Somewhere in Germany is a baby Superman, born in Berlin with bulging arm and leg muscles. Not yet five, he can hold seven-pound weights with arms extended, something many adults cannot do. He has muscles twice the size of other kids his age and half their body fat. DNA testing showed why: The boy has a genetic mutation that boosts muscle growth — via Die Puny Humans
Microsoft has announced a massive expansion in storage capacity of 250MB for users of its free Hotmail service, but just when the extra megabytes will become available to local users isn’t clear
The NSW Government has made official its push into open source, launching a $1.5 million deployment of what may be the state’s largest-ever rollout of open source software on the desktop
The freedom of individuals around the world to surf the net is under threat from the policies of democracies as well as authoritarian regimes and dictatorships, according to the Internet Under Surveillance report by media watchdog Reporters Without Borders. The authors distinguished between dictatorships like China that gag the internet
, and democracies, which they said threatened freedom of expression in the name of fighting pornography, racism or global terrorism — via GeneWeb.info
Police are re-examining more than 100 murders in England and Wales they suspect could be so-called honour killings. Many of the female victims were from South Asian communities. Detectives are not reopening the cases but hope to learn more about the scale and nature of the phenomenon. As well as South Asian communities, some of the victims came from Arabic or eastern European backgrounds. Motives for the murders often included relationships which the families felt brought them dishonour. Police say some of the murders were carried out by contract killers hired by the families. They also believe that so-called bounty hunters
were involved — people, including women, who make a business out of tracking down victims — via Die Puny Humans
Francisco Javier Ortiz Franco, a top editor and founder of the Zeta weekly newspaper, was slain by unidentified gunmen as he drove through Tijuana’s Marron district with his children. The newspaper, in a statement posted on its Web site, said it would not speculate about motives for the attack but Zeta’s campaigns against corrupt politicians have in the past made its editors targets of gangland-style attacks
Telstra is finalising a plan for its IP network, and will take the first step in its biggest overhaul in five years this week when it issues a $300 million contract to upgrade its core system by replacing its ageing copper network with fibre-optic lines
MySQL AB, the company behind the popular open source database MySQL, is looking to ramp up its presence in the Australian market
Inghams has told McDonalds in New Zealand that the next shipments of soy to feed their chickens will not be GE, whereas Australian consumers still have no choice but to eat Inghams chickens fed GE soy
A US federal judge yesterday approved class-action status for a sex-discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart that has become the largest private civil rights case in US history. It could represent as many as 1.6 million current and former female employees of the retailer
The third volume of Invader Zim, Horrible Holiday Cheer, is slated for a Christmas release
This is probably the first presentational/physically protective iPod accessory I’m seriously thinking about buying.
My favs are fireball, snowflake and vines.
Hmmm… Donuts.
A Japanese teenager was forced by his teacher to write an apology in blood after dozing in the classroom. The 40-year-old male teacher handed the boy a box-cutter and paper and told him to write an apology in blood. The teacher left the student, who then cut his finger and began to write an apology using his own blood
68-year-old grandmother, Louise Jones, pulled up to her house and saw a police car. She honked, and an officer got out of the vehicle. Jones said the officer went to a call at another home, then returned to her house to give her a ticket for honking. Police said Jones wouldn’t cooperate and hit the officer. That’s when the officer pulled his Taser gun and shocked her — via Die Puny Humans
There’s a new application for RF-absorbing materials: wallpaper that blocks Wi-Fi. BAE, the British defence contractor, has announced that the same material used to foil radar by stealth bombers can be used to selectively block certain frequencies and prevent wireless networking signals from entering or exiting a building. Pass me my tin foil beanie
Nokia has funded a mobile phone browser project at the Mozilla Foundation, breathing new life into the open-source effort once written off as Microsoft roadkill. The resulting project, called Minimo, has produced a workable prototype, or pre-alpha milestone
German police are hunting three bandits who held up a self-service strawberry farm with a pistol and a knife — for a five-pound basket of strawberries
Have a geezer at my kitten, Olaf. He’s named after Olaf Stapledon. He’s an odd beast, and he demands breakfast by punching my eyeball vigorously at 6am. I think the patch on his nose makes him resemble a koala.
He’s nine months old and already the size of a wombat (or something furry that’s bigger than a breadbox, at any rate). Neibi and I got him from the Cat Protection Society, and he came with free microchip, vaccinations, and acute ringworm.
Amnesty International charges of Iraqi prisoners being subject to cruel and inhumane treatment were notified to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in June and July of 2003, Australian Defence Forces chief General Cosgrove told a Senate estimates committee
The development of a new breed of electric stun gun that can incapacitate whole crowds of people at a stroke has appalled human rights groups. Today, the commercial stun guns used by the police or the military can target only one person at a time and work only at very close quarters. But the new weapons are being designed to sweep a lightning-like beam of electricity across a swathe of people from distances of 100 metres or more. Amnesty International is calling for exhaustive safety tests of all electroshock weapons
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