Friday January 29, 2010

In Haiti, Words Can Kill

Rebecca Solnit
Tomdispatch.com

Just before Haiti was devastated by the most powerful earthquake to hit the island in more than 200 years, when, that is, it was only devastated by the hemisphere’s worst poverty, there were but one or two full-time foreign correspondents in the country. No longer.

Within days, the networks, CNN, and Fox had more or less transferred their news operations (already slimmed down by years of attrition) onto the island. CNN’s Anderson Cooper made it first on Wednesday morning.
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Friday January 29, 2010

In US First, California Assembly Committee Approves Marijuana Legalization Bill

Stop The Drug War

A bill to legalize the adult use, sale, and production of marijuana was approved Tuesday by a 4-3 vote in the California Assembly Public Safety Committee. While the vote was historic -- it marked the first time a state legislative committee anywhere had voted for a marijuana legalization bill -- a Friday legislative deadline means the bill is likely to die before it reaches the Assembly floor.
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Friday January 29, 2010

The tree-lined bunkers that could change the face of the Middle East

Robert Fisk
Independent

The border looks peaceful, but Hizbollah and Israel are preparing for war

It looks like a hop, skip and a jump. There's the first electrified fence, then the dirt strip to identify footprints, then the tarmac road, then one more electrified fence, and then acres and acres of trees. Orchards rather than tanks.
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Friday January 29, 2010

The Bush-Packed Supreme Court Thinks Corporations Are People Too

Scott Klinger
AlterNet

Corporations now have all the privileges of citizenship, without any of the responsibilities.

This week's Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case removes all limits on large corporations to finance and influence federal elections. In its ruling the court reverses a decades-old ruling barring companies from using their general funds to fund political campaigns, and guts pieces of the popular McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation.
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Friday January 29, 2010

Scientists embed laser light into silicon chips

Darren Pauli
Computerworld Australia

Australian researchers plan to replace copper wire with light pulses

Australian scientists have developed a silicon-embedded laser that will help speed up computer processing time.
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Friday January 29, 2010

Binge-drinking violence 'creating no-go areas'

Jack Doyle
Press Association

Booze-fuelled violence is creating "no-go areas" across England and Wales, a Government-funded poll revealed today.

One person in every four said they avoided parts of their local area because of crime and disorder linked to alcohol abuse.
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Friday January 29, 2010

Supreme Court's 'Radical and Destructive' Decision Hands Over Democracy to the Corporations

Liliana Segura
AlterNet

One expert calls the Citizens United decision 'the most radical and destructive campaign finance decision in the history of the Supreme Court.'

Indeed, in a momentous 5 to 4 decision the New York Times called a "doctrinal earthquake," the U.S. Supreme Court handed down an unprecedented ruling today that gives new significance to the phrase "corporate personhood."
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Friday January 29, 2010

Bing to replace Google on iPhone, say reports

Dan Moren
Macworld.com

Apple and Microsoft in talks to ditch Google

A report in BusinessWeek suggests that Apple may be in talks with Microsoft to replace the iPhone's default search engine, Google, with Microsoft's own offering, Bing.

As recently as 2007, this would have been unthinkable: Google was the stalwart ally who'd helped Apple build the iPhone's Maps and YouTube applications, and Microsoft was the longtime nemesis whose 1997 $150 million investment was viewed by many as a deal with the devil.
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Thursday January 28, 2010

Worried the TSA Body Scanners Will Give You Cancer? Don't.

Allison Kilkenny
AlterNet

You'll get more radiation from traveling in an airplane. But there are plenty of other reasons to hate the scanners.

So a terrorist snuck by airport security whilst wearing explosive panties, and now your country has completely freaked out, and airports want to install full-body scanners that use radiation to see your naughty bits.
read full story

What's a concerned citizen to do?

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Thursday January 28, 2010

Why parents are getting it wrong

Clint Witchalls
Independent

Too much praise is bad. Smacking could be good. And lying is a sign of intelligence. So says a controversial new book on raising children.

My nine-year-old daughter, Abby, came back from art club with a large cardboard box full of the beautiful things she'd made. She slowly unpacked each item to gasps of admiration from me and my wife. We had to turn our backs while Abby unpacked the chef d'oeuvre.
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Thursday January 28, 2010

Britain follows US with national data website

Simon Rogers
The Guardian

Inventor of world wide web brought in for launch of data.gov.uk

First Barack Obama dived in. Today sees Gordon Brown's turn to open up government information to the public with the launch of a new website: data.gov.uk

Brown brought in the inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, last June as an adviser for the launch of data.gov.uk "so that government information is accessible and useful for the widest possible group of people".
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Thursday January 28, 2010

Exolanguage: do you speak alien?

Stephen Battersby
New Scientist

The cosmos is quiet. Eerily quiet. After decades of straining our radio ears for a whisper of civilisations beyond Earth, we have heard nothing. No reassuring message of universal peace. No helpful recipe for building faster-than-light spacecraft or for averting global catastrophes. Not even a stray interstellar advertisement.

Perhaps there's nobody out there after all. Or perhaps it's just early days in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and we're listening to the wrong star systems or at the wrong wavelengths.
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Thursday January 28, 2010

Evidence found that links China to Google hack

Robert McMillan
Techworld

Algorithm used in Aurora code is only found on Chinese websites

The malicious software used to steal information from companies such as Google contains code that links it to China, a security researcher said on Tuesday

After examining the back-door Hydraq Trojan used in the hack, SecureWorks researcher Joe Stewart found that it used an unusual algorithm to check for data corruption when it transmits information.
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Thursday January 28, 2010

U.S. Security Company Offers to Perform "High Threat Terminations" and to Confront "Worker Unrest" in Haiti

Jeremy Scahill
Rebel Reports

We saw this type of Iraq-style disaster profiteering in New Orleans and you can expect to see a lot more of this in Haiti over the coming days, weeks and months. Private security companies are seeing big dollar signs in Haiti thanks in no small part to the media hype about "looters."

After Katrina, the number of private security companies registered (and unregistered) multiplied overnight. Banks, wealthy individuals, the US government all hired private security.
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Thursday January 28, 2010

Labour's computer blunders cost £26bn

Michael Savage
Independent

Ministers blamed for 'stupendous incompetence' after taxpayers left with huge bills for bungled projects

A series of botched IT projects has left taxpayers with a bill of more than £26bn for computer systems that have suffered severe delays, run millions of pounds over budget or have been cancelled altogether.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

ISPs could cut spam easily, says expert

John E. Dunn
Techworld

Try port 25 blocking, says Trend

Two simple techniques could be used to strangle botnets, a security expert has claimed. First, block email port 25 by default. Second, tell users when they are spewing spam from compromised PCs.

According to Trend Micro's CTO, Dave Rand, who is leading a campaign to reform the way ISPs approach the matter of botnets and spam, the two countries that adopted such techniques, The Netherlands and Turkey, have seen a huge reduction in the numbers of botnetted PCs.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

Avatar's Moon Pandora Could Be Real

Ehud Rattner
The Future Of Things

NASA’s Kepler mission has excited the imagination of many astronomers, when it showed recently the potential to detect Earth-sized objects and habitable moons. In a new paper, researcher from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggests that stellar objects could have stable atmospheres, allowing life to exist – just as seen in the new motion picture ‘Avatar’.

In the new film Avatar, humans visit an alien moon called Pandora; now, scientist Lisa Kaltenegger is showing that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can study the atmosphere of alien moons and planets, as well as detect key gases like carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water vapor.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

How Factory Farms Are Pumping Americans Full of Deadly Bacteria and Pathogens

Kathy Freston
AlterNet

We're getting sicker and sicker, thanks to gruesome conditions in animal agriculture nationwide.

After reading www.BirdFluBook.org, by Dr. Michael Greger, I was stunned to realize the extent to which we have endangered our health by allowing factory farms to flourish and produce 99 percent of the meat, dairy and eggs we eat. Not only are dangerous flu viruses mutating because of these concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), but we are also being exposed to some other very serious bacteria and pathogens.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

Homeless Haitians Told Not to Flee to U.S.

