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Twice a year, the organization representing the wireless industry puts out a bunch of facts and figures on how much we're using our phones in the U.S., and each time, I can't help but marvel at the results. The big number this time around, according to the CTIA: In the past six months alone, Americans sent an estimated 740 billion text messages, which comes out to about 4.1 billion messages each day. Put another way: That's 11.7 text messages a day for every man, woman, and child in the country. (Of course, the average American teen can fire off 11...

A server meltdown over the weekend wiped out the master copies of personal data -- including address books, calendars, to-do lists and photos -- accumulated by users of T-Mobile's formerly popular Sidekick smartphone. This computing calamity allows Sidekick owners only a faint hope of backing up the information currently on their devices, and none of recovering anything they'd trusted to online storage. And it leaves T-Mobile and the operator of the Sidekick's data service, a Microsoft subsidiary formerly known as Danger Inc. -- oh, the irony! -- with serious explaining to do. A statement on T-Mobile's site phrased things a...

(snip> Now comes word that nuclear batteries may actually become an honest-to-God reality, no foolin'. Researchers at the University of Missouri say they've achieved the unthinkable, and that a pint-sized power cell based on radioactive decay can last a ridiculously long time: a million times as long as a conventional battery, enough to keep putting out a charge for hundreds of years. Nuclear batteries already exist, but historically they have been quite large (and used only on things like spacecraft). The new design involves the use of a liquid semiconductor, which is less susceptible to damage from nuclear radiation than...

Live-cell fluorescence imaging identifies bona fide reprogrammed cells.Fluorescence imaging could help resolve whether iPS cells have been properly programmed.Alamy The next tools for reprogramming cells to an embryonic-like state might just be a camera and a set of fluorescently tagged antibodies. Researchers imaged more than a million human cells in vitro as they changed from skin tissue cells, known as fibroblasts, into colonies of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. As expected, many similar-looking colonies appeared, but only very few consisted of fully reprogrammed iPS cells. After assessing which were which, researchers led by Thorsten Schlaeger and George Daley of the...

KDDI Pairs a Mobile Phone With a Robot Martyn Williams, IDG News Service Oct 11, 2009 10:50 am As mobile phones add more features and more users connect with social media, the cell phone becomes a more important part of people's lives. Japanese carrier KDDI has developed a robot companion that seeks to bridge the gap between a phone and its user and a prototype was shown at this week's Ceatec expo near Tokyo. The robot, called Polaris, is spherical and opens up to reveal a cradle on which a cell phone can sit. While in the cradle the phone...

US researchers have unveiled a new penny-sized "nuclear battery" which can retain almost a million times the power of conventional chemical batteries. Developed by a team at the University of Missouri, the new battery produces energy from the process of decaying radioisotopes, which releases charged particles that can be harvested for an electrical current.

As a displaced Northern Californian, one that's proud of our state's long leadership on matters of environment and science, I can't help but wonder at the lack of factual context and analysis in Mark Morford's piece on oil sands. The Canadian oil sands are a large industrial project, and they present environmental challenges. We do not deny that, like other energy production, the oil sands are greenhouse gas intensive. But Mr. Morford's characterizations are out of step with the facts. The oil sands account for five per cent of Canada's emissions, Canada accounts for two per cent of global emissions,...

Army News video: Soldiers try out, rate new load-bearing vests Thursday, October 08, 2009 Gatineau, QC – Three battle groups will test out the top four rated vests.

Vincenzo Amendola and Moreno Meneghetti, at the University of Padova, Italy, take inspiration from nature to design materials that can repair themselves.Nature uses self-healing in all living systems to repair damage caused by environmental interactions. A simple case is repairing a skin wound - without this mechanism, we could not live. DNA repair, which must occur routinely in every living organism, is another example. But at what level do repairing mechanisms occur? Looking at the components of a living system, we find cells, which typically have micrometre dimensions. But we have to zoom in further, namely to the nanoscale, to...

