And no one sees any conflict of interest?!
While many judges around the country are throwing out file sharing lawsuits on account of questionable or faulty arguments, DC federal judge Beryl Howell just recently allowed three cases filed by copyright holders to proceed. What makes it intriguing is that she used to be a former RIAA lobbyist.
via Former RIAA Lobbyist Now Handles File Sharing Cases as a Federal Judge.
Nearly all the energy we use on this planet starts out as sunlight that plants use to knit chemical bonds. Now, for the first time, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge have created a potentially cheap, practical artificial leaf that does much the same thing—providing a potentially limitless source of energy that’s easy to tap.
The new device is a silicon wafer about the shape and size of a playing card coated on either side with two different catalysts. The silicon absorbs sunlight and passes that energy to the catalysts to split water into molecules of hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen is a fuel that can be either burned or used in a fuel cell to create electricity, reforming water in either case. This means that in theory, anyone with access to water can use it to create a cheap, clean, and available source of fuel.
via Spinning the Sun’s Rays Into Fuel – ScienceNOW.
SmartBird is an ultralight but powerful flight model with excellent aerodynamic qualities and extreme agility. With SmartBird, Festo has succeeded in deciphering the flight of birds – one of the oldest dreams of humankind.
via Festo Festo Corporate – SmartBird.
Blinding fast virtual storage appliance gets rid of managing LUNs or disks and gives you virtual disks. Easy to set up in 8 minutes, it can be run by anyone without needing specific storage experience. It’ll be taking on EMC for speed and price.
We knew that the act of smiling makes you feel better. It turns out that analysing yearbook photo’s or baseball cards shows that people with the wider smile live longer, do better, have a happier life!
The Untapped Power Of Smiling – Eric Savitz – The Tech Trade – Forbes.
The Foresight project Global Food and Farming Futures final report and executive summary provide an overview of the evidence and discuss the challenges and choices for policy makers and others whose interests relate to all aspects of the global food system.
via Reports and publications | Our work | BIS.
Attackers breached the servers of RSA and stole information that could be used to compromise the security of two-factor authentication tokens used by 40 million employees to access sensitive corporate and government networks
via RSA breach leaks data for hacking SecurID tokens • The Register.
The evoMouse is the evolution of the computer mouse.
With the evoMouse, your finger is your pointer and there is no more pushing around a physical mouse.
The evoMouse works on nearly any flat surface and requires very little space. It tracks effortlessly to your comfortable and natural movements.
With the evoMouse, you can perform common mouse operations using only your fingers. You can control the cursor, click and select, double-click, right-click and drag with basic hand gestures.
The evoMouse also features multi-touch functionality including scroll, rotate, zoom, forward and back. The evoMouse can even be used for handwriting recognition with your finger or a pen.
The evoMouse is easy and convenient to set up and use with almost any desktop or laptop computer. It connects via Bluetooth or a standard USB port.Because it allows natural movements and doesn’t require pushing around a physical object, the evoMouse may help reduce repetitive stress injuries like Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.
via ++CELLUON ++.
The story then says that radiation levels are still ‘safe’. I’d say radiation levels were still ‘safe’ too. As far as I’m concerned we get enough radiation levels from the global background radiation, we really don’t need ANY more radiation from any source at all. Except medical X-Rays – these fall under what I term necessary. Not these stupid scanners that don’t work, don’t deter, cost millions and resequence our DNA.
TSA Admits Bungling of Airport Body-Scanner Radiation Tests | Threat Level | Wired.com.
Again… hahahaha – 5 seconds is all it took 🙂
Safari/MacBook First To Fall At Pwn2Own 2011 – Slashdot.
UNEP head Achim Steiner said: “The way humanity manages or mismanages its nature-based assets, including pollinators, will in part define our collective future in the 21st century. The fact is that of the 100 crop species that provide 90 per cent of the world’s food, over 70 are pollinated by bees.
via World’s bees face multiple threats • The Register.
The 46-inch LCD screen has a resolution of 1920×1080 as well as touch screen with full ten finger recognition. The type of panel used here is a VA panel and will mostly be implemented for commercial applications.
CeBIT 2011: Samsung Shows Ambient Light Powered Display > Display > Techtree.com.
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via Social Media Dashboard | Unilyzer | Social Media DashboardUnilyzer – Social Media Dashboard.
This car is uses an F-1 engine to pump fuel into two rockets. Richard Noble is hoping that Wg Cdr Andy Green will drive this beast at over 1000 mph in S Africa in 2013.
The Car Faster Than a Speeding Bullet – Tech Europe – WSJ.
Not out yet, but this is an alternative to space based RTS Sins of a Solar Empire. Part one, is of course out for you to play.
Sword of the Stars 2 – Paradox Interactive.
It’s very cheap indeed and offered by photojojo. You can DIY one cheaper, but it won’t look anywhere near as good.
The Ring Flash Adapter.
Making its first debut into the retail marketplace, STRATACACHE’s PrimaSee™ is a translucent digital display that showcases high-definition, dynamic video advertisements embedded within a glass panel. These see-through promotional videos correspond with products visible in the backdrop to convey point-of-purchase brand messages. Using an embedded media player, content can easily be updated based on current promotions.
via PrimaSee.
With a 6.5-inch wing span, the remote-controlled bird weighs less than a AA battery and can fly at speeds of up to 11 mph, propelled only by the flapping of its two wings. A tiny video camera sits in its belly.
The bird can climb and descend vertically, fly sideways, forward and backward. It can rotate clockwise and counterclockwise.
Most of all, it can hover and perch on a window ledge while it gathers intelligence, unbeknownst to the enemy.
“We were almost laughing out of being scared because we had signed up to do this,” said Matt Keennon, senior project engineer of California’s AeroVironment, which built the hummingbird.
via Tiny Spy Planes Mimic Birds, Insects.
Companies are measuring the responses your brain gives to parts of movies, allowing producers to tweak movies to provide the kinds of responses they want.
How Hollywood Studios Harness Your Brainwaves to Win Oscars.
PhoneGap allows you to build native apps for the iphone, blackberry, palm, symbian, android platforms.
A Japanese inventor has found a way to convert plastic grocery bags, bottles and caps into usable petroleum.
Plastic bags are, of course, made from petroleum to begin with, but it is not the same kind of petroleum that is used in fuel. In order to turn home waste into home power the machine heats up the waste plastic and traps the vapors created in a system of pipes and water chambers. Finally, the machine condenses the vapors into crude oil, that can be used for heating on the home level
via New invention can turn your plastic bags into fuel at home.
The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.
But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.
For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved?
via The decline effect and the scientific method : The New Yorker.