Oragenics, has received permission from the FDA to conduct the first clinical trial in which genetically modified bacteria will be put into people’s mouths. The new bacteria, which are genetically neutered so they do not make the acid that eats away at teeth, would be designed to replace the acid-producing bacteria present in most mouths
Optus has a dirty little secret — a highly lucrative business based on internet phone pornography lines that has been exposed in a Supreme Court judgment against the nation’s second-biggest telecommunications company
The Australian Communications Authority (ACA) is stepping up its anti-spam campaign by deploying forensic technology to collect and examine suspect e-mails to obtain evidence that may be used in court action against spammers. The ACA — which administers Australia’s anti-spam legislation — has signed an agreement to extend use of Australian-developed forensic technology beyond a current closed trial with Pacific Internet to an open trial with all of the Internet service provider’s 20,000-odd users. If the one-month trial is successful, the ACA is expected to deploy the technology to the broader Australian public from early in 2005
The release of Band Aid’s revamped version of the appalling Do They Know It’s Christmas
has put many charitable souls in a bit of a quandary. The fact is, you want to help the Sudanese refugees by supporting this excellent cause, but the single is, well, crap. Technically, this is known as the Band Aid Dilemma — a disturbing condition in which the natural instinct to help those less fortunate than yourself battles the primordial desire to avoid dreadful pop like the plague. There is a solution. Buy as many copies as you can afford. Destroy them in amusing ways, on camera. Send the pictures of to the Band Aid Dilemma
Sony is broadening support for the MP3 file format in its portable music player range. It will introduce a new hard drive-based MP3 player in December, and will offer software upgrades for earlier players with hard drive storage so they can play MP3s too
Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail. Lycos hopes it will make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out. Unfortunately, the download site was targeted by spammers in a DDoS attack hours after going live
A database of badger DNA is being created to snare criminals who set dogs on the animals and dig-up setts. The RSPCA project, which will cover England and Wales, is the first of its kind for a wild species. It is hoped the database will help bring successful prosecutions against people who dig and bait the animals — via Paul Mellen
The CIA is quietly funding federal research into surveillance of Internet chat rooms as part of an effort to identify possible terrorists, newly released documents reveal. In April 2003, the CIA agreed to fund a series of research projects that the documents indicate were intended to create new capabilities to combat terrorism through advanced technology
. One of those projects is research at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, devoted to automated monitoring and profiling of the behaviour of chat-room users
Tasmania has become a signatory to an International Seed Conservation Program. The Millennium Seed Bank project aims to collect and conserve 10% of the world’s seed-bearing plants by 2010. So far 16 countries are involved in the project, with 7,000 species of plants already stored in a seed bank in England. The manager of the Tasmanian project, Steve Harris, says seeds from 800 species of native plants will be collected from around the state
Computer engineers were at a loss to explain why the Government had been hit by arguably the worst electronic meltdown in the history of Whitehall. Senior sources said that the specialist troubleshooters called in to deal with the crisis at the Department for Work and Pensions had failed to get to the bottom
of the problem which blanked out up to 40,000 desktop screens. While it has been established that the crash was provoked by an attempt to upgrade the screens, there was still no precise idea why it happened
Sarah West, a Southern Cross University researcher, says technology to recycle water is available in Australia but is hardly being used. She has spent eight months studying water recycling and decentralised sewerage systems overseas. In parts of the United States, commercial laundries and car washes are using recycled water. It is also being used for flushing toilets, garden irrigation and growing vegetables
A man has been arrested outside a Swedish high-security prison after shooting mobile phones into the prison yard with a bow and arrow. The man arrested outside the Norrtaelje prison is believed to have shot as many as five mobile phones over the prison wall. Three arrows were found in the yard, with two phones and a battery charger taped to the arrows
Bruce Sterling ponders the future direction of desktop fabricators and heads off the current printer consumables extortion racket, by suggesting the goop they run on be made from readily available waste products
Why is a TV executive so agitated about online pirates? Because he, like most media honchos, has seen the scary numbers indicating that the next big craze in illegal file-sharing is not music, not movies, but television. Frankly I’m amazed that movies caught on before TV since there’s so much more TV, and they tend to be smaller files than movies — via Slashdot
Tokyo is an impressive city above ground, but one of the most incredible things about this city is it’s mind-bogglingly complex underground. The G-Cans Project is a massive project, begun 12 years ago, to build infrastructure for preventing overflow of the major rivers and waterways spidering the city. The underground waterway is the largest in the world and sports five 32m diameter, 65m deep concrete containment silos which are connected by 64 kilometres of tunnel sitting 50 metres beneath the surface.
The whole system is powered by 14000 horsepower turbines which can pump 200 tons of water a second into the large outlying Edogawa River.
The site is all in Japanese, but if you click around the menus a bit, there are animations and diagrams of how the system works, and other interesting photos of the high-tech control center and turbine facilities. Supposedly the G-Cans project is also meant to be a tourist attraction, and can be visited for free — via Dead Machinery
Downhill Battle has released the first public preview of Blog Torrent a simplified
BitTorrent package that they developed because, Making it easy to blog large video files means that people can share their home movies the same way they share their photos or writings
. Features include: integrated torrent creation and upload, simple non-MySQL installation, and an RSS feed for every tracker. Currently Windows only on the client side, but Mac and Linux versions are in the works
Google has filed a lawsuit against Internet marketing firm, Auctions Expert International, claiming the company defrauded Google’s advertising network with false ad clicks
The lesson clients need to learn
I so need this as an A1 poster for me at work. It should also come with a pointing implement so I can tap the sign whenever I’m asked to to deliver all 3.
These could so be used in fortune cookies for designers.
Designer Sara Cihat creates really cool looking rehabilitated dishware out of finds from second-hand stores which are then cleaned up, re-screened, and glazed to new heights of hipster glory — via design*sponge
DNA profiling has enabled us to link a suspect to a sample of blood, hair or saliva found at a crime scene. But until now, there was no way of knowing when the suspect was there — giving the guilty room to wriggle free. Now a team in America has developed a test that can reveal when a sample was deposited by measuring how quickly certain genetic material breaks down. The test measures two forms of RNA and works with as little as one microlitre of blood. The technique may even be sensitive enough to tell investigators when a fingerprint was left
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