Brain implant allows paralysed woman to control a robot with her thoughts
5/16/2012
Scientists turn a virus into electricity
5/14/2012
Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have come up with a way to generate power using harmless everyday viruses.
The researchers have been working with a virus called M13 bacteriophage to convert mechanical energy into electricity, which they say one day could power gadgets such as smartphones from everyday movements such as walking.
Google Calls for Mistrial After Jury Says Android Stole From Java
5/7/2012
A jury has ruled that Google infringed on Oracle's copyrights in building a new version of the Java platform for its Android mobile operating system, but it was unable to reach a decision on whether this infringement was acceptable under the law.
The House passed the controversial CISPA cybersecurity bill on Thursday, defying a White House veto threat and throwing the issue squarely into the Senate's lap.House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said the bill was "needed to prepare for countries like Iran and North Korea so that they don't do something catastrophic to our networks here in America."
Hard drives store data on discs coated with a metallic film divided into tiny magnetic regions, each of which stores a single bit the more regions you can squeeze on to a disc, the bigger the capacity. Now, a team at the University of Leeds, UK, have borrowed a trick from nature to build a new kind of hard drive.
Pentagon Pushes For Greater Spy Powers; Wants To Run Businesses, Like CIA
4/21/2012
On A TRAIN SOMEWHERE ON THE EAST COAST: Imagine a soldier, wearing mufti, traveling through Syria in a rattletrap taxi. He's a spy, dressed in a suit, going to meet an agent who says he can offer rebels the Syrian government's order of battle.
The soldier, an Army intelligence officer fluent in Syrian and Iraqi Arabic, has spent 18 months cultivating the source, a senior official in the telecommunications company owned by the brother of Syria's president. The son of a general, the agent has grown disillusioned by two years of civil war and wants to help end his country's agony. His information could help the rebels break the regime's back.
With little public attention, dozens of universities and law-enforcement agencies have been given approval by federal aviation regulators to use unmanned aircraft known as drones, according to documents obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests by an advocacy group.
The more than 50 institutions that received approvals to operate remotely piloted aircraft are more varied than many outsiders and privacy experts previously knew. They include not only agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security but also smaller ones such as the police departments in North Little Rock, Ark., and Ogden, Utah, as well the University of North Dakota and Nicholls State University in Louisiana.
The Stuxnet virus that put back Iran's nuclear program by some years was planted by an Israeli backed terrorist group.
A member of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) used a corrupt memory stick, US intelligence officials said.It is these same Israeli proxies who have been bumping off Iran's nuclear scientists, these sources said.
Physicists Create First Long-Distance Quantum Link
4/12/2012
For more than a decade, physicists have been developing quantum-mechanical methods to pass secret messages without fear that they could be intercepted. But they still haven't created a true quantum network the fully quantum-mechanical analog to an ordinary telecommunications network in which an uncrackable connection can be forged between any two stations or "nodes" in a network. Now, a team of researchers in Germany has built the first true quantum link using two widely separated atoms. A complete network could be constructed by combining many such links, the researchers say.
550,000-strong army of Mac zombies spreads across world
4/5/2012
The Mac-specific Flashback Trojan created a zombie army of 550,000 Mac machines by exploiting a Java hole that Apple only patched on Tuesday, six weeks after Microsoft plugged it up on Windows machines.
This is according to Russian anti-virus firm Dr Web, which arrived at the figure after it successfully managed to sinkhole one of the command-and-control servers used to control Mac machines hit by the latest attack. The legions of compromised zombies were mostly located in the US (56.6 per cent, or 303,449 infected hosts), Canada (19.8 per cent, or 106,379 infected computers) and the UK (12.8 per cent or 68,577 cases of infection).
