Girls as young as 11 should receive compulsory vaccinations against a sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer, according to an influential medical journal.
The Lancet published an editorial calling for compulsory jabs for 11- and 12-year-olds despite fears that they could encourage under-age sex.
The Sunday Telegraph revealed last month that ministers have commissioned secret research into parental attitu... (more)
There is something in this vaccine the powers that be desperately want to inject you with...
Imagine being able to check instantly whether or not statements made by politicians were correct. That is the sort of service Google Inc. boss Eric Schmidt believes the Internet will offer within five years.
Politicians have yet to appreciate the impact of the online world, which will also affect the outcome of elections, Schmidt said in an interview with the Financial Times published on Wednesday.
He predicted that "truth predictor" software would, within five year... (more)
U.S. researchers say they are creating an intelligent airborne fleet of small, unmanned vehicles for military use. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists and their colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Boeing Phantom Works in Seattle say such unmanned aerial vehicles would require little human supervision and could automatically monitor their own condition.
The existing UAVs can be easily carried in a backpack and launched by hand, but they typica... (more)
The United States is the world leader in nanotechnology -- the newly blossoming science of making incredibly small materials and devices -- but is not paying enough attention to the environmental, health and safety risks posed by nanoscale products, says a report released yesterday by the independent National Research Council.
If federal officials, business leaders and others do not devise a plan to fill the gaps in their knowledge of nanotech safety, the report warns, the field's... (more)
In response to the hundreds of soldiers coming home from war with missing arms or legs, Darpa is spending millions of dollars to help scientists learn how people might one day regenerate their own limbs.
Prosthetics are getting better all the time, but they will never be as good as the limbs we were born with. So two teams of scientists at 10 institutions across the country are competing to regrow the first mammalian limb.
The two groups are sharing $7.6 million in ... (more)
Scientists working at a British laboratory have achieved one of the most controversial breakthroughs ever made in the field of stem cell science by taking cells from dead embryos and turning them into living tissue.
The technique could soon be used to create treatments for patients suffering from diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, the researchers say. The breakthrough has been hailed by many scientists and ethical expert... (more)
In the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone, environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., along with award-winning writer Dick Russell, deepens his investigation into America's electoral process, according to a press release received by RAW STORY.
"Following the debacle of the 2000 presidential election, touch-screen voting machines promised to make voting as easy and reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM," the press release states. "In 2002, privately owned Diebold, the world’... (more)
"PLEASE put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply." So said the armed robot in Paul Verhoeven's 1987 movie RoboCop.
The suspect drops his weapon but a fault in the robot's software means it opens fire anyway. Nearly two decades later, such fictional weapon-toting robots are looking startlingly close to reality – and New Scientist has discovered that some may eventually help to decide who is friend and who is foe.
Scientists could generate a black hole as often as every second when the world's most powerful particle accelerator comes online in 2007.
This potential "black hole factory" has raised fears that a stray black hole could devour our planet whole. The Lifeboat Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to safeguarding humanity from what it considers threats to our existence, has stated that artificial black holes could "threaten all life on Earth" and so it proposes to set up "sel... (more)
A B.C. scientist fired for lampooning an order to call Stephen Harper's Tory government "Canada's new government'' is back on the job.
Geologist Andrew Okulitch said Tuesday he was reinstated as a scientist emeritus with the Geological Survey of Canada after a call from the deputy minister of natural resources.
The 64-year-old Saltspring Island resident, who has worked for the federal government for 35 years, said he was fired Sept. 5 after he e-mailed an undiplomat... (more)
BluScreen, an interactive advertising technology that identifies passers-by using their Bluetooth-enabled cellphones, is being tested at the school of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University in the UK.
At the school, the system will chose from different announcements about school events and scheduling. Once out in the real world, the system will present advertisements tailored to individuals.
The 10th and final version of the Stryker armored vehicle to be delivered to Fort Lewis looks a lot like its predecessors, with one exception.
One big exception.
The Mobile Gun System features a 105 mm cannon. Five years in the making, it brings much more to the fight than other versions armed with a heavy machine gun, a grenade launcher or anti-tank missiles.
“This will bring a lot more firepower, a lot more versatility to what the infantry can... (more)
Like other computer scientists who have studied Diebold voting machines, we were surprised at the apparent carelessness of Diebold’s security design. It can be hard to convey this to nonexperts, because the examples are technical. To security practitioners, the use of a fixed, unchangeable encryption key and the blind acceptance of every software update offered on removable storage are rookie mistakes; but nonexperts have trouble appreciating this. Here is an example that anybody, e... (more)
BRITISH arms manufacturer BAE Systems is designing "environmentally friendly" weapons, including "reduced lead" bullets, "reduced smoke" grenades and rockets with fewer toxins, The Sunday Times said.