A surgical jamming system that can stop the enemy from communicating and navigating while minimizing disruption to friendly forces will be demonstrated under a new program launched by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Precision Electronic Warfare (PREW) program will demonstrate synchronization and pointing technology enabling multiple airborne and ground transmitters to work together to focus their jamming power on an area smaller than a city block. Jamming systems now used in Iraq and Afghanistan to block the triggering of remote-controlled explosive devices via cellular or satellite telephones are effective, but interfere with friendly forces' communication and navigation...

Could the Prius and other Toyota hybrids be banned from the U.S.? It seems unthinkable, but that's one possible ending to a patent investigation launched this week. This case centers around Paice, a tiny Florida company that has patented a way to apply force to a car's wheels from the electric motor or the internal combustion engine.

NASA's Lunar Prospector first detected some hydrogen signatures in craters on the dark side of the moon in 1999. Ever since, researchers have been keen to confirm the presence of water on the moon. The Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) is tasked with crashing through the mists of speculation and conjecture and discover the truth. And you can watch all the action as it happens. LCROSS was launched on June 18th and executed a fly-by of the moon five days later before entering into a wide orbit. On Friday October 9th, the craft will start to make...

Genome-wide association studies have identified hundreds of genetic clues to disease. Kelly Rae Chi looks at three to see just how on-target the approach seems to be. Download a PDF of this story Five years ago human geneticists rallied around an emerging concept. Technology had granted the ability to compare the genomes of individuals by looking at tens of thousands of known single-letter differences scattered across them. These differences, called single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs, served as reference points or signposts of common variation between individuals. The idea was that common variants in the genome might contribute to the genetics...

Ultra-low prices on portable computers are nothing new, and in fact have increasingly become the norm since the debut of netbooks — small and light ultraportables that are virtually defined by their low cost. However, there are some strong reasons to believe that Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 7 operating system, in addition to new types of Linux-based portables, could help drive profit margins for hardware manufacturers to surprising new bottoms. But is it good for the tech industry for laptops and netbooks alike to sell for fire-sale prices? And can hardware providers build healthy businesses around a new, premium-priced operating system?...

We've yet to see a trade show where Sony left its Rhode Island-sized booth at home, and CEATEC is no exception. Aside from pushing its 1080p 3D installations with an epic amount of force, the company also had a smattering of swank new concepts on display that caught our eyes. A 0.2 millimeter-thin flexible OLED display was alive and displaying content, while an ultrathin Reader mock-up looked more like a MID and less like a Kindle. Without question, the two items that took our breath away were the all-panel laptop (which tossed the traditional keyboard in favor of a...

The FDNY may use geographic information system software to relocate firehouses to meet changing population patternsThe introduction of new technology into the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) hasn't always been easy. "We didn't even have fax machines until the late '90s," department Chief Salvatore Cassano said during a forum held in the city Friday to highlight ways in which public safety agencies are turning to information technology (IT) to better manage demographic and other data as urban populations grow and departmental budgets shrink. "You can't manage what you don't measure," he added, "and we weren't measuring things well." Help,...

Science-fiction is well on the way to becoming science fact with engineers from Activelink, a Kyoto-based subsidiary of Panasonic, developing an exoskeleton suit inspired by the "Power Loader" suit Ripley wore in her climactic battle with the Queen Alien in Aliens. And, just like in the movie, the Power Loader suit is designed to give its wearer superhuman strength for the lifting of heavy objects – in the movie it was cargo, but Activelink also has construction and disaster relief operations in its sights. The suit is constructed from an aluminum-alloy frame and weighs 230kg (507 lbs). Similar to...

This week the Annals of Improbable Research hosted its 19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. As CNET News' Elinor Mills wrote, this year was no less ignoble than the previous 18, with such delightful discoveries as applications for panda poo and observations from a lifetime of knuckle cracking. Except for one award: the gas mask bra, which, while ridiculous and hilarious at face value, has far more going on below the, er, neckline. Elena Bodnar, who lives in Chicago, got her start as a scientist in Ukraine, when she witnessed the devastating effects of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster...

