2006 October

Google Inc., expanding its efforts at providing software that helps users create and post their own materials on the Internet, has acquired a California startup that develops online collaboration tools known as wikis.
The announcement came Tuesday through separate postings at Google’s and JotSpot Inc.’s Web journals. Terms were not disclosed.
JotSpot chief executive Joe Kraus said […]

The music publishing industry reached a tentative deal with operators of the Kazaa file-sharing network over claims of copyright infringement, an industry group said.
Publishers pursuing a class-action suit against Kazaa informed U.S. District Court on Monday that the peer-to-peer network had agreed to pay “a substantial sum” under the agreement, the National Music Publishers’ Association […]

IEEE-USA commends NASA for announcing today that it would send a Space Shuttle mission to extend the life of the Hubble Space Telescope.
“The Hubble is one of the most productive astronomical observatories ever built,” said Dr. Russell Lefevre, IEEE-USA’s vice president for technology policy. “The scientific achievements have fostered an understanding of outer space that […]

A research center newly created by the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) aims to put light-sensitive switches in the body’s cells that can be flipped on and off as easily as a remote control operates a TV.
Optical switches like these could trigger a chemical reaction, initiate a muscle contraction, activate […]

It was one of the biggest fads of the 1950s, right up there alongside Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap. Art Linkletter is credited with its creation and promotion. But once it took off, it created a life of its own, and is still very popular today.
This site is called Hula Hoops, and is the home of […]

Xboxic is reporting that a major update will be pushed to all Xbox-live connected Xbox360s on Oct 31st. It will contain a whole slew of updates, most notably the addition of support for HD-DVD playback (additional hardware required) and the ability to output in full 1080p HDTV resolution. Be sure to connect your Xbox 360 […]

Microsoft Corp. today plans to release a renamed, updated version of its small-business accounting program that it said makes better use of online services.
The Redmond company also plans to debut a new, free version of the program for simpler or smaller businesses.
The free product, called Office Accounting Express 2007, provides full cash- and accrual-based accounting, […]

Alice Hill of RealTechNews writes:
These days almost everything plays video clips, so why not your wristwatch? The Shenzhen Adragon Digitek is an MP4 wristwatch boasts 256MBs to 2GBs of internal storage and plays MPEG 4 video clips as well as JPEG still images AND MP3 or WMA audio. The screen is 1.5 inches diagonal, which […]

David Grewell picked up the little plastic model of a molecule he keeps in his office.
He scrunched the model’s folding pieces into a ball. That’s about the shape of a soy or corn protein, said Grewell, an Iowa State University assistant professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering. Then he unfolded the model into a long, […]

Montana rancher and inventor Lee Arbuckle may soon change the nation’s market for native grass seed, a tricky-to-harvest crop worth hundreds of millions and vital to restoring wildlands.
With the help of the Montana Manufacturing Extension Center at Montana State University, Arbuckle and his wife Maggie have spent the last five years researching and developing a […]

A network administrator for a peer-to-peer Internet file-sharing system has been sentenced to five months in prison for copyright infringement.
Grant T. Stanley, 23, was also given five months of home detention, three years of supervised probation, and a $3,000 fine for his role in the Elite Torrents service, which used a sharing technology known as […]

Oceanographers worldwide pay close attention to phytoplankton and with good reason. The microscopic plants that form the vast foundation of the marine food chain generate a staggering amount of power, and now a groundbreaking study led by Florida State University has calculated just how much - about five times the annual total power consumption of […]

After two years of work, an innovative project using Web-based technologies to speed researcher access to a large body of new scientific data has demonstrated that not only access to but also the quality of the data has improved markedly. A new paper on the Web-enabled ThermoML thermodynamics global data exchange standard notes that the […]

MIT researchers are developing a half-sized gasoline engine that performs like its full-sized cousin but offers fuel efficiency approaching that of today’s hybrid engine system - at a far lower cost. The key? Carefully controlled injection of ethanol, an increasingly common biofuel, directly into the engine’s cylinders when there’s a hill to be climbed or […]

We have all seen them at some time in our lives. The cute young actors and actresses that play the small parts on television shows and in movies. We are also familiar, to a lesser extent, that many of them grow up with problems that came from being in television and movies at such a […]

LSDSmurf of DarkVision Hardware writes:
Here’s another weird finding on Google Earth. Somewhere in Alberta, Canada you can spot mountains or large hills that look like the face of an Indian.
It looks pretty real, even a lot more realistic than the face on Mars, IMO. It’s also pretty big; I used the measure tool in Google […]

It takes more than a lunch lady to run today’s public school cafeterias. It takes a logistics expert.
Take Rome’s West End Elementary, where two classrooms of students charge into the lunchroom every five minutes, load their trays up with corn dogs, steak nuggets and fresh fruit and pile into cashier Lydia Galego’s line.
Galego, though, has […]

Scientists helping to develop the next generation of cancer-beating drugs say they have had a major breakthrough with their latest results.
A new class of drugs - being developed by a major pharmaceutical company - targets an enzyme that helps cells divide; in cancer, this enzyme, called Aurora B, goes into overdrive, possibly leading to uncontrolled […]

Fractus, the pioneer developer of fractal antenna technology, has launched a suite of DVB-H internal antenna solutions for all three mobile TV frequencies; VHF (200MHz), UHF (600MHz) and L-band (1.4GHz). Fractus offers a fully customised internal antenna solution for 200MHz, and a customised and integrated solution for 600MHz and 1.4GHz. The TVNow range also includes […]

You’ve probably heard of this place before. It has been featured in movies and television shows, and even kids cartoons. But here is an official explanation of the site, as provided by our US Navy. I guess it would know better than anyone else.
The site is called The Bermuda Triangle. It is physically a location […]