Allies Supportive but Wary Over U.S. Response ``If there are two lessons of the last two centuries, the first is -- thou shalt not march on Moscow, and the second -- thou shalt not march on Kabul,'' Deputy Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski wrote in the Rzeczpospolita daily.
``The Americans, after all, could not deploy sufficient forces to this remote region. A hundred thousand troops were not enough for the Soviets.''
9/17/2001 01:36:37 PM

Afghans Flee Capital as Fears Grow of U.S. Strikes But significantly, the statement by the Taliban's leader -- who rarely gives interviews, has never been filmed or photographed and has met just two non-Muslims in his entire life -- failed to condemn the U.S. attacks or even sympathize with relatives of the victims.
9/14/2001 10:37:01 AM

His Memory Returns, Byte by Byte Brain crash !
9/10/2001 12:30:17 PM

CNN.com - Ultrafast wireless technology set to lift off - August 30, 2001 Later this year, the Federal Communications Commission will decide whether to give the green light to so-called ultra-wideband transmission. If approved, UWB could have a dramatic impact on short-range wireless communications for the enterprise.
9/3/2001 01:18:32 PM

Drug-Free Urine at $69 a Pee "But pretty soon people were calling me up in the middle of the night," said Curtis, 42. "I found it was a viable business venture." By chugging fruit juice, tea and coffee, Curtis says he produces enough urine to make 50 kits a day; he keeps another 500 gallons of his liquid waste stored in industrial freezers. "I don't waste a drop of my assets," he said.
9/3/2001 01:14:51 PM

Salon.com Life | The failure of zero tolerance At its most extreme, evocation of zero tolerance has resulted in an 11-year-old being hauled off in a police van for packing a plastic knife in her lunchbox to cut chicken; a 14-year-old held in an adult jail and charged with "strong-armed" theft for stealing $2 from his classmate; a fifth-grader expelled for a year for hiding razor blades from a friend he thought might use them to harm another; a fourth grader suspended for wearing a Tweety Bird chain on his neck; and, in a tale that would be comic if it weren't true, a 6-year-old cited for "sexual harassment" for running out of the bath naked in his own home to tell the bus driver to wait for him.
8/31/2001 10:50:11 AM

New Scientist "If you were an alien observer, looking at Earth from somewhere else in the galaxy, just by checking how bright Earth is as it rotates, not only could you determine the Earth's rotation period and that it has land and oceans, but you could also detect our changing cloud patterns," says Ford.
8/31/2001 10:42:16 AM

New Scientist The technique of hiding control signals in sound has been developed by Scientific Generics, based at Harston near Cambridge, UK. "We can use the existing infrastructure, putting data in TV sound, over a public address system or a music CD, or in an e-mail or an MP3 file," says Ian Hosking. The company is patenting the technique, which it calls "intrasonics".
8/31/2001 10:29:54 AM

Beyond 2000 | Leisure-Audio/Visual | Trick of the Light A new technology developed by NASA will allow amateur photographers to impress their friends with their picture prowess by automatically enhancing images to a professional standard. Retinex Imaging Processing was originally developed for remote sensing the Earth, but it soon became evident it could be a valuable tool for ordinary consumers.
8/30/2001 10:29:29 AM

New Scientist Web servers can be tricked into solving problems by exploiting their in-built error-checking. The servers think that they are receiving normal requests, but hidden within each message is a secret calculation.
8/30/2001 10:18:34 AM

New Scientist The shortfall problem could, however, increase tensions between the US and its allies, says George Lewis, a physicist at MIT. "If you ask how many people are going to be killed, on average, you're clearly better off having the warhead fall short," he says. "But the people who it's going to land on may have a different view."
8/29/2001 11:11:29 AM

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Delhi children make play of the net "But with children, if you give them free access to a computer, they will learn very quickly. They will adapt and will really exploit the system to get the most out of it."
8/28/2001 11:18:12 AM

Technology Review - Blue Is for Biohazard A chemical sensor that changes color in the presence of toxins may one day save lives on the battlefield and in hazardous industries, report researchers in the August 17 issue of Science magazine.
8/27/2001 10:20:38 AM

New Scientist It's a bold claim, but it has taken him 20 years--ten of them thinking and working late into the night, and publishing nothing. By a nice irony, that intellectual space was bought by the millions he made out of Mathematica, a computer program that makes complicated mathematics doable for ordinary mortals. Now, at 41, he's busy gearing himself up for the glare of publicity as he prepares to publish the fruit of all those years.
8/24/2001 10:55:51 AM

Technology Review - 7 Startups Graduate with Honors Now a far cheaper, easier-to-manufacture integrated circuit—one made of plastic rather than silicon—is on the horizon. If these plastic-based chips prove practical, they could help give rise to inexpensive, flexible, even disposable electronic devices.
8/23/2001 11:04:59 AM

