Japanese researchers find new giant picture on Peru's Nazca PlateauA new giant picture on the Nazca Plateau in Peru, which is famous for giant patterns that can be seen from the air, has been discovered by a team of Japanese researchers.
The image is 65 meters long, and appears to be an animal with horns. It is thought to have been drawn as a symbol of hopes for good crops, but there are no similar patterns elsewhere, and the type of the animal remains unclear.
The discovery marks the first time since the 1980s that a picture other... (more)
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Save The Net - Congress Sells Out The American PublicCongress is about to sell out the Internet by letting big phone and cable companies set up toll booths along the information superhighway.
Companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast are spending tens of millions in Washington to kill "network neutrality" -- a principle that keeps the Internet open to all.
A bill moving quickly through Congress would let these companies become Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow -- and which won't load at a... (more)
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APPLE: Web writers not 'legitimate members of the press'A California court in San Jose on Thursday is scheduled to hear a case brought by Apple Computer that eventually could answer an unsettled legal question: Should online journalists receive the same rights as traditional reporters?
Apple claims they should not. Its lawyers say in court documents that Web scribes are not "legitimate members of the press" when they reveal details about forthcoming products that the company would prefer to keep confidential.
That argume... (more)
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Bush administration proposes mandatory Web rating, with criminal penaltiesGonzales calls for mandatory Web labeling law
April 20, 2006, 11:35 PM PDT
Web site operators posting sexually explicit information must place official government warning labels on their pages or risk being imprisoned for up to five years, the Bush administration proposed Thursday.
A mandatory rating system will "prevent people from inadvertently stumbling across pornographic images on the Internet," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said at an event in Alexa... (more)
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Robots track drunk & lonely bloggersCreepy new software is tracking the moods of bloggers who keep Live Journal diaries, and corporate America is already inventing ways to make money off the data.
MoodViews keeps tabs on the "mood tags" Live Journal bloggers often use on approximately 150,000 diary entries every day.
The software has found that the tag "drunk" is most often used on weekends and that "lonely" and "loved" are both common on Valentine's... (more)
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DARPA outlines 2007 blueprintSeaplane UAV, small gunship, transatmospheric vehicle and heavylift STOL/VTOL transport in US agency’s plans
Concepts ranging from an optionally manned small gunship to a global-range transatmospheric vehicle are among new programmes the US Defense Advanced Research Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to launch in fiscal year 2007.
Demonstrations of a high-lift wing using distributed embedded propulsion for circulation control and a low-drag swept ... (more)
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Mass whale deaths tied to U.S. Navy sonar, report saysTOKYO - The U.S. Navy's deployment of active sonar to detect submarine activity is believed to have been responsible for at least six incidents of mass death and unusual behavior among pods of whales in the last 10 years, according to a recent U.S. Congressional Research Service report.
In one of the most serious incidents, 150 to 200 melon-headed whales were observed milling in Hanalei Bay off Hawaii's Kauai Island during a Rim of the Pacific Exercise on July 3, 2004, after midfr... (more)
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A case of mind over matterFor nearly two decades, neuroscientist Jonathan Wolpaw has been using a powerful computer and a stretchy red cap to read people's minds.
Wolpaw is a pioneer of ''brain-computer interface research," the science of picking up the brain's electric signals and translating them into information that can tell a device what to do. Week after week, volunteers in his Upstate New York public health laboratory put on a nylon mesh cap studded with electrodes and nudge a cursor around a comput... (more)
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Inventor test drives fuel alternativeA Palmerston North inventor is driving the length of New Zealand in a car powered by cooking waste from McDonald's to try to prove that vegetable oil can be used as a reliable motor fuel.
James MacDonald hopes to patent the engine modification he has spent two-and-a-half years developing.
"You can use hemp oil, vegetable oil, tallow, chicken fat etc, so any hydro carbon chain," he says.
His trip from Bluff to Cape Reinga is expected to take a fortnigh
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NASA: New and Improved Antimatter Spaceship for Mars MissionsA spacecraft powered by a positron reactor would resemble this artist's concept of the Mars Reference Mission spacecraft. Credit: NASA
Most self-respecting starships in science fiction stories use antimatter as fuel for a good reason – it’s the most potent fuel known. While tons of chemical fuel are needed to propel a human mission to Mars, just tens of milligrams of antimatter will do (a milligram is about one-thousandth the weight of a piece of the original M&... (more)
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AOL censors email of those it doesn't like, claim: Only pro AOL messages allowedA GROUP opposed to AOL's certified email plans has alleged that the ISP has been caught censoring emails from outfits it doesn’t like.
MoveOn.org, a petition group against AOL's certified email plans, sent out its normal optin newsletter to its members, on Thursday, only to find that it had been blocked by AOL.
