large scale, but it’s a step in the good direction. Read more for additional references and photos showing how Shewanella oneidensis can help us to decontaminate groundwater at nuclear waste sites — via Slashdot
Dell is recalling 4.1 million notebook computer batteries because they could erupt in flames, the company said Monday. It will be the largest safety recall in the history of the consumer electronics industry
Google has announced a deal to make the books from the University of California library available online. The agreement bolstered the Google Book Search project, a controversial campaign by the online search juggernaut to digitise all the written works in the world and put them on the internet. The state university system has more than 100 libraries on its 10 campuses and bills the aggregate collection as the largest research and academic library in the world
Since the early 1960s, the man who owns and lives inside the £1m Victorian property has been digging. No one knows how far the the network of burrows underneath 75-year-old William Lyttle’s house stretch. But according to the council, which used ultrasound scanners to ascertain the extent of the problem, almost half a century of nibbling dirt with a shovel and homemade pulley has hollowed out a web of tunnels and caverns, some 8m deep, spreading up to 20m in every direction from his house. Their surveyors estimate that the resident known locally as the Mole Man has scooped 100 cubic metres of earth from beneath the roads and houses that surround his 20-room property
The RIAA brought a file-sharing lawsuit against a guy who died; they offered the departed’s family a 60-day grieving period before they began to depose his children for the suit against his estate — via Boing Boing
Air travellers leaving the United Kingdom on Thursday faced the strictest security measures in years: iPods, mobile phones, laptops, and even books and magazines were no longer permitted as carry-on items
Sources at PC and notebook component makers indicated that Apple will launch its MacBook laptops using Intel’s new 64-bit Merom CPU in September, with associated OEM makers, such as Asustek (MacBook) and Quanta Computer (MacBook Pro), expected to benefit from that
Scientists in England have gathered definitive evidence that a kind of cancer in dogs, known as Sticker’s sarcoma, is contagious. It is spread by tumour cells getting passed from dog to dog through sex or from animals biting or licking each other. Robin Weiss and his colleagues did genetic studies on the tumour cells from 40 dogs with Sticker’s sarcoma, collected from five continents, which showed that all the tumour cells are clones of each other. The parent cell probably arose in a domesticated dog of Asian origin — perhaps a husky — hundreds of years ago, and perhaps more than 1,000 years ago. A similarly transmissible cancer has recently been discovered spreading through populations of Tasmanian devils
Sony’s new Blu-Ray drives won’t be able to play Blu-Ray DVD movies, because they couldn’t meet all the requirements set out by the cartel that controls Blu-Ray DRM — via Boing Boing
Attack code exploiting a recently-patched vulnerability in Windows operating system has been posted to the Internet, prompting concerns of a widespread attack. The software was added to the widely used Metasploit project — a favorite of both security researchers and malicious hackers — at around 1.00am Thursday morning Pacific Time, according to HD Moore, the Metasploit project leader. It works very reliably against Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems that do not have SP2 [Service Pack 2] installed,
he said in an e-mail
Security features in the kernel of Microsoft’s forthcoming operating system, Windows Vista, obstruct innovations by antivirus and other security applications, security vendor Symantec has claimed
US scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory say detecting biowarfare agents will become a lot easier thanks to a new barcode
system based on biosensing nanowires
Detective Senior Constable Mark Thomas, an officer involved in the prosecution of 13 accused terrorists, has told a court he gleaned much of his knowledge of terrorism from the internet and admits he’s no expert on the subject
The Indian high court has ordered Coke and Pepsi to produce the formulas for their soft-drinks, on the back of a report that says that Pepsi contains 30 times the amount of pesticide reported in 2003, while Coke’s level has gone up 25-fold — via Boing Boing
Google has signed a $900m deal with Fox to provide search capabilities for Fox sites, the most noteworthy of which is MySpace. This deal does not include FoxSports.com, which already has a deal with MSN. Google claims that MySpace was an important site to be involved with given its rapid popularity growth. Google also signed a deal with MTV earlier in the week
Researchers at the University of Washington have discovered a possible nonvolatile magnetic semiconductor and are investigating its use for spintronics
, an emerging technology that is concerned with manipulating and controlling the charge, flow and magnetism of electrons. The possibilities for the material cobalt green
, a paint developed by American Revolution era artists, as a spintronics material is exciting. Should the magnetic properties of the paint at room-temperature prove able to reliably control the wild spinning of excited electrons in a processor, not only could the size of processors reduce substantially, but the constant limiting factor, how to keep things cool, could disappear
Chancellor Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister in waiting, has bought the idea that all electronic transactions in the UK should be linked to a central government/police database. Every cash withdrawal, every credit card purchase, ever loyalty card use… And that data should flow back from the police database to the loyalty card provider. So, for example, not only would the government know what books you were buying, but the bookstore would also know if you had an outstanding speeding ticket
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