James McKinley Jnr.
New York Times

America has a message for the millions of Haitians left homeless and destitute by last week’s earthquake: Do not try to come to the United States.

Every day, a United States Air Force cargo plane specially equipped with radio transmitters flies for five hours over the devastated country, broadcasting news and a recorded message from Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s ambassador in Washington.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

A night on the town: Vomit, violence and God

Emily Dugan
Independent

A Slice of Britain: Derby is the latest town to witness the arrival of Street Pastors, a group of Christians who volunteer to spend their Friday and Saturday evenings bringing succour to the drunk and the wounded

The beat is pounding; blue neon lights are flashing. It's another night of sin at Syn nightclub in Derby city centre. But the disco flicker is coming from an ambulance. An unconscious girl slumped, slack- jawed, in a wheelchair being dragged in through its back doors.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

Hackers are cracking bank security

Jaikumar Vijayan
Computerworld US

User authentication no longer enough to protect online banks

Security measures such as the use of one-time passwords and phone-based user authentication -- considered among the most robust forms of IT defenses -- are no longer enough to protect online banking systems against fraud, a Gartner Inc. report warns.

Cybercriminals are using increasingly sophisticated tactics to outmaneuver security systems so they can steal customers' log-in credentials and pillage their bank accounts , according to Gartner analyst Avivah Litan , who wrote the report.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

Inducing Controlled Suicide in Human Cells

Ehud Rattner
The Future Of Things

Researchers at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Barcelona, have recently designed a new tool to study rescue signaling pathways and cell apoptosis. Their development might help scientists to better understand the phenomenon of cells' excessive accumulation of errors in the proteins they produce, preventing a process which is practically cells' suicide.

When cells accumulate excessive errors in the proteins they produce, apoptosis is activated; however, beforehand the cells attempt to rectify the problem through a number of rescue responses.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

LG unveils 'bendable' ebook for newspapers

Claudine Beaumont
Telegraph

LG's 19in ebook screen could bring newspapers and magazines to life

LG said it was the largest ebook reader ever made, and that while the device wasn't fordable or rollable, it is flexible and bendable, creating a look and feel similar to that of a newspaper.
The screen is currently just a prototype device, and will not be made publicly available, but it hints at the future of electronic displays and possible uses for ebook readers.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

Objects of Desire

Sean Clinton
Adbusters

Israeli diamonds are forever … on your conscience.

In recent years the romantic image of diamonds as objects of desire has been tarnished by bloody conflicts in central Africa that are often funded by the trade of locally mined gems. Human rights organizations have begun a campaign against “conflict diamonds,” or “blood diamonds,” and the ensuing global attention has forced the diamond industry to take action against the trade. The Kimberley Process, introduced in a 2003 UN resolution, is a certification scheme designed to prevent rough diamonds used to fund conflict from entering the market.

But the process operates with a very narrow definition of conflict diamonds. Cut and polished diamonds, regardless of what bloody conflicts they may fund, do not qualify for regulation under the Kimberley Process. Israel’s blood diamonds, therefore, are kosher.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

On gospel, Abba and the death of the record: an audience with Brian Eno

Paul Morley
The Guardian

He's been a Roxy original, the inventor of 'ambient', Bowie's muse, the brain in Talking Heads and U2's 'fifth man'. Now Eno tells us where he's heading next

When influential music website Pitchfork listed its 100 greatest albums of the 1970s – which in certain other lists is calculated to be the greatest decade for rock music – the modestly immodest, driven, musical non-musician Brian Eno was directly and indirectly involved in at least a quarter of them, including the number one, Low, on which he collaborated with a nomadic, post-"Fame" David Bowie and the producer Tony Visconti.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

Think Cheese Is More Eco + Humane Than Meat? Think Again

Caitlin Fitzsimmons
Ecosalon

Cheese is my weakness. Camembert and cheddar, stilton and swiss, mozzarella and mascarpone, gouda and goat’s cheese, feta and fresh quark – I love them all. And while it may not be great for my waistline or as environmentally pure as organic lentils, at least I can eat it knowing that it’s a more eco-friendly choice than, say, tucking into a juicy slab of steak. Or can I?

My vegetarian friends certainly seem to think so – many of them seem to subsist on cheese. Trust me, I can understand why – it’s an easy source of protein, calcium, vitamin B12 and other nutrients that omnivores typically get from meat.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

The laughing policemen: 'Inaccurate' data boosts arrest rate

Michael Gillard and Richard Osley
Independent

Officers accused of targeting 'law-abiding middle classes' to meet government performance quotas

Police are using controversial car-surveillance technology aimed at catching criminals and terrorists to target members of the public in order to meet government performance targets and raise revenue, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

The Story of a Hemp Bicycle and a Bamboo Bike Bus

Warren McLaren
Tree Hugger

Spiegel International have a wonderful write-up (in English) on bamboo bikes. It covers how Craig Calfee's dog inspired him to make a bike from bamboo, How he subsequently won trade shows awatds "Best Road Bike," "Best Off-Road Bike" and "Peoples' Choice" for his bamboo designs, how they were lab tested tougher than carbon fibre.

Andrea Reidl's article goes to explain how Calfee is now passing on his secrets to African villagers so they might have durable, locally made bike frames.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

Sewage as a Measure of Society's Drug Use

Daniela Perdomo
AlterNet

Testing municipal wastewater for drugs may be the next big thing in public health research. The methodology will likely confirm the universality of drug use.

All kinds of people use illegal drugs, all over the country -- in urban, suburban, ex-urban, and rural areas. Yet our imperfect methods for gauging community drug use disproportionately represent cities and often leave out the highest-risk populations, giving a skewed picture of who uses what types of drugs where.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

Facebook users banned for Haiti spam

Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld US

Social network boots enthusiastic fundraisers

Some Facebook users sending messages about the Haitian earthquake may have been a bit dismayed at times this week to find that they'd been booted off the site for suspicion of spamming.

Facebook acknowledged today that some users had been dropped from the site because they had been sending out so many messages after an earthquake struck Haiti that the site mistook them for spammers.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

Scottish priest could become first female bishop

Lucinda Cameron
Press Association

A Scottish priest will today find out if she is to become Britain's first female bishop.

The Rev Canon Dr Alison Peden, 57, has been shortlisted for the role of Bishop of Glasgow & Galloway in the Scottish Episcopal Church.

Dr Peden is rector of Holy Trinity Church in Stirling, chaplain of Forth Valley College, Stirling, and canon of St Ninian's Cathedral, Perth.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

The Wages of Fear in Israel and the U.S.

Ira Chernus
Tomdispatch.com

A country programmatically gripped by fear -- yes, that’s us for more than eight years now. Fear of terrorism to be exact, even as truly terrible things happened in this land and elsewhere, from hurricane Katrina in 2005 to last week’s devastating Haitian earthquake, which should have put our fears into perspective. But no such luck.

Since 9/11, the thought of “terrorism” has seized the U.S. by the throat.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

Our "War" With Al Qaeda Is Getting Us Nowhere

Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times

Our leaders' agenda can be derailed at any moment by a jihadist death cult using exploding underpants. We should be focusing on how to build our nation.

Dick Cheney says President Obama is "trying to pretend that we are not at war" with terrorists. There is only one thing I have to say about that: I sure hope so.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

Mawkish, maybe. But Avatar is a profound, insightful, important film

George Monbiot
The Guardian

Cameron's blockbuster offers a chilling metaphor for European butchery of the Americas. No wonder the US right hates it

Avatar, James Cameron's blockbusting 3D film, is both profoundly silly and profound. It's profound because, like most films about aliens, it is a metaphor for contact between different human cultures. But in this case the metaphor is conscious and precise: this is the story of European engagement with the native peoples of the Americas. It's profoundly silly because engineering a happy ending demands a plot so stupid and predictable that it rips the heart out of the film.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

Why You Should Fear Your Sofa, Baby Stroller and Nursing Pillow

Ruth Rosen
AlterNet

Flame retardants in everyday products cause cancer, birth defects or endocrine disruption in every animal species studied.

