Friday, October 21, 2005

Whale-eating zombie sea worms from the deep

A new species of marine worm that lives off whale bones on the sea floor has been described by scientists.

The creature was found on a minke carcass in relatively shallow water close to Tjarno Marine Laboratory on the Swedish coast.

Such "zombie worms", as they are often called, are known from the deep waters of the Pacific but their presence in the North Sea is a major surprise.


Source: BBC.

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Wednesday, October 19, 2005

WiFi-n-Fries

Nintendo has joined forces with McDonald's to offer free wireless internet access in the US for its DS handheld games console. The service means McDonald's customers will be able to play selected DS titles against other gamers around the globe.

Source: BBC.

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Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Velociraptor - just a big sweety, really

The Velociraptor dinosaur made famous by the Hollywood movie Jurassic Park may not have been quite the super-efficient killer we all thought.

Source: BBC []

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Tuesday, October 11, 2005

You dirty rat

People who keep rodents as pets should take care not to catch salmonella, experts advise. The American Centers for Disease Control has reports of 28 people, including seven young children, who have caught strains of the bacteria carried by pet rats, mice and hamsters.



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Sunday, October 09, 2005

Robot cars are up to the Challenge



Three driverless robotic vehicles led by Stanford University on Saturday crossed the finish line of a $2 million Pentagon-sponsored robot race across the rugged Mojave Desert...As Stanford's Volkswagen robot dubbed Stanley crossed the finish line, a group of Stanford students erupted into cheers and carried their team leader, Sebastian Thrun, on their shoulders. "The impossible has been achieved," said Thrun, throwing his cap into the crowd.



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Saturday, October 08, 2005

Robot fish in London

The world's first autonomous robotic fish are the latest attraction at the London Aquarium. Biologically inspired by the common carp, the new designs can avoid objects and swim around a specially designed tank entirely of their own accord.



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Friday, October 07, 2005

"Typical American" doesn't exisit?

The passionate Italian, the conscientious German, the in-your-face American -- all common stereotypes with little basis in reality, according to a new survey measuring the accuracy of national character stereotypes from 49 cultures around the world.



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Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Well, yes, it's a plane, actually.

With the graceful flight of hawks and eagles in mind, NASA aerospace engineer Michael Allen hand-launched a lightweight motorized model sailplane over the Southern California desert recently, hoping it would catch plumes of rising air called thermals.

It did just that, not once but numerous times - without human intervention - during a series of research flights at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, validating his premise that using thermal lift could significantly extend the range and endurance of small unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) without a corresponding increase in fuel requirements.




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Thursday, October 06, 2005

Alien Vs. Predator for real

This is a movie in the making:

Alligators have clashed with nonnative pythons before in the Everglades. But when a 13-foot python tried to swallow a 6-foot gator recently, the result wasn't pretty. The snake apparently bit off too much gator — and ruptured from the girth of its prey. The python was found with the gator's hindquarters protruding from its midsection. Its stomach still surrounded the alligator's head, shoulders, and forelimbs.



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Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Grand Prix rocket racing

If you enjoyed the pod racing scene in Star Wars or have spent an hour or five lost in WipeOut on the Playstations 1 and 2, how cool does this sound:

Peter Diamandis, the man behind the $10m X-Prize for suborbital space travel, has brought forward his new initiative: the Rocket Racing League. The RRL will see Grand Prix-style races between rocket planes, flown by top pilots through a "3D trackway" just 5,000ft (1,500m) above the ground. The first "X-Racers" will be built for the series, but it is hoped new teams will soon enter with novel designs.



Official site is .

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Sunday, October 02, 2005

Today San Francisco, tomorrow the world, and the Solar System the day after that

...they don't come more cosmically successful than Google, a company whose workforce is ballooning by hundreds of workers per month and which recently raised more than $4 billion for new projects by selling shares in the company. It announced Wednesday it was to build a research complex at NASA's Research Center and collaborate with the space agency's scientists.

However, before we consider the possibility of Google conquering the entire galaxy...A representative from the search engine colossus explained NASA and Google have done little more than ink a "memorandum of understanding," committing the two parties to work together in a range of areas including IT solutions, data management and nanotechnology.



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"It wasn't me, honest."


Many organisations are turning a blind eye to the risks posed by PCs left unattended but logged in to networks, says a new analysis from Gartner. The main risk is that confidential information could be accessed and changed as a means of carrying out fraud, but the tendency of employees to send bogus or prank e-mails is also noted. The latter can have potentially serious legal consequences.



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Google to unwire San Francisco

Google Inc. has offered to blanket San Francisco with free wireless Internet access at no cost to the city, placing a marquee name behind Mayor Gavin Newsom's effort to get all residents online whether they are at home, in a park or in a cafe. The offer by the popular Mountain View search engine was one of more than a dozen competing bids received by the city before its deadline Friday. Officials will review the submissions and decide which, if any, of the candidates gets the green light to build the so called Wi-Fi service, which would be free or inexpensive for users.



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Saturday, October 01, 2005

Now it's killer bats?

The likely source of the respiratory disease Sars is the horseshoe bat, a new study suggests. Researchers found a virus closely related to the Sars coronavirus in bats from three regions of China.



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