Russia's last cargo spaceship with an analogue control system plunged on Sunday into a "spaceship cemetery" in the southern Pacific, the Russian Mission Control said. "Fragments of the Progress M-67 space freighter with waste material from the International Space Station (ISS) drowned at about 14.20 Moscow time [10.20 GMT]...several thousand kilometers to the east of New Zealand," space officials said. Progress M-67, which arrived at the ISS on July 29 bringing 2.5 tons of supplies, including fuel, water and various equipment, undocked from the orbital station on September 21. During its automatic flight, the craft was used as a laboratory...

Don't like the idea of your neighbors rudely snooping on the wireless signal you slaved to pay for from the lazy comfort of their living room? It's not just about slowing down your connection; while they're downloading Mad Men via bittorrent, you could be on the hook for their actions. Wireless security and encryption systems are fraught with problems and insecurity, and other methods to restrict your signal to a small area are cumbersome at best. Enter a new solution: Anti-Wi-Fi paint. The idea is simple: Use a special paint on walls where you don't want wireless to pass through...

Laser pulses fired into hydrogen produces intense x-rays.Tom Tracy Photography / Alamy A team of physicists has built a small, powerful X-ray source — a prototype of the sort of machine they hope could replace much larger facilities.The technology has the potential to revolutionize everything from microbiology to materials science by giving scientists easier access to high-quality images of the things they are studying.Researchers use X-rays to probe all manner of things — from comet dust to fossilized animals trapped in amber. But making high-quality images requires much brighter and better controlled sources than those available in most institutions. So...

(Please also see email to a Sacramento employer who is running a PERM ad to demonstrate that "no Americans are available" to sponsor an H-1b worker for a green card.) For years the Programmers Guild has been calling for some basic reforms to the H-1b program. Now the harm of the H-1b program is hitting home. In May 2009, Kim's daughter Stephanie graduated from the University of Southern California (USC) with dual STEM degrees. (U.S. News ranks USC Engineering school 7th in the nation.) Stephanie completed both degrees in only four years and worked at summer internships. She has incurred...

Treemometers: A new scientific scandal If a peer review fails in the woods...By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this authorPosted in Environment, 29th September 2009 16:03 GMTFree whitepaper – Dell IT infrastructure services brochure A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number of recent peer-reviewed climate papers. At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC's assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia....

The US government has relaxed its control over how the internet is run. It has signed a four-page "affirmation of commitments" with the net regulator Icann, giving the body autonomy for the first time. Previous agreements gave the US close oversight of Icann - drawing criticism from other countries and groups. The new agreement comes into effect on 1 October, exactly 40 years since the first two computers were connected on the prototype of the net.

A federal court on Tuesday reversed an earlier ruling that Microsoft's product activation technology infringed on another company's patent, overturning a $388 million verdict in the case. In a ruling on Tuesday, the court vacated the earlier decision and decided the case in Microsoft's favor. "We are pleased that the court has vacated the jury verdict and entered judgment in favor of Microsoft," Microsoft spokesman Kevin Kutz said in a statement. Tuesday's ruling is the latest twist in a case that has had plenty of them. Microsoft initially won a summary judgment ruling, which would have ended the case in...

Japanese researchers have made ultra-thin metal wires by growing them inside carbon nanotubes. It is hoped that the research - which can make wires only a single atom in diameter - could provide interesting clues to the best components for future nanoelectronic devices. Atom-thin metal wires show many novel electronic properties - but the wires are so fragile and prone to oxidation that they have been difficult to study. Ryo Kitaura and colleagues at Nagoya University solved this problem by growing the wires encased within protective nanotubes. This means that their properties can be measured and mapped. 'The process [of growing the...