Not only was the email blocked, but MoveOn didn’t get a note saying that it had been.
In a press release, a spokesman for MoveOn.o... (more)
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The new breed of soldier: Robots with gunsSpurred by the risks from roadside bombs and terrorist ambushes, the military is aggressively seeking to replace troops with battlefield robots, including new versions armed with machine guns.
"There was a time just a few years ago when we almost had to beg people to try an unmanned ground vehicle," says Marine Col. Terry Griffin, manager of the Robotic Systems Joint Project Office in Huntsville, Ala. "We don't have to beg anymore."
UAVs sniff out IEDS:Eyes in the s... (more)
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Move, baby, move … healthy kick in video gamesPLAYING video games can give boys a physical workout that raises their blood pressure and heart rate and burns as many calories as brisk walking or cycling, US researchers say.
The discovery meant computer gaming - often said to contribute to the childhood obesity epidemic - should no longer be classified as a sedentary pastime, and might even help fight fat, said Arlette Perry, of the University of Miami's exercise and sports sciences department.
In her study - the... (more)
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Getting organ-ized: Failing organs are the subject of new medicine that sounds like something out of science fiction -- from growing parts from stem cells to transplanting organs from pigs, writes Free Press reporter Mary Jane Egan. The world dawned to a new age in science this month when U.S. researchers successfully implanted the first lab-engineered bladders into children and teens -- organs grown from the patients' own cells.
The stunning accomplishment is a glimpse into the future of medicine -- one in which doctors may one day routinely order up newly grown living body parts to replace failing organs.
Or, says Dr. Anthony Jevnikar, a scientist at the Lawson Health Research Institute, doc... (more)
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US to deploy RPG-busting 'force field'The US is to field test an innovative Israeli set-up designed to act as a "force field" around armoured vehicles, protecting them from rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and anti-tank missiles, according to a Fox News report.
The system, dubbed "Trophy", uses radar to track incoming threats and then destroys them when they're in range by attacking the warheads with an "invisible force", according to Fox. Quite how it does thi... (more)
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Scientists unearth 12,000-year-old giant sloth in Everglades restoration The big brown bones looked as if they had been scattered by a careless hand, strewn around a small pit about 10 feet down -- the remains of a giant sloth, frozen in time for thousands of years.
The crunching sound on April 1 signaled something more unusual than the typical rock being dug up. Contractors building a 2,000-acre filter marsh for polluted agricultural runoff in southeastern Hendry County stopped digging to see what had been unearthed: part of a massive jawbone.
... (more)
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Climate of Fear: Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence.There have been repeated claims that this past year's hurricane activity was another sign of human-induced climate change. Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weath... (more)
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Tiny Flyer Navigates Like FlyAn ultralight autonomous aircraft that mimics the navigational abilities of a fly could one day become a real fly on the wall.
The 10-gram microflyer, being developed by a team of researchers lead by Dario Floreano at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, has a 36-centimeter (14-inch) wingspan.
But it could one day be shrunk to insect size and used for search and rescue.
"A lot of groups are taking inspiration from insects but none of... (more)
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Media Exposure Linked to Child, Teen Health, Behavior ProblemsTV, movies, video games, and Internet use have serious consequences for children's health, according to a wide-ranging series of studies published in the April issue of Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.
From obesity and social isolation to early sexual initiation and aggressive and violent behavior, 15 new studies link exposure to media images with a broad range of negative health, behavior and lifestyle issues in children and teens.
Moreover, the studi... (more)
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British hacker shines light on poor IT securityGary McKinnon tells ZDNet UK about alarming lapses in IT security, which could be a key factor behind US calls to extradite him to face charges of hacking US Army, Navy, Air Force and NASA computers
The British hacker facing extradition to the US on charges of hacking and causing damage to US defence sites has highlighted poor security as a major factor in his ability to wander through the IT systems of some key defence establishments.
Far from intending to c... (more)
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Premature babies 'feel true pain'Premature babies experience feelings of pain rather than simply displaying reflex reactions, a study says.
Experts have never been sure how a premature baby responds to pain, the Journal of Neuroscience reported.
But a team from University College London found that they do feel pain after analysing brain scans taken when blood samples were being drawn.
They hope the findings will lead to more formal plans for managing pain in premature babies.
... (more)
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Once More: Cell Phones and Brain Cancer?: A new Swedish study may have found a link between long-term, heavy cell phone use and the risk of brain tumors.A new study from the Swedish National Institute for Working Life published in the International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health examined mobile phone user among 2,200 cancer patients between 20 and 80 years of age, and an identical number of control cases. Among the cancer patients, 905 were diagn... (more)
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