For good or ill, California often leads the nation's social and cultural trends and legal standards. California's passion for organic, local food, for example, has spread across the nation. When the state demanded lower vehicle emissions, manufacturers rushed to produce vehicles compliant with California's regulations. With nearly forty million people buying consumer products in one state, manufacturers across the nation, as well as in China, tailor their specifications to meet California's regulations.
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Thursday January 21, 2010

Clash of the Titans

Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek

How the Democratic Republic of Google is testing China's appetite for democracy itself.

Google's decision to defy Beijing's rules censoring the Internet could be seen as an isolated event—one company pulling out of China for a set of specific reasons. Certainly many other firms are acting that way, hoping to continue their pursuit of profits in the fastest-growing market in the world. But in fact Google's decision reflects important and expanding strains within China, and in its relations with the rest of the world.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

US waves white flag in disastrous 'war on drugs'

Hugh O'Shaughnessy
Independent

After 40 years, Washington is quietly giving up on a futile battle that has spread corruption and destroyed thousands of lives

After 40 years of defeat and failure, America's "war on drugs" is being buried in the same fashion as it was born – amid bloodshed, confusion, corruption and scandal. US agents are being pulled from South America; Washington is putting its narcotics policy under review, and a newly confident region is no longer prepared to swallow its fatal Prohibition error.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

After the big freeze, the baby boom

Laura Donnelly
Telegraph

Midwives and economists are predicting a major baby boom this autumn following the “big freeze” in which heavy snow and icy roads have kept millions of Britons indoors.

Maternity services are preparing for a surge in conceptions among couples who have been confined to their homes for long nights and cosy days during the coldest winter for almost five decades.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Floating Mega Arcology for Boston’s Harbor

Bridgette Meinhold
Inhabitat

Get ready Boston, someday you might just have this incredible floating city within a city located in your harbor. The BoA, short for Boston Arcology, is a sustainable mega structure designed by Kevin Schopfer, who also designed the amazing New Orleans Arcology Habitat (NOAH).

The BoA will house 15,000 people in hotels, offices, retail spaces, museums, condominiums, and even a new city hall. Built to LEED standards with golden proportions, this amazing building would serve as an expansion of the city without impacting what is already currently built.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Fears grow over safety of 'legal high' mephedrone

Denis Campbell
The Observer

It has a street name of 'bubble', but mephedrone, which can be bought over the internet, is causing serious health problems.

Growing numbers of teenagers and young people are receiving emergency medical treatment after being harmed by a legal drug that has the same effects as ecstasy and cocaine.

Users of mephedrone are ending up with nose bleeds and burns, paranoia, heart palpitations, insomnia and memory problems.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

German government warns against using MS Explorer

Daniel Emery
BBC News

The German government has warned web users to find an alternative browser to Internet Explorer to protect security.

The warning from the Federal Office for Information Security comes after Microsoft admitted IE was the weak link in recent attacks on Google's systems.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

NASA finds cocaine in Space Shuttle hangar

Austin Modine
The Register

Extra work on the nose cone

NASA is trying to sniff out which employee brought a baggy of cocaine into the hangar that houses Space Shuttle Discovery at Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week. The space agency is preparing the shuttle for a launch to the International Space Station in March.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Convenience food labelling 'misleading'

Martin Hickman
independent

Food manufacturers are failing to identify foreign ingredients, says watchdog

Most convenience foods such as sandwiches and pies are breaching industry guidelines by not identifying foreign ingredients, according to a study by the Food Standards Agency (FSA).

The health watchdog urges manufacturers to state the country of origin on "multi-ingredient" products, but 60 per cent failed to do so, it said.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Poland’s Economy Is No Joke

Peter Schiff
Campaign For Liberty

Watching the world’s leaders stumble their way through the economic crisis, it often feels as if political success and economic understanding are mutually exclusive. Even the Chinese, who over the past generation have engineered a dramatic turnaround from their Maoist economic nightmare, show a remarkable willingness to pursue a monetary policy (a currency peg to the U.S. dollar) that yields no benefit to their citizens.

Amid this morass of economic quackery, it is refreshing to see a clear ray of sanity emanating from one country: Poland.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Alt Text: Wilderness Survival, iPhone-Style

Lore Sjöberg
Wired

If you scan the list of top iPhone apps, you might be forgiven for thinking that the device, like adolescence, is mostly for playing videogames, making rude noises and connecting to Facebook.

However, a more thorough examination of the digital delectables on offer in the app store will reveal that, far from being merely a plaything that receives phone calls — as long as you don’t live in rural Montana or my neighborhood — the iPhone is actually a hard-core survival tool.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Sacked scientist promises impartial drugs advice

Andy Coghlan
New Scientist

The scientist sacked by the British government for allegedly criticising government drugs policy today made good on his promise to set up his own committee to investigate and publicise the science of recreational drugs.

"We will provide the truth about drugs unfettered by any political interference," said David Nutt of Imperial College London, and the former head of the government's Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) until he was asked to leave last October by Home Office minister, Alan Johnson.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Haiti, U.S. Aid and Humanitarian Relief

Anthony DiMaggio
Counterunch

U.S. journalists are seizing on the tragedy in Haiti in a non-stop barrage of reporting, providing endless updates on a devastating earthquake that has killed an estimated 45-50,000 people. Coverage of the quake is accompanied by detailed updates of the suffering of those involved, in addition to assurances that the U.S. government (and private donors) is doing all it can to help those in dire need.

This framework comports well with American journalists’ self-image– reflexively accepted – that the U.S. promotes the global good through altruism and humanitarianism.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

DNA profiles removed at rate of only one a day

Craig Woodhouse
Press Association

Innocent people's DNA profiles are being removed from the national database at a rate of barely one a day, figures showed today.

Home Office minister Alan Campbell said just 377 profiles were deleted in 2009 after appeals to police chiefs.

Liberal Democrat policing spokesman Paul Holmes, who uncovered the figures through a written parliamentary question, described the situation as a "disgrace".
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Spectral Light

Amy Irvine
Orion Magazine

Beyond black-and-white thinking in the New, Old West

In the dead of the night the human brain is most capable of distillation—of boiling things down to basic black and white. Smoke means fire. Breaking glass signals intrusion. From an evolutionary standpoint, this kind of rudimentary thought process might be a most valuable survival skill—the kind that allows a body to respond to threats even in a state of half-sleep.

My husband, Herb, is a lawyer, the kind of man who has been trained to think before he acts—to examine all angles and consider complexities.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Italy Shows its Ugly Side

Paul Virgo
IPS

If the first step towards solving a problem is recognising you have one, the Italian authorities look to be some way from tackling the growing racism and xenophobia affecting sections of its society.

Last week's riots by migrants in the southern town of Rosarno exposed an ugly side of the 'Bel Paese' - the beautiful country - that contrasts sharply with its romantic image abroad.

Instead of the architectural delights of Rome, Florence and Venice, viewers around the world saw pictures of seasonal farm workers driven to vandalism by exploitation and inhuman living conditions after the touch paper was lit by two of them being shot by air-rifles.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Did King Tut's Discoverer Steal from the Tomb?

Matthias Schulz
Spiegel International

Howard Carter, the British explorer who opened the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, will forever be associated with the greatest trove of artifacts from ancient Egypt. But was he also a thief?

Dawn was breaking as Howard Carter took up a crowbar to pry open the sealed tomb door in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. With shaking hands, he held a candle to the fissure, now wafting out 3,300-year-old air. What did he see, those behind him wanted to know. The archaeologist could do no more than stammer, "Wonderful things!"
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Microsoft confirms it will stay in China

John Fontana
Network World US

Steve Ballmer refuses to follow Google lead

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the company is staying in China even though rival Google is talking about pulling out following a cyber attack on its systems.

"We have been quite clear we are going to operate in China and we are going to abide by the law," Ballmer told CNBC in an interview after meeting with President Obama and 50 other top CEOs to discuss how technology can help cut government costs.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Loner ran site for stolen card details

Wesley Johnson and Sam Marsden
Press Association

A loner with a modest lifestyle ran a secretive website where criminals traded information from stolen credit cards causing tens of millions of pounds of losses.