A new report finds that medical innovation boosts life expectancy, but doesn't cost more "About half of all growth in health care spending in the past several decades was associated with changes in medical care made possible by advances in technology," declared(pdf) a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report last year. "Health care economists attribute about 50 percent of the annual increase of health costs to new technologies or to the intensified use of old ones," writes bioethicist Daniel Callahan in his new book, Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying Our Health Care System. Conventional wisdom holds...

Computers Researchers Remote Control Flying Beetles Via Electrodes by Terrence O'Brien (RSS feed) — Sep 27th 2009 at 3:01PM The military and researchers across the country have been working on putting tiny bots in the air for quite some time. They've talked robotic spy-bats, dreamed up cyborg crickets, dragonflies, and all matter of other bug-sized bots. In fact, they've successfully implanted electrodes into the brains of crickets, moths, and beetles to exercise some control over their movements -- they even got a beetle to briefly take flight. But until now, the amount of control over motions has been very limited....

Phase-change memory's 40-year journey from bright idea to mobile phone. Is phase-change memory about to appear in your mobile phone?Samsung South Korean manufacturer Samsung Electronics announced this week that it has begun mass production of a new kind of memory chip that stores information by melting and freezing tiny crystals. Known as phase-change memory (PCM), the idea was first proposed by physicists in the 1960s. Here, Nature explains how PCM works, why it has taken so long to develop and how it could change your mobile phone forever.What's the big idea behind PCM? PCM was first proposed by physicist and...

Blindness first began creeping up on Barbara Campbell when she was a teenager, and by her late 30s, her eye disease had stolen what was left of her sight. Reliant on a talking computer for reading and a cane for navigating New York City, where she lives and works, Ms. Campbell, now 56, would have been thrilled to see something. Anything. Now, as part of a striking experiment, she can. So far, she can detect burners on her stove when making a grilled cheese, her mirror frame, and whether her computer monitor is on. She is beginning an intensive three-year...

Here's an odd twist that might give new life to the dying horse of music digital-right management. Microsoft has just been awarded a U.S. patent for a distributed DRM system -- it works over peer-to-peer networks -- which uses encrypted public and private keys as the licensing mechanism. This is significant because, while centralized music stores like Apple's iTunes have forsaken DRM, the Microsoft patent would enable peer-to-peer networks to reemerge as viable, albeit protected, content sources. The patent, number 7,594,275, is entitled simply, "Digital rights management system." Granted today (Sept. 22), it was filed in October, 2003, which undercuts...

Cyber criminals have created a highly sophisticated Trojan virus that steals online banking log-in details from infected computers. The Clampi virus, which is spreading rapidly across hundreds of thousands of computers in Britain and the United States, infects computers when users visit websites that host a malicious code. Once on the computer, the virus sits unnoticed until the user logs on to bank, credit card or other financial websites. It then captures log-in and password information and sends it to a server run by the attackers. They can then tell the compromised computer to send money to accounts that they...

The tides in the Bay of Fundy pummel the shores of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick with the force of 8,000 locomotives, a twice daily demonstration of nature's unyielding power. More than 100 billion tonnes of water -- more than all of the world's rivers combined -- rush in and out, raising 12 metres between high and low tide. And this unique phenomena could soon power 800,000 homes on Canada's East Coast -- enough energy to keep the lights on in all of Nova Scotia, with enough spare power to cover parts of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island --...

A giant white surveillance balloon will bob thousands of feet above the Edmonton Garrison in the coming weeks as soldiers learn how to use it to save lives in Afghanistan. The balloon -- which looks like a hot air balloon, but carries a camera instead of passengers -- is just one component in a new Persistent Surveillance System that will help soldiers monitor for improvised explosive devices. IEDs have been the deadliest weapons Canadian soldiers have faced in Afghanistan. The bombs have claimed the lives of 72 of the 131 soldiers killed. Lt. Wright Eruebi, spokesman for 1 Canadian Mechanized...

