Eric Harshbarger has built a seven foot tall grandfather clock exclusively from Lego. It keeps accurate time and needs no electricity; it needs to be weight reset every thirteen hours
The first theatrical Babylon 5 movie, The Memory of the Shadows
starts filming in April. The story was written by series creator J Michael Straczynski
A cheap modification to supertankers could help prevent devastating oil pollution if the vessels sink. The new system makes it quick and easy to empty the tanks if the ship ends up on the seabed
If it walks like a flamingo and looks like a flamingo, it is not necessarily a flamingo — or even a close relative. A controversial genetic study suggests we have completely misunderstood how the majority of birds are related, and that some species that look almost identical are not related at all. The discovery comes from an analysis of the evolution of the bird gene beta-fibrinogen. It suggests that the Neoaves, a group that includes all modern bird species except waterfowl, landfowl and flightless birds, actually comprises two distinct lineages called the Metaves and Coronaves, and that many birds which look alike are not in the same lineage
The all free dictionaries project focuses on maintaining free dictionaries (now more than 90 with more than 3,300,000 translations). They are designing a new system which will unite them all into one universal dictionary for all languages. The universal dictionary will be soon available for free under GPL
Scientists working in South Africa say they have identified a gene that controls the human body’s response to HIV. The researchers say the gene determines the body’s response to infections
A coalition of American internet and finance firms and law enforcement agencies has been launched in a bid to halt the growing number of online phishing scams. The group called Digital PhishNet is a collaborative operation of technology, banking, financial services and online auction firms with law enforcement to tackle phishing
, a scheme based on use of faked or spoofed
web sites
A lone whale with a voice unlike any other has been wandering the Pacific for the past twelve years. Marine biologist Mary Ann Daher of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and her colleagues used signals recorded by the US navy’s submarine-tracking hydrophones to trace the movements of whales in the north Pacific. The partially declassified records show that a lone whale singing at around 52 hertz has cruised the ocean every autumn and winter since 1992. Its calls do not match those of any known species, although they are clearly those of a baleen whale, a group that includes blue, fin and humpback whales
Seiko Epson is on schedule to commercialise OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) screen technology for televisions in 2007 but some significant research issues remain. OLED screens produce pictures that proponents say are extremely bright and crisp compared to those shown on PDP (plasma display panels) and LCDs. Another advantage is that OLEDs should be cheaper. However, at present OLED panels don’t last long
A Danish company, Aresa Biodetection, has developed genetically-modified flowers that change colour when their roots come in contact with nitrogen dioxide in the soil. Explosives used in mines produce NO² as the chemicals gradually decay. The company plans to sow fields of NO²-sniffing Arabidopsis thaliana (Thale or mouse cress) in areas riddled with long-forgotten ordinance from Angola to Cambodia.
The effort’s life- and limb-saving potential is staggering: More than 100 million land mines kill or injure 26,000 people in 45 countries each year. Today’s most popular detection method is poking around with a stick — via Core77
Corporate business is discovering that e-mail within professional circles is showing that millions of highly educated people are functionally illiterate. Shame the morons are blaming e-mail rather than the political interference that has destroyed the educational system
True to the saying no honour among thieves
, adware company, Avenue Media, is finding that competing adware company, DirectRevenue, is detecting and deleting their software. Now Avenue Media is crying foul and have filed a lawsuit against DirectRevenue stating that DirectRevenue knowingly and with intent to defraud, exceeded its authorized access to users’ computers
— via Slashdot
Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 has been released. Virtual folders and RSS integration, coupled with the recent hype surrounding Firefox, might give the product some serious momentum
Powell spoke before congress, detailing that complaints to the FCC are up from 14,000 in 2002, to nearly 240,000 in 2003. There were only 350 complaints during 2000 and 2001. Powell failed to mention however that 99.8% of those complaints came from PTC (Parents Television Council). It means that really a tiny minority with a very focused political agenda is trying to censor American television and radio
Designers say that the Cell
processor that will power the next version of the PlayStation game console will also be adaptable for advanced scientific research, but you won’t have to be a rocket scientist to program it
A new study reveals that Wolf eradication in the US has had a far more devastating impact on the genetic diversity of remaining populations than previously thought.
With the Canadian wolf population at a relatively healthy 70,000, it was assumed that the human impact of past mass eradications had been minor. But scientists found a 43% drop in genetic variability in the modern wolves. It is impossible for the wolf populations to recover this important diversity, which enables them to adapt to different environmental challenges.
Australian Consumers’ Association health spokeswoman Nicola Ballenden says that E-Health initiatives intended to improve public health outcomes while cutting costs are being hijacked by greedy
software makers, drug marketers and pharmacists
Out of its natural habitat, the giant squid Architeuthis dux is something of a flop. They’re so heavy, they collapse under their own weight. You lose the lovely cylindrical mantle and arms,
says Steve O’Shea, squid expert at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. So the Kiwis plan to have the squid plastinated by German anatomist Günther von Hagens.
To research the project, von Hagens visited O’Shea in October to study some much smaller species such as arrow squid.
We dissected a number of ‘sacrificial’ squid,says O’Shea.
The plastination process could take up to a year, and the squid will need a rigid framework for support, but O’Shea is confident that von Hagens will be able to display the animals.
FairUCE, which stands for Fair use of Unsolicited Commercial Email
, is an SMTP proxy, running between multiple instances of Postfix, that verifies e-mail by attempting to verify the sender through lookups, a user customised challenge/response. It claims to be able to stop a vast majority of spam
without the need for content filters, and virtually eliminates spoofed addresses, phishing, and even many viruses with a few cached DNS look-ups and a couple of if/then statements
The passage of the US Free Trade Agreement enabling legislation has been thrown into doubt after the government agreed to an eleventh hour review of key concerns outlined by the Internet Industry Association. The IIA claims the legislative changes would make possession of pirated materials a criminal offence, and could make ISPs criminally liable for pirated material that exists on their systems. The IIA also believes the system of take-down orders proposed through the legislation would put an onerous administrative burden on its members
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