Renukanth Subramaniam helped to run the virtual criminal community DarkMarket, which was shut down by an undercover FBI officer after a two-year global investigation.

The site featured breaking news-style updates on the latest compromised information, enabling criminals to trade credit card information and other personal details.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Buyer Beware: Animal Fat Lurks in These 7 Common ‘Vegetarian’ Foods

Tina McCarthy
Eco Salon

When you became a vegetarian, you quickly learned it wasn’t just about skipping pepperoni on that pizza. You had to start scanning labels for ingredients like capric acid, tallow, rennet, glycerin, whey, suet, stereate and emulsifiers – because eating animal fat by any other name would be just as carnivorous.

What you may not know is that plenty of common foods widely considered to be veg-friendly (or perhaps we should say veg-adjacent) actually contain animal fat, not just dairy fat. That means flesh. Read on to learn more.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Why Do People Want to Have Sex with the 9-Foot Tall Natives in 'Avatar'?

Vanessa Richmond
AlterNet

So many people have been seduced by 'Avatar' that lusting for blue aliens could become a part of mainstream culture.

Fantasy and sex go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Geeks have always known this. Books and movies featuring quests, dragon-riding, spaceships and magic, also tend to have a fair share of scantily clad, hot, young, single characters.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Internet piracy at work soars

Carrie-Ann Skinner
PC Advisor

Employees illegally download torrents at work

The number of office workers using their corporate network to illegally file-share has increased, says ScanSafe.

According to the cloud-security vendor, attempts to illegally download MP3s and software via a work internet connection has increased by 55 percent over the past three months.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Street Fight On The High Seas

Raffi Khatchadourian
The New Yorker

Several days ago in the Southern Ocean, off the coast of Antarctica, a Japanese whaling vessel, the Shonan Maru No. 2, heaved into a high-speed trimaran owned by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an environmentalist group that I profiled in The New Yorker in 2007.

The collision caused about ten feet of the trimaran’s hull to splinter off and break apart into the icy depths. The event was both violent and perilous: the trimaran’s remaining shell subsequently took on large amounts of water, and one of the six people onboard was injured.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Blair froze out Iraq war dissenters

Michael Savage
Independent

Tony Blair froze out anyone with concerns about the Iraq war and was not challenged on the issue by a Cabinet that had been "conditioned" to accept that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, the Iraq inquiry has been told.

Lord Turnbull, who as Cabinet Secretary was Britain's most senior civil servant, said that Mr Blair largely surrounded himself with those who would not disagree with him, while those who did have concerns were given almost no time to discuss the issue.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

'She Orgasms When You Touch Her': The World's First Sex Robot

Tana Ganeva
AlterNet

Sadly, humanity has reached 2010 without flying cars or personal-use jetpacks. But not without sex robots.

At AVN Media Network's recent Adult Entertainment Expo, Douglas Hines of True Companion announced the release of a digitally programmed robot that's like a real woman, only much better.

"She is anatomically consistent with a real person. She has three inputs, so …. what you can think of … for a woman … she can do,"
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Google to China: Drop Dead

Rory O'Connor
Mediachannel.org

It should come as no surprise to anyone — least of all to Google founding whiz kids Sergey Brin and Larry Page — that reporting of their company’s recent announcement that it would stop cooperating with Chinese Internet censorship was itself heavily censored in China.

Although, as the New York Times noted, “Some big Chinese news portals initially carried a short dispatch on Google’s announcement,” news of the decision “soon tumbled from the headlines.” Later reports omitted all references to “free speech” and “surveillance.”
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Sunday January 17, 2010

New Airport Body Scans Don't Detect All Weapons

Jon Hamilton
NPR

The Obama administration's plan to protect air travelers from terrorists is counting on a technology that is powerful but imperfect, experts say.

The plan will place hundreds of full-body scanners in airports around the country. These scanners use a technology called backscatter X-ray to create images that can reveal weapons or explosives hidden beneath a person’s clothing.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Dubai Debts Prompt Review of Islamic Finance

Mona Alami
Ips

'The World’, a manmade archipelago off the coast of Dubai, developed by the Nakheel real estate company - which partly relied on the issuance of Islamic bonds, or sukuk, to finance the ambitious project - has come to symbolise for many the vulnerability of the Islamic financial market.

On Nov. 30, Nakheel asked that trading on all its sukuk bonds be suspended until it was in a position to provide further information. This decision included three types of sukuk that amounted to some 3.5 billion US dollars due on Dec.14.

The emirate was luckily bailed out by its richer neighbour, Abu Dhabi, which proffered a 10 billion dollar advance that allowed for the payoff of Dubai’s incumbent debt.
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Sunday January 17, 2010

Scientists begin pulling data from atom smasher

Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld US

Large Hadron Collider starts producing results

After billions of dollars were spent to build, start, shut down and then fix and restart the Large Hadron Collider , the system has finally produced enough data for some long awaited scientific analysis.

Scientists around the world are starting to analyse what an Iowa State University professor calls "beautiful" data.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Chinese plead with Google not to quit

Clifford Coonan
Independent

Web users risk wrath of state with floral tribute outside internet giant's Beijing HQ

Google's threat to withdraw from China sent shockwaves through the country's internet users yesterday. Some pleaded with the search engine not to abandon them, while others applauded its tough stance after it uncovered cyber attacks on Chinese human rights activists.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Facebook snuggles with McAfee in security spree

John Leyden
The Register

Symantec unlikely to like updated relationship status

Facebook has partnered with McAfee to offer users of the social networking site a free six-month subscription to its security software.

The year-long exclusive deal, announced Wednesday, also involves a special (unspecified) discount for McAfee's Internet Security Suite software once the six months trial is over.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Poor neighbourhoods can kill

Peter Aldhous
New Scientist

Deep down, Diana Garmon-Spears knew something was seriously wrong when she noticed a lump in her right breast, about the size of a peanut. "I ignored it, but then my breast started to deform. I started to form a mass of lumps all around," she recalls.

Two years later, she doesn't expect doctors to cure her cancer, and has been forced to give up her office work. "I don't think there's any employer who's going to understand you having chemo or radiation for 2 hours a day."
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Thursday January 14, 2010

The Iron Dome

Jonathan Cook
Counterpunch

Israel unveiled “Iron Dome” last week, a missile-defence system that is designed to strike a knock-out blow against short-range rockets of the variety fired into Israel by Hamas and Hizbullah. In the short term, Iron Dome is supposed to herald the demise of the rocket threat to Israeli communities near Gaza four years after Hamas won the Palestinian elections.

The period in-between has been marked by a series of inconclusive moves by both sides: Israel’s crippling siege of Gaza has yet to break the will of Gazans; negotiations for the release of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas more than three years ago, have gone nowhere; reconciliation talks between rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah have borne no fruit; and even the savage offensive against Gaza last year, Operation Cast Lead, achieved little in strategic gains for Israel.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

42 tons of poison to purge island of rats

Kathy Marks
Independent

Desperate measure to save Lord Howe Island's native species

Lord Howe, an idyllic island off the Australian mainland, carefully conserves its natural treasures. The World Heritage-listed chunk of rock has strict quarantine laws, and limits the number of tourists who may visit.

But its unique birds, insects and plants are under threat from an implacable foe: the black rat. Accidentally introduced in 1918 when a ship ran aground, rats are blamed for the extinction of five endemic bird species.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Arctic Tundra is Being Lost As Far North Quickly Warms

bill sherwonit
e360

The treeless ecosystem of mosses, lichens, and berry plants is giving way to shrub land and boreal forest. As scientists study the transformation, they are discovering that major warming-related events, including fires and the collapse of slopes due to melting permafrost, are leading to the loss of tundra in the Arctic.

During the summer of 2007, lightning strikes sparked five tundra fires on Alaska’s North Slope. Two of the fires — rare events north of the Arctic Circle — began in neighboring drainages, only a couple of days apart. That, in itself, might have gained the attention of tundra researchers. But the 2007 fire season would ultimately burn a record swath across the North Slope, while reshaping the way scientists think about the Arctic’s response to global warming.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Dietary Restrictions

Anne Dailey
Last exit Magazine

Most of us aren’t even aware of the vast system of regulatory boundaries that are limiting our food choices.