SpuriousLogic writes "After receiving injections of genes that produce color-detecting proteins, two color-blind monkeys have seen red and green for the first time. Except in its extreme forms, color blindness isn't a debilitating condition, but it's a convenient stand-in for other types of blindness that might be treated with gene therapy. The monkey success raises the possibility of reversing those diseases, in a manner that most scientists considered impossible. 'We said it was possible to give an adult monkey with a model of human red-green color blindness the retina of a person with normal color vision. Every single person I...

A DNA cutting tool that can manipulate human genomic DNA could ultimately find applications in gene therapy, say Japanese scientists.Makoto Komiyama, Narumi Shigi and colleagues at the University of Tokyo recently made the DNA cutter - ARCUT - and used it to cut bacterial DNA at one target site. Now they have shown that it can be tuned to cut human genomic DNA selectively and also to repair it."ARCUT's selectivity meant that the Tokyo team was able to use the cutter to target one site in human genomic DNA" ARCUT consists of a cerium(IV) complex which cuts the DNA and...

Algae, paper and salt-water are the key components of thin and flexible new batteries, report Swedish researchers. Cellulose obtained from the bright green Cladophora algae proved to be key to the project, as it boasts a unique nanostructure with a high surface area. Although the batteries have lower voltage and power density than conventional batteries, their low cost and flexibility hold great promise for applications where metal-based batteries are impractical. The research is the product of a collaboration between two teams at Uppsala University in Sweden: Maria Strømme's group, who identified the potential of the algal cellulose, and Leif Nyholm's group, who...

Video: Precision Urban Hopper leaps over fences, makes enemies cringe by Darren Murph posted Sep 15th 2009 at 10:46AM It's only been a few months since we heard from the whiz kids over at Boston Dynamics, and honestly, we've been waiting on pins and needles to see what miracle would emerge from its labs next. Said outfit has just been awarded a contract by Sandia to build the next generation of the Precision Urban Hopper, which will be a four-wheeled jumping robot that can navigate autonomously.

We now learn that the White House , though a private contractor, and without anyone’s knowledge, is collecting and storing comments made on it’s social networking sites at Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and Sideshare. The truly amazing part though is that the President is pointing to federal law as his justification for these actions.

US and French scientists say the term 'nanoparticle' needs to be redefined to provide a focus for environmental, health and safety studies, and future regulation. According to the researchers, nanomaterials should be categorised based on novel properties that are related to their small size - not, crucially, their size alone.In most countries, few or no specific regulations exist to govern the safe use of nanoparticles, despite their wide use in cosmetics, sun screens and some drug products. Until a decision can be reached on what exactly constitutes a nanoparticle, however, there can be no clear path forward. Although traditionally thought...

Reporting from Broughton, England - The good folk of Broughton don't take kindly to being photographed without permission. Just ask Google. When the search-engine giant sent one of its specially equipped cars to take pictures of the village for its Street View feature, residents swung into action. They stopped the car in its tracks, called the police and quizzed the bewildered driver for nearly two hours before letting him go. "I don't think this guy anticipated how angry people would get," said Edward Butler-Ellis, 28. "We didn't stand there with pitchforks or anything and block the road with bales of...

A security researcher has discovered a cluster of infected Linux servers that have been corralled into a special ops botnet of sorts and used to distribute malware to unwitting people browsing the web. Each of the infected machines examined so far is a dedicated or virtual dedicated server running a legitimate website, Denis Sinegubko, an independent researcher based in Magnitogorsk, Russia, told The Register. But in addition to running an Apache webserver to dish up benign content, they've also been hacked to run a second webserver known as nginx, which serves malware. "What we see here is a long awaited...