Technology Review - Innovation: Lithography Unmasked With as many as a million mirrors, the system could create the same complex pattern on the silicon chip that would normally require a series of masks.
8/23/2001 10:52:31 AM

New Scientist Everyone wants to be happy, right? Wrong, says Ed Diener, a psychologist in the emerging field of "subjective well-being"-- a professor of happiness in all but name--at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He's found that happiness is more than just a warm glow, it's firmly rooted in culture. And guess what? Money really does make you happier--but for maximum gain you have to be poor to begin with.
8/23/2001 10:50:12 AM

Japan Scientist Pins Big Hopes on Tiny Wonders The tiny taurus, visible only through the lens of an electron microscope, represents a breakthrough in the field of nanotechnology, the manufacture of microscopic devices.
8/23/2001 10:32:31 AM

ZDNet: eWEEK: Study: Java to overtake C/C in 2002 Developers using Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java programming language will outnumber those using the C/C languages by next year, the findings of a series of studies conducted by Evans Data Corp. and released late Wednesday show.
8/22/2001 01:18:29 PM

New Scientist A nuclear reactor designed to generate power in the basement of an apartment block is being developed in Japan. In the past few months government-backed researchers have been testing a fail-safe mechanism for the reactor, which will close down automatically if it overheats.
8/22/2001 11:35:25 AM

Storage Areas for All "It's storage for the masses, Tony Prigmore, senior analyst at Enteprise Storage Group, said of 3ware's approach that uses the iSCSI open standard endorsed by IBM, Cisco Systems and other heavyweights "It's going to be an excellent way for people to network information in smaller organizations.''
8/14/2001 10:01:12 AM

New Scientist The "Bow-lingual", developed by Japanese toy manufacturer Takara Co. Ltd, consists of a six-centimetre dog collar microphone that transmits sounds to a palm-sized console. The console uses 200 different words, including "fun", "boring" and "happy", to translate six basic dog "emotions" in real time.
8/8/2001 10:36:38 AM

Software Is Called Capable of Copying Any Human Voice AT&T Labs will start selling speech software that it says is so good at reproducing the sounds, inflections and intonations of a human voice that it can recreate voices and even bring the voices of long-dead celebrities back to life.
7/31/2001 10:27:58 AM

New Scientist A new type of low-power battery that does not require a case and is thin enough to be printed on paper will soon be making its debut in shops. The power source relies on an undisclosed mixture of chemicals to produce 20 milliamp-hours at a terminal voltage of 1.5 volts for every square centimetre that is printed. The battery material is roughly 0.5 millimetres thick and would, if mass-produced, cost just a few cents per square inch, according to Israeli-based company Power Paper.
7/25/2001 10:24:24 AM

Technology Review - Fault-Tolerant File Storage That earth-shaking experience got Theimer, then an operating systems researcher at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, thinking about how to make computer file storage systems radically more fault tolerant. His work has helped to lead to Farsite, a fail-safe storage technology being created at Microsoft.
7/24/2001 10:42:01 AM

New Scientist An amphibious vehicle that is fast in the water as well as on land has been developed by a UK research company.

7/16/2001 11:01:32 AM

Alarms Warn of Leak on U.S. Space Station Among the items NASA eliminated from the station project in a recent spate of budget cuts was a propulsion module the station could have used to boost it own orbit.
7/16/2001 10:45:36 AM

New Scientist Fusion reactors aim to reproduce the Sun's power source, but the problem is containing the hot plasma. The San Diego team achieved more stable containment and higher pressure by carefully manipulating the magnetic fields that control the spinning plasma.
7/13/2001 10:20:31 AM

New Scientist Bulkeley found that half of the Republicans' dreams were nightmares, compared to only 18 per cent of the Democrats' dreams. "What's striking is that the nightmares of people on the right are more nightmarish. They were bleaker. There was more hopelessness," he says.
7/11/2001 10:35:27 AM

L.A. May Be Shot Down in Bid to Tax Satellites Los Angeles officials seeking to impose property taxes on space satellites were brought back down to Earth on Tuesday when a state board moved toward declaring satellites beyond the reach of even the tax collector.
7/11/2001 10:14:34 AM

The PerfectBook Machine What brought Marsh to Epstein's attention is a machine that may be the publishing equivalent of a car that runs on water. Working from a digital file, it can print, bind, and trim a book of any size in a matter of minutes. Having finished with one title, it can proceed to another and another, as long as the machine is kept supplied with ink, toner, and paper-the same regular copy paper you might buy at Staples.
7/10/2001 10:40:54 AM

Australian Research Fertilizes Eggs Without Sperm Australian researchers said on Tuesday they may have found a way to fertilize an egg with cells from any parts of the body, rather than sperm, in a new study which offers hope to infertile men and even lesbian couples.
7/10/2001 10:23:37 AM