Food. We grow it, we purchase food, we eat it several times a day. Technically speaking, we choose what we eat. If we’re farmers we choose what we grow. But dig under the surface a bit and you’ll find that the walls and boundaries that have sprung up in the last fifty years in and around our food system are everywhere.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

What Comes Next for the Crisis-Stricken Country?

Hauke Goos
Spiegel International

Rebooting Iceland

Iceland has been like the canary in the coalmine of the global economic crisis. The government was driven out of office, the banks were nationalized and Iceland's people will be bailing the country out for years to come. Reykjavik's next great experiment will be reinvention.

Hannes Holmsteinn Gissurarson, the man who gave Iceland the dream of one day becoming the world's finest country, is standing in the middle of his small office at Reykjavik University and, for a second, he is acting modestly. He now simply wants to be remembered as a man unjustly condemned by history even though he did everything right.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Tories will change law to cut use of stop-and-search

Nigel Morris and Robert Verkaik
Independent

Conservatives concerned that officers are abusing anti-terrorism legislation

Police use of stop-and-search powers under anti-terror legislation would be slashed back by a Conservative government. Amid fears that some officers are abusing their authority, the Tories would instruct police to use the powers more sparingly.

The number of stop-and-searches has trebled in a year, with police facing protests that they have targeted tourists, photographers and trainspotters under the legislation.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Israel Declares War on Peace NGOs

Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler
IPS

One year after the devastating attack on Hamas in Gaza a new wave of reports castigating Israel for war crimes has emerged.

Now, Israel is fighting back with a report on the reports, picking on international NGOs such as Amnesty, Christian Aid, Oxfam, Trocaire , Finn Church Aid, Diakonia and Cordaid.

The immediate target of Israeli ire is a collective report entitled "Failing Gaza: No rebuilding, no recovery, no more excuses,’’ issued by these NGO, based in Europe.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Google may pull out of China after cyberattacks

Nancy Gohring
Techworld

Search giant gets political following hacker attacks

Google has decided to stop censoring its results in China and could end up closing its operations and shutting down its search engine there following an attack on Google's servers in December that targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Gates Foundation throws its lot with agribusiness

Tom Philpott
Grist

For a while, the Gates Foundation sought to avoid a reputation as a cheerleader for biotech “solutions” to Africa’s agriculture troubles.

Sure, our nation’s best-funded foundation hired a former Monsanto exec, Rob Horsch, as a program officer. But its official ag-development documents (see, for example, this one) brim with statements on the importance of small-scale farming—a wise idea, given that a majority of Africa’s residents rely on small-scale farming for their sustenance.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Judge says extraditing Gary McKinnon may be unlawful

Afua Hirsch
The Guardian

Asperger's sufferer faces lengthy prison sentence in the US for breaching US military and Nasa computers

The home secretary may have acted unlawfully by pursuing the extradition of the computer hacker Gary McKinnon, a high court judge said yesterday.

Extraditing McKinnon, an Asperger's sufferer who is facing a lengthy prison sentence in the US for breaching US military and Nasa computers, raises "stark and simple issues", Mr Justice Mitting said.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Is the weather making you ill?

Jeremy Laurance
Independent

If you feel weak in the winter and sick in the summer, you are not imagining it. The weather really does affect our health – and can be lethal

For a weather-conscious nation we are comically bad at coping with snow and ice. Traffic jams, grit shortages and school closures are part of the British winter landscape.

But it is not only our routine that suffers. So does our health. Cold temperatures lower immunity and thicken the blood, increasing the risk of infection and heart attacks. Grey skies depress mood, icy conditions increase injuries.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Sleep Challenge 2010: How Sleep Is Like Steroids ...Without the 'Roid Rage'

Arianna Huffington
Huffington Post

After finally getting eight hours of sleep a night, I was surprised to discover that getting enough sleep also helps you exercise better.

It's now day 8 of the Sleep Challenge I'm doing along with Glamour's Cindi Leive. So how is my "sleep-hab" -- that's sleep rehab! -- going?

In a word: progress! As of my last sleep challenge post at four days in, I'd yet to reach my goal of eight hours of sleep a night. Well, I am pleased to announce that for the last two nights I've gotten the full eight.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Five emotions you never knew you had

Jessica Griggs
New Scientist

Can you name the six basic emotions? Take a straw poll of your friends and we guarantee that you will find no consensus. Yet psychologists are unequivocal: joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust.

These are the Big Six, quite literally, the in-your-face emotions - the ones that everyone the world over exhibits with the same dramatic and characteristic facial expressions.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Chuck Norris Hunts for Obama's 'Secret Vault' as Interpol Conspiracy Theories Get Wilder

Michael Isikoff
Newsweek

The conspiracy theories about President Obama's executive order on Interpol are getting wilder by the day.

Invoking no less an authority than Glenn Beck, movie tough guy (and political activist) Chuck Norris has taken aim at Obama's Dec. 17 executive order extending certain "privileges, exemptions, and immunities" to Interpol, otherwise known as the International Police Organization, based in Lyon, France.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Chrome sets the pace for browser security

Computerworld US

Security guru says Google well ahead of Microsoft and Mozilla

All browser makers should take a page from Google's Chrome and isolate untrusted data from the rest of the operating system, according to a noted security researcher.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

TV addicts risk heart disease, study finds

John von Radowitz
Press Association

Every hour spent watching TV each day increases the risk of dying from heart disease by almost a fifth, say scientists.

Couch potatoes were warned that their lifestyle also increased the risk of death from other causes including cancer.

Individuals who spent hours watching television greatly heightened the chances of dying early from heart attacks and strokes, they found.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Data Highlights: America's Century-Long Love Affair with the Car May Be Coming to an End

Lester Brown
Treehugger

Between 1950 and 2008 more cars were added to our roads virtually every year as the total fleet expanded steadily from 49 million to 250 million vehicles. In 2009, however, 14 million cars were scrapped while only 10 million cars were sold, shrinking the fleet by 4 million vehicles, or nearly 2 percent.

With record numbers of cars set to reach retirement age between now and 2020, the fleet could shrink by some 10 percent, dropping from the all-time high of 250 million in 2008 to 225 million in 2020.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

The Search for Autism’s Missing Piece

Brita Belli
E Magazine

Autism Research Slowly Turns Its Focus to Environmental Toxicity

Autism cases are on the rise. Or so the most recent data would have us believe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that 1 in 100 children in the U.S. have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)—up from 1 in 150 in 2007. A study in the journal Pediatrics in October 2009 revealed similar numbers—parents of 1 in 90 children reported that their child had ASD. With boys, the rate of ASD was 1 in 58.

Without a doubt, autism is the country’s fastest-growing developmental disability, affecting more children than cancer, diabetes and AIDS combined. Still, in dealing with a childhood disorder that ranges from “highly functioning” to uncommunicative, and such a long list of potential triggers and treatments, even the numbers themselves are subject to questioning.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

China powers the global green tech revolution

Todd Woody
Grist

Forget Red China. It’s Green China these days—at least when it comes to making big renewable deals.

Friday night, a Chinese developer and eSolar of Pasadena, Calif., signed an agreement to build solar thermal power plants in the Mongolian desert over the next decade. These plants would generate a total of 2,000 megawatts of electricity. It’s the largest solar thermal project in the world and follows another two-gigawatt deal China struck in October with Arizona’s First Solar for a massive photovoltaic power complex.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Universities tell Gordon Brown: cuts will bring us to our knees

Jessica Shepherd
The Guardian

Exclusive Top colleges warn order to save £2.5bn will wreck 'jewel in crown'

Top universities accuse Gordon Brown of jeopardising 800 years of higher education, warning that they could quickly be "brought to their knees" by the government's spending cuts of up to £2.5bn, thereby damaging Britain's ability to recover from recession.
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Thursday January 14, 2010

Shady Lady seeks male escorts with staying power

Guy Adams
Independent

A Nevada brothel is recruiting to take advantage of a law change and offer services to women clients

The job has its perks. Pay is excellent. Hours are sociable. The surroundings are clean and comfortable, if a tiny bit chintzy, and you're guaranteed to meet lots of fascinating women. The catch? You are required to have sex with them.
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Tuesday January 12, 2010

Don’t Panic

Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek

How our frenzied response to terrorism only feeds it.