An impression of how a controversial future giant aircraft carrier would look in its home base has been unveiled today by the Royal Navy.The computer-generated image has been created to give an impression of the scale of the next generation of warships which are due to enter service in 2015.It shows one of the carriers alongside at Portsmouth Naval Base, Hampshire, where it would take up three jetties.     Ministry of Defence computer generated image of how a controversial future giant aircraft carrier would look in its home base was unveiled today by the Royal Navy. It shows one...

US scientists are a step closer to producing a new generation of energy conversion devices, thanks to an advance in liquid crystal (LC) technology.Antal Jákli, at Kent State University, and colleagues have made use of a property called flexoelectricity, where materials, such as LCs, convert mechanical energy into electrical energy when they are flexed. The LCE's volume swells by around a factor of two when it absorbs the bent-core LCs Bent-core nematics (BCNs) - LCs made from banana-shaped molecules - are particularly flexoelectric but because of their fluidity, they are not robust or flexible enough to use in energy conversion...

American chemists have made molecular 'daisy-chains' containing threaded rings that can be pulled taut or slackened by chemical stimuli. The polymers are a step towards making materials that stretch or contract on demand, and show great potential for applications such as actuators in nanomachinery or designing artificial muscles. 'Artificial muscle tissue is still a long way off, but we are starting to demonstrate the kind of systems where it could be possible,' says Robert Grubbs, who led the work at the California Institute of Technology, US. Grubbs won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2005 for his work on olefin metathesis reactions, which allow carbon-carbon...

NEW YORK (AP) - Some of the world's most prominent technology companies are offering suggestions to publishers on how they can charge readers for news online. IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and Google Inc. - a company some newspapers blame for helping dig their financial hole - responded to a request by the Newspaper Association of America for proposals on ways to easily charge for news on the Web. But building the infrastructure for charging readers is one part of the equation. The other part looks more challenging: getting publishers to make the leap and stop giving news out...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is back in business, ready to uncover new worlds, peer ever deeper into space, and even map the invisible backbone of the universe. The first snapshots from the refurbished Hubble showcase the 19-year-old telescope's new vision. Topping the list of exciting new views are colorful multi-wavelength pictures of far-flung galaxies, a densely packed star cluster, an eerie "pillar of creation," and a "butterfly" nebula. With its new imaging camera, Hubble can view galaxies, star clusters, and other objects across a wide swath of the electromagnetic spectrum, from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. A new spectrograph slices across...

Hook-and-loop tape is the generic name. But everyone knows the plastic fastener that can be reused and repositioned endlessly as Velcro. Now, German engineers have developed industrial-grade analogs for automotive and other applications. Made from steel, the newly patented fasteners can operate at temperatures as high as 800° Celsius and at tensile loads of up to 35 metric tons per square meter. Industrial companies approached the Technical University of Munich’s Institute of Metal Forming and Casting four years ago about developing the new connectors. They’re patterned on the burrs that some plants have evolved to adhere to the coats of...

German researchers have developed a hybrid, light activated nanomaterial that can target, label and kill harmful antibiotic resistant bacteria such as Escherichia coli. The zeolite-based material may one day play a major role in both diagnosing and treating infectious diseases and possibly cancer, suggests the team.So-called 'photodynamic therapy' is a well-established technique in which a light source is used to trigger the action of a light-sensitive drug, and is already used to treat cancer and macular degeneration. However, scientists have been eager to develop cheaper therapeutic approaches with more functions. One such approach would be to develop a single nanomaterial that...

Bacteria are the oldest living things on earth, and researchers have long felt that they must lead dull, unfussy lives. New discoveries are starting to show just how wrong that notion is. For a simple, single-cell creature, a bacterium is surprisingly social. It can communicate in two languages. It can tell self from nonself, friend from foe. It thrives in the company of others. It spies on neighbors, spreads misinformation and even commits fratricide. "Really, they're just stripped-down versions of us," says Bonnie Bassler, microbial geneticist at Princeton University, who has spent two decades peeking at the inner lives of...