Other initiatives include developing armoured vehicles with lower carbon emissions, safer and more sustainable artillery and even recycling or composting waste explosives, the newspaper added.
"Weapons are going to be used and when they are, we try to make them as safe ... (more)
If you have a passport, now is the time to renew it -- even if it's not set to expire anytime soon. If you don't have a passport and think you might need one, now is the time to get it. In many countries, including the United States, passports will soon be equipped with RFID chips. And you don't want one of these chips in your passport.
RFID stands for "radio-frequency identification." Passports with RFID chips store an electronic copy of the passport information: your name, a dig... (more)
According to reports, DVDs, CDs, Blu-ray discs and HD DVD discs may soon have RFID chips embedded into them to prevent illegal copying of movies and music. The chip is currently in development by a company called U-Tech, which is a subsidiary of Ritek, the world's largest manufacturer of DVD discs -- both stamped and recordable. The company developing the actual RFID chips is IPICO, and both U-Tech and IPICO have announced production at one of U-Tech's main production plants located in Taiwan.... (more)
American doctors yesterday introduced the world's first bionic woman and estimated the cost at just one per cent of the price tag for the fictional Six Million Dollar Man.
Appearing for the first time in public yesterday, Claudia Mitchell, 26, said that her new $60,000 thought-powered arm was "really cool" and had allowed her to reclaim her life.
"It helps overcome the psychological effects of amputation. It feels like I'm on the edge of technology," she said. ... (more)
A REPORT into a huge Homeland Security exercise to test to see if the US is ready for a large scale cyber attack has revealed that the country can’t handle cyber terrorism.
The exercise, which was held in February, revealed huge gaps in the way that government agencies and companies handled such attacks.
The hackers managed to infiltrate computer servers, crash the Federal Aviation Administration's control system, deface newspaper Web sites and threaten power ... (more)
After years of work, David Schurig and David R. Smith at Duke University will finish their research and have absolutely nothing to show for it: They're making a cloak of invisibility.
Really.
So unusual is this undertaking for a serious academic electrical engineering team that Smith has created an elaborate Web site discussing the dream of invisibility as viewed in science fiction--Harry Potter and the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft are mentioned--and relating such ... (more)
THE world has an abundant supply of oil, and high petrol prices are just the reality of a globally traded commodity, ExxonMobil Australia chairman Mark Nolan said today.
Mr Nolan used his speech to the Asia Pacific oil and gas conference in Adelaide today to debunk the theory of peak oil, which suggests oil supplies have peaked and will dwindle over the next 20 years.
Such predictions, he said, had been around since the 1920s, particularly at times of high oil price... (more)
TRIALS have begun on the first “hijack-proof” airliner, which will be able to steer itself away from tall buildings and even land by remote control if terrorists kill the pilot.
Microphones will eavesdrop on passengers’ conversations while computerised CCTV detects suspicious movements so that hijackers can be caught before they go into action.
The plans, being developed by a consortium including BAE Systems, Airbus and the European commission, ... (more)
The founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia written by its users, has defied the Chinese government by refusing to bow to censorship of politically sensitive entries.
Jimmy Wales, one of the 100 most influential people in the world according to Time magazine, challenged other internet companies, including Google, to justify their claim that they could do more good than harm by co-operating with Beijing.
Wikipedia, a hugely popular reference tool in the West, ... (more)
JB: This is Earth & Sky. Surveillance technologies could miniaturize to the point where privacy becomes an issue.
DB: That's according to James Moor, a professor of philosophy at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, who specializes in the ethics of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology will someday enable all kinds of devices to become very small. That includes, for example, the radio ID tags that let you EZPass through a toll both, or let retailers track packages and inventory. Such tiny... (more)
Chevron's announcement this week that the Jack Field located in the Gulf of Mexico 270 miles southwest of New Orleans may have as much as 15 billion barrels of oil was not the only recent find of oil in the Gulf.
In March, Mexico announced the discovery of a new huge oil find, the Noxal Field some 60 miles from the port of Coatzacoalcos on the coast of Veracruz state. Estimated to contain as much as 10 billion barrels of oil, the find could well be larger than Cantarell, Mexico's... (more)