In responding to the attempted bombing of an airliner on Christmas Day, Sen. Dianne Feinstein voiced the feelings of many when she said that to prevent such situations, "I'd rather…overreact than underreact." This now appears to be the consensus view in Washington, but it is quite wrong.

In fact, precisely the opposite is true. The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction. Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population.
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Tuesday January 12, 2010

The Healing Powers of Facebook

Mikita Brottman
Counterpunch

Not long ago, the web was abuzz with the saga of Nathalie Blanchard, a 29-year-old Canadian woman suffering from depression whose benefits were withdrawn when pictures appeared on Facebook showing her “having fun.”

There are many reasons why this story is disturbing—it is scary to think that insurance companies employ representatives to patrol Facebook, for one thing—but perhaps most troublesome is the idea that anyone would believe there to be a direct correlation between a person’s Facebook profile and their inner life.
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Tuesday January 12, 2010

Full-body scanners used on air passengers may damage human DNA

Mike Adams
Natural News

In researching the biological effects of the millimeter wave scanners used for whole body imaging at airports, NaturalNews has learned that the energy emitted by the machines may damage human DNA.

Millimeter wave machines represent one of two primary technologies currently being used for the “digital strip searches” being conducted at airports around the world.

“The Transportation Security Administration utilizes two technologies to capture naked images of air travelers – backscatter x-ray technology and millimeter wave technology,” reports the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a non-profit currently suing the U.S. government to stop these electronic strip searches.
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Tuesday January 12, 2010

The ‘false’ pandemic: Drug firms cashed in on scare over swine flu, claims Euro health chief

Fiona Macrae
Daily Mail

The swine flu outbreak was a ‘false pandemic’ driven by drug companies that stood to make billions of pounds from a worldwide scare, a leading health expert has claimed.

Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, accused the makers of flu drugs and vaccines of influencing the World Health Organisation’s decision to declare a pandemic.

This led to the pharmaceutical firms ensuring ‘enormous gains’, while countries, including the UK, ’squandered’ their meagre health budgets, with millions being vaccinated against a relatively mild disease.
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Tuesday January 12, 2010

China banks eclipse US rivals

Patrick Jenkins
Financial Times

Chinese banks have cemented their position as the most highly valued financial institutions, taking four of the top five slots in a ranking of banks’ share prices as a multiple of their book values.

China Merchants Bank, China Citic, ICBC and China Construction Bank lead the table, followed by Itaú Unibanco of Brazil, all with a price-to-book multiple of more than three.

Over the past six years, the average price-to-book value of the biggest 50 banks has halved from two to one.
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Tuesday January 12, 2010

Because they were worth it? Research finds Neanderthals enjoyed makeup

Sam Jones
The Guardian

For decades, our low-browed Neanderthal cousins have been portrayed as dim savages whose idea of seduction was a whispered "ug" and a blow to the cranium.

But analysis of pierced, hand-coloured shells and lumps of pigment from two caves in south-east Spain suggests the cavepeople who stomped around Europe 50,000 years ago were far more intelligent – and cosmetically minded – than previously thought.
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Tuesday January 12, 2010

Quantum computers do chemistry

Colin Barras
New Scientist

A team of quantum physicists has taken the first steps towards using a quantum computer to predict how a chemical reaction will take place.

Even the most powerful classical computers struggle when trying to calculate how molecules will interact in a chemical reaction. That's partly because the complexity of such systems doubles with the addition of every atom, as each atom is entangled with all the others.
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Tuesday January 12, 2010

Who will pay for Amazon's 'Chernobyl'?

Esme McAvoy
independent

A film released this week in Britain recounts the 16-year battle by Ecuadorians for damages against Chevron for oil pollution

It's barely eight in the morning and already the dusty oil town of Lago Agrio, on the fringes of the Ecuadorian Amazon, is sweltering. Its name means "sour lake" in Spanish, after the hometown of Texan oil company Texaco – a fitting name for an area of once-pristine rainforest that has been decimated in the pursuit of oil.
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Tuesday January 12, 2010

The Shadow War

Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse
Tomdispatch.com

Making Sense of the New CIA Battlefield in Afghanistan

It was a Christmas and New Year’s from hell for American intelligence, that $75 billion labyrinth of at least 16 major agencies and a handful of minor ones. As the old year was preparing to be rung out, so were our intelligence agencies, which managed not to connect every obvious clue to a (literally) seat-of-the-pants al-Qaeda operation.

It hardly mattered that the underwear bomber’s case -- except for the placement of the bomb material -- almost exactly, even outrageously, replicated the infamous, and equally inept, “shoe bomber” plot of eight years ago.
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Tuesday January 12, 2010

Giving corporations an outsized voice in elections

Monica Youn
Los Angeles Times

Voters stand to lose out if the Supreme Court treats political spending by businesses and other big-money players as protected speech.

Corporations are pitching a bizarre product -- a radical vision of the 1st Amendment. It would give corporations rather than voters a central role in our electoral process by treating corporate political spending as protected speech.

If this vision becomes reality, businesses and other big-money players will spend billions either hyping their preferred candidates or running attack ads against elected officials who don't support their preferred agenda.
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Tuesday January 12, 2010

Detaining children in Britain: No place for the innocent

Paul Vallely
Independent

What kind of country drags vulnerable children from their beds at daybreak, puts them behind bars and fills them with terror? Paul Vallely meets a family who have endured this horror – in Britain. And they're not alone.

The thundering knock came early in the morning. It was 6.30am. Without waiting for an answer the security chain across the door was smashed from its fittings. Feet thundered up the staircase.
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Tuesday January 12, 2010

Rare self-rolling giant snow balls found in UK

Heidi Blake
Telegraph

They may look like winter's answer to crop circles, but these mysterious snow rolls are in fact a rare natural phenomenon usually found only in the world's most remote and frozen regions.

Also known as snowrollers, snow bales and snow doughnuts, they form mostly in unusual conditions created by a precise combination of snow, ice, wind, temperature and moisture on the prairies of North America.

But this week's frozen weather has allowed the snow cylinders to make a freak appearance in the UK.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

Did Court Deal Fatal Blow to Tasers for Police?

Raj Jayadev and Aram James
New America Media

In what is being heralded as a landmark decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently declared that police officers could be held liable for using a Taser without proper cause. And in making their determination, the court also set new legal parameters on how law enforcement is to use Tasers, stating, "The objective facts must indicate that the suspect poses an immediate threat to the officer or a member of the public."

The federal finding substantially changes the landscape of Taser usage, and may signal the end of Tasers for law enforcement agencies who are now more vulnerable to civil and criminal action then ever before.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

If you think this is bad, go to Vostok

Steve Connor
Independent

In the strictest scientific sense, there is no such thing as cold, only an absence of heat. But try telling that to anyone caught outside last night.

Heat is caused by the motion or oscillation of atoms and molecules. The more oscillation there is in the air or in an object, the more heat there is and the higher the temperature. There is a theoretical temperature low enough for this thermodynamic oscillation to cease altogether, and this is called absolute zero, which is -273.15C.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

How to make a liquid invisibility cloak

Kate McAlpine
New Scientist

When J. K. Rowling described Harry Potter's invisibility cloak as "fluid and silvery", she probably wasn't thinking specifically about silver-plated nanoparticles suspended in water. But a team of theorists believe that using such a set-up would make the first soft, tunable metamaterial – the "active ingredient" in an invisibility device.

The fluid proposed by Ji-Ping Huang of Fudan University in Shanghai, China, and colleagues, contains magnetite balls 10 nanometres in diameter, coated with a 5-nanometre-thick layer of silver, possibly with polymer chains attached to keep them from clumping.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

Britain's plan for giant wind farms will need 'super-grid' to take off

Rowena Mason
Telegraph

Power companies awarded contracts to build 6,400 wind turbines off the British coast have warned that they will need a "super-grid" connected to Europe to guarantee a steady power supply.

E.ON, RWE npower, Scottish Power, Centrica, Scottish and Southern Energy, Vattenfall and smaller utilities must find £100bn in investment to ensure the wind farms are built by 2020. At peak capacity, the new projects could provide 25pc of Britain's electricity needs.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

Flu Season: Factory Farming Could Cause a Pandemic

Kathy Freston
AlterNet

The chicken and pork industries have wrought unprecedented changes in bird and swine flu. Billions could die in a new pandemic.

I was intrigued (and disturbed) by a book I just read online -- www.BirdFluBook.org -- by Michael Greger, M.D. about the potential of a deadly flu pandemic, the likes of which we have never seen. Greger very clearly delineates how a virus begins, mutates, and becomes dangerous.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

Behind Mass Die-Offs, Pesticides Lurk as Culprit

Sonia Shah
e360

In the past dozen years, three new diseases have decimated populations of amphibians, honeybees, and — most recently — bats. Increasingly, scientists suspect that low-level exposure to pesticides could be contributing to this rash of epidemics.

Ever since Olga Owen Huckins shared the spectacle of a yard full of dead, DDT-poisoned birds with her friend Rachel Carson in 1958, scientists have been tracking the dramatic toll on wildlife of a planet awash in pesticides. Today, drips and puffs of pesticides surround us everywhere, contaminating 90 percent of the nation’s major rivers and streams, more than 80 percent of sampled fish, and one-third of the nation’s aquifers.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

Air Force Completes Killer Micro-Drone Project

David Hambling
Wired

The Air Force Research Laboratory set out in 2008 to build the ultimate assassination robot: a tiny, armed drone for U.S. special forces to employ in terminating “high-value targets.” The military won’t say exactly what happened to this Project Anubis, named after a jackal-headed god of the dead in Egyptian mythology.

But military budget documents note that Air Force engineers were successful in “develop[ing] a Micro-Air Vehicle (MAV) with innovative seeker/tracking sensor algorithms that can engage maneuvering high-value targets.”
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Saturday January 09, 2010

Dadaist user manuals - a call for submissions

Rik Myslewski
The Register

'Stop before you whop'

The eggnog has been drunk, the ornaments put away, the hangovers endured. Now it's time for you to dig through those users manuals for all that kit you received as a holiday goodie.

Problem: the manual was translated from its original Mandarin, Minangkabau, or Quenya by an autistic babelfish.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

Bonus time as banks pay out £40bn

Jill Treanor
The Guardian

Exclusive: Chancellor Alistair Darling's windfall tax has not led to cut in rewards for bankers

The world's biggest investment banks are expected to pay out more than $65bn (£40bn) in salaries and bonuses in the next two weeks, reinforcing the view that it is business as usual on Wall Street and in the City barely a year since the taxpayer bailout of the banking system.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

10 Reasons the U.S. Military Should (Officially) Use Pot

Penny Coleman
AlterNet

Medical marijuana may have a host of advantages over other treatments for traumatized vets, but the VA won't even study its efficacy.

"I’ve gone through pain management more times than I can count on my hands, and I've had over twelve series of epidermal steroid injections done to my lower back. None of them ever did anything for me. Except of course make my stomach problems much worse.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

France moves to outlaw the burka and niqab citing égalité

John Lichfield
Independent

Proposal angers Sarkozy as he struggles to contain surge in anti-Islamic feeling

The parliamentary leader of the ruling French party is to put forward a draft law within two weeks to ban the full-body veil from French streets and all other public places.

The announcement by Jean-François Copé, cutting short an anguished six-month debate on the burka and its Arab equivalent, the niqab, will divide both right and left and is likely to anger President Nicolas Sarkozy.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

The Airport Scanner Scam

James Ridgeway
Mother Jones

Scan, baby, scan. That’s the mantra among politicians at all levels in the wake of the thwarted terrorist attack aboard a Detroit-bound passenger jet. According to conventional wisdom, the would-be “underwear bomber” could have been stopped by airport security if he’d been put through a full-body scanner, which would have revealed the cache of explosives attached to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s groin.

Within days or even hours of the bombing attempt, everyone was talking about so-called whole-body imaging as the magic bullet that could stop this type of attack.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

Broadcaster of the Year

Deborah Campbel
Adbusters

Documenting an ever-larger swath of the planet.

It was an audacious plan that seemed doomed to fail: In late 2006 Al Jazeera, the upstart Arabic news network twice bombed by the US military, launched an English-language channel in a bold play at taking on the biggest names in international news and beating them at their own game.

Yet three years on, through a combination of old-school field reporting from the world’s most dangerous places and 70 bureaus staffed by scrappy (and typically young) reporters from a United Nations of countries, Al Jazeera English (AJE) has emerged as the dominant channel covering the developing world at a time when Western media are reeling from the loss of their markets – and their sense of mission
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Saturday January 09, 2010

Happy New Year, Unless You're Fat: Social Networking Site Kicks Out 5,000 Members For Holiday Weight Gain

Liliana Segura
AlterNet

"As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but ... our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld," says the founder of BeautifulPeople.com

2010, I thought to myself, would be the year I ignored all the bullshit and concentrated on the serious stuff. But then the BBC had to come along and ruin it by tossing this little gem of absurdity my way:

Dating and social network site BeautifulPeople.com has axed some 5,000 members following complaints that they had gained weight...
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Saturday January 09, 2010

Solar energy’s dirty little secret

Todd Woody
Grist

Solar energy has long been one of the great hopes for fighting climate change and liberating the world from fossil fuels. And it’s easy to see why solar has captured the collective imagination: All those photovoltaic panels look so shiny, futuristic, clean, and green.

That’s not quite the case. Any form of energy production has its dirty side and solar is no exception. While its impact is nowhere near that of coal-fired power plants, photovoltaic modules are made from a witch’s brew of toxic chemicals.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

IRAN: New Revelations Tear Holes in Nuclear Trigger Story

Gareth Porter
Inter Press Service

New revelations about two documents leaked to The Times of London to show that Iran is working on a "nuclear trigger" mechanism have further undermined the credibility of the document the newspaper had presented as evidence of a continuing Iranian nuclear weapons programme.

A columnist for the Times has acknowledged that the two-page Persian language document published by The Times last month was not a photocopy of the original document but an expurgated and retyped version of the original.

A translation of a second Persian language document also published by The Times, moreover, contradicts the claim by The Times that it shows the "nuclear trigger" document was written within an organisation run by an Iranian military scientist.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

Chimp's dance suggests a mental grasp of fire

Fergal MacErlean
New Scientist

Chimps have been reported dancing in rainstorms – and now it seems our closest relation has a "fire dance", too. A dominant male chimp performed such a dance in the face of a raging savannah fire in Senegal.

Anthropologist Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University in Ames recounts that the male faced the fire with "a really exaggerated slow-motion display" before redirecting his display at chimps sheltering in a nearby baobab tree.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

Return of the Fungi

Andy Isaacson
Mother Jones

In the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest grows a bulbous, prehistoric-looking mushroom called agarikon. It prefers to colonize century-old Douglas fir trees, growing out of their trunks like an ugly mole on a finger. When I first met Paul Stamets, a mycologist who has spent more than three decades hunting, studying, and tripping on mushrooms, he had found only two of these unusual fungi, each time by accident—or, as he might put it, divine intervention.

Stamets believes that unlocking agar i kon's secrets may be as important to the future of human health as Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillium mold's antibiotic properties more than 80 years ago.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

Business As Usual Is History: Corporations Won't Save Us, But Co-ops May

Sena Christian
AlterNet

As economic hardship threatens communities, there is one bright light in the fog -- cooperatives -- which already serve 4 in 10 Americans and are growing strong.

During Andrew McLeod's 10-day visit to the Basque Country of northern Spain, he met a 34-year-old man named Aitor Garro, who makes aluminum car components. For the last 13 years, this man has worked at Fagor Ederlan, a division of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, which is the world's largest system of worker-owned businesses.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

Skype rolls out HD video calls

James Niccolai
Techworld

Internet phone software also bundled with TVs

Skype users can now make high definition video calls as long as they have an HD webcam and sufficient bandwidth and processing power, Skype said. The company also announced that HDTVs will ship later this year with its Internet calling software embedded on them.

The HD capability is included in the beta version of Skype 4.2, the company said. The software was actually released for PC users in early December but Skype didn't disclose the HD features at the time, perhaps because it wanted to make a splash at the Consumer Electronics Show, which gets under way this week in Las Vegas.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

The Best Chance Yet for Legalizing Marijuana

Daniela Perdomo
AlterNet

Tax Cannabis 2010 faces hurdles as it prepares for its test on the California ballot next November.

It's Dec. 14 and news that the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010 has qualified for the California ballot next year has just exploded in time for the evening news cycle. I am sitting on a sofa in a nearly empty room at Oaksterdam University, filing an update to my scoop for AlterNet and waiting for a chance to speak more at length with Richard Lee, the man behind the measure.
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Saturday January 09, 2010

Mobile phones 'may prevent Alzheimer's'

Jeremy Laurance
Independent

Mobile phones may improve memory and protect against Alzheimer's disease, scientists have discovered.

In one of the most unexpected scientific findings for some time, researchers have found that the electromagnetic waves emitted by the devices may improve cognitive function.
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Wednesday January 06, 2010

'Gott Mit Uns': Christians Excusing War

Gary G. Kohls
Consortium News

When Gulf War I ended (during George Bush the Elder’s presidency), General Norman Schwartzkopf, the field commander, triumphantly proclaimed, “God must have been on our side!”.

Such statements aren’t unusual for glory-seeking dictators, kings, princes, presidents and generals, regardless of what religion justified their particular war, but I cringed when I heard this self-professed Christian warrior claim God’s blessings on the war that made him famous.

In his memoir, It Doesn’t Take A Hero, Schwartzkopf claimed that he kept a Bible at his bedside throughout the war.
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Wednesday January 06, 2010

Politicians and celebrities shamed for science gaffes

Andy Coghlan
New Scientist

Did you know that when you eat meat, it stays in your gut for 40 years, putrefies and leads to a disease that kills you?

"That is a fact," according to the model and charity campaigner Heather Mills, one of several celebrities whose statements in the media last year have been scrutinised and where necessary challenged by the British-based charity Sense About Science in its latest "celebrity watch" review.
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Wednesday January 06, 2010

Google Chrome steals Apple's browser spot

Gregg Keizer
Computerworld US

Safari moves down to number four

Google's Chrome overtook Apple's Safari to become the world's third most popular browser just 16 months after its debut, a web metrics company said.

Internet Explorer (IE), meanwhile, lost almost a full percentage point in December, the latest slip in a decline that accelerated during the second half of 2009.
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Wednesday January 06, 2010

Mega Giant Corporations Are Very Bad for America

Barry C. Lynn
AlterNet

Wal-Mart delivers at least 30% and sometimes more than 50% of the entire U.S. consumption of products. Why the monopolization of our economy should scare you.

The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, published by Wiley Press.

Even with a GPS and a good map, I have a hard time finding Diane Cochrane’s home, which is tucked in the crease of a hill a few miles east of Prescott, Arizona. The one-story green frame building sits at the bottom of a steep driveway that drops from a rocky road that cuts off a maze of streets that, as I drive along in my rented Pontiac, seem more like a mad Motocross track than the arteries of a neighborhood.
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Wednesday January 06, 2010

What's Next: Muslim-Only Lines At Airports?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
New America Media

Are Muslim-only lines at airports next? The thought is offensive, disgusting, and blatantly unconstitutional. But it’s hardly far-fetched.

Three years before suspected Nigerian airline terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was hauled off a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with a powder and liquid explosive device stuffed in his underwear, British Department of Transportation officials openly discussed corralling men of South Asian or Middle Eastern appearance at airports for intense questioning, checks and searches. The plan outraged Muslim leaders and British officials backed off the systematic profiling of Muslims.
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Wednesday January 06, 2010

California: Historic Vote On Cannabis Regulation To Take Place On Tuesday, January 12

Paul Armentano
NORML

On Tuesday, January 12, members of the California Assembly will hold a historic vote on statewide marijuana policy. Members of the Public Safety Committee will decide on Assembly Bill 390, the Marijuana Control, Regulation, and Education Act, which seeks to regulate and control the production, distribution, and personal use of marijuana for adults age 21 and older.

Tuesday’s vote will mark the first time since 1913, when California became one of the first states in the nation to enact cannabis prohibition, that lawmakers have reassessed this failed policy.
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Wednesday January 06, 2010

Yummy! Ammonia-Treated Pink Slime Now in Most U.S. Ground Beef

Jennifer Poole
Daily Kos

You're not going to believe what you've been eating the last few years (thanks, Bush! thanks meat industry lobbyists!) when you eat a McDonald's burger (or the hamburger patties in kids' school lunches) or buy conventional ground meat at your supermarket:

According to today's New York Times, The "majority of hamburger" now sold in the U.S. now contains fatty slaughterhouse trimmings "the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil," "typically including most of the material from the outer surfaces of the carcass" that contains "larger microbiological populations."
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Wednesday January 06, 2010

Too-dilute disinfectant boosts bacteria resistance

Andy Coghlan
New Scientist

No wonder antibiotic-resistant bugs are spreading in hospitals: if cleaners over-dilute their solutions, washing surfaces with disinfectant may make things worse.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium responsible for severe chest infections, can become tolerant to the commonly used mild disinfectant benzalkonium chloride. The bug develops mutations that enable it to expel the disinfectant.
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Wednesday January 06, 2010

Google (still) pocketing dollars for free clicks

Cade Metz
The Register

10 months of 'conversion inflation syndication fraud'

Ten months after the behavior was first spotlighted, Google continues to charge its advertisers for "free clicks," thanks to a partnership that sees its ads served onto a well-known example of online pop-up-ware.

According to new research from Harvard professor and noted Google critic Ben Edelman, the web giant is still sending ads to WhenU, a piece of pop-up-ware along the lines of Gator or Zango.
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Wednesday January 06, 2010

If we are all under suspicion, then we are all threatened

Dominic Lawson
Independent

People meekly accept official behaviour, even if they might strongly suspect it is the police who are behaving illegally

Even were I to live within walking distance of the Queen's Sandringham estate, it would never occur to me to spend any part of Christmas Day standing outside its church to take photographs of attendant members of the Royal Family. Yet, odd as such behaviour might seem – it's not as if the media don't produce film and pictures from the same event, saving everyone else the trouble – it is about as harmless as anything can be.
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Wednesday January 06, 2010

Amazon explorers uncover signs of a real El Dorado

Rory Carroll
The Guardian

Satellite technology detects giant mounds over 155 miles, pointing to sophisticated pre-Columbian culture

It is the legend that drew legions of explorers and adventurers to their deaths: an ancient empire of citadels and treasure hidden deep in the Amazon jungle.

Spanish conquistadores ventured into the rainforest seeking fortune, followed over the centuries by others convinced they would find a lost civilisation to rival the Aztecs and Incas.
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Wednesday January 06, 2010

Bookies' odds make way for decimalised age

Chris McGrath
Independent

So farewell then, Burlington Bertie. It’s a pity to see you go, but it seems the young people just don’t think your way any more. As one of the quaintest examples of the bookmaker’s idiom, “Burlington Bertie” is under threat.

It is the “tic-tac” code for odds of 100-30 – the sort of fraction set to disappear as a result of new proposals to broaden the appeal of horse racing.
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Wednesday January 06, 2010

When Does It Become Genocide?

Nadia Hijab
Counterpunch

During a visit to Ramallah a year ago while the Israeli bombardment of Gaza was underway, I shared my fears with a close Palestinian friend. "It may sound insane, but I think the Israelis' real objective is to see them all dead."

My friend told me not to be silly, the assault was horrific, but it was not mass killing.
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