New Scientist Russia plans to reassert itself as a major power in space by resurrecting the Buran space shuttle, a relic of the Soviet era. It will pay for the development programme in part by taking more space tourists like Dennis Tito up to the space station.
7/3/2001 11:04:35 AM

Hitachi spins chips into paper money The chip, called Mew, measures just 0.4mm on a side, and stores information such as identification and security code. It includes 128 bits of ROM (read-only memory) and RF wireless circuitry that allows it to transmit over a distance of about 30cm. If inserted in money, a reader unit would be able to instantly detect authentic bills.
7/3/2001 10:12:50 AM

Technology Review - The Light Brigade From versions that fill a 747 airplane to devices that fit in a Humvee, lasers are already destroying military targets in tests and are likely to be deployed over the next decade in everything from full-scale warfare to peacekeeping actions to terrorist encounters.
6/25/2001 10:39:35 AM

COLUMN ONE: Birth of a Thinking Machine Whether Lenat and his team have achieved that goal is about to be subjected to public scrutiny. For years, Cyc has largely been kept under wraps, seen and used only by specialists and a handful of commercial firms and government agencies licensed by Cyc's corporate owner, Cycorp Inc.
6/22/2001 10:41:52 AM

New Scientist: Six degrees of copulation Any two people could be connected via a chain of just two or three sexual relationships, says a Swedish study.
6/21/2001 11:39:23 AM

Tiqit : MPC Roughly the size of a box of matches, The Matchbox PC is currently the world's smallest PC capable of running popular operating systems such as Windows 95, Windows NT, and Linux. With such powerful capabilities in your pocket, one can only imagine the possibilities. For more specific technical information regarding the Matchbox PC click on one of the links above.
6/20/2001 10:06:08 AM

He Ain't Heavy, He's Your Energy Henderson says that his company has done "simulations" and computerized research, and he can tell that the traffic tap -- and the other "taps" he's developing to generate power from pedestrian and animal movement -- can be a viable source of energy.
6/18/2001 10:49:42 AM

Once-Bright Future of Optical Fiber Dims There is a glut of capacity of high- speed, long-haul information pipelines, but a shortage of the high- speed, local-access connections that consumers and businesses need to gain access to the Web. It is as if superhighways stand nearly empty while traffic backs up at the Holland and Lincoln tunnels.
6/18/2001 10:35:53 AM

It's Greenspan's Fed The solution to the Jorde mystery: she was vetoed by the supremely powerful Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.
6/18/2001 10:29:51 AM

Want To Give Your Computer a Meaningful Gesture? JesterTek Inc., a developer of video gesture control technology, has introduced JestPoint, which lets users point at a computer monitor of any size from any distance and use intuitive gestures to command and control content wirelessly.
6/15/2001 10:13:16 AM

Electronic paper now works in full colour, thanks to a fine filter Laptops, palmtops and cellphones with rigid electronic paper screens will be on the market within the next two years, says E Ink's Dan Button, who demonstrated the new colour display this week at the Society for Information Display conference in San Jose, California.
6/14/2001 10:29:24 AM

Microsoft Is Ready to Supply a Phone in Every Computer "I think we've woken up to Microsoft," said David Nagel, AT&T's chief technology officer. "There is an enormous difference between putting a piece of software code in a box and having a working service."
6/13/2001 10:21:07 AM

Technology Review - MP3 Goes Pro At the same time, MP3Pro will bring "a clear quality improvement at the upper end," says Linde. In a direct comparison between music encoded at 80 kilobits per second and the uncompressed digital recording of the same music, "no one so far has had the 'golden ears' to be able to hear a difference," he says.
6/8/2001 10:48:52 AM

New Scientist: Balancing act You can fool the brain and make someone sway from side to side by boosting the signal behind one ear and dampening it at the other. "We're causing a shift in the perception of what is vertical," says Collins. "It feels as if you have moved."
6/4/2001 10:56:21 AM

The Attacks on GRC.COM I believe you will be as fascinated and concerned as I am by the findings of my post-attack forensic analysis, and the results of my subsequent infiltration into the networks and technologies being used by some of the Internet's most active hackers.
6/4/2001 10:18:26 AM

Ring Ring: 'How 'Bout a Date?' Here's the basic idea. A would-be lover keys in an anonymous message on her cell phone and sends it to her love interest. The recipient is invited to guess who it's from by sending his own message to the cell phones of people he suspects. If he guesses right, a "match" is declared and the two can happily take the next step. If he guesses wrong, he sets up his own flirting session with an entirely new person.
5/29/2001 10:05:20 AM

High-Temperature Superconductors Find a Variety of Uses This month, workers pulled out nine cables from underground conduits at a Detroit power substation so that they could be replaced by the first high-temperature superconductor cables in a working power grid. The three new cables contain only 250 pounds of superconductor, yet they will be able to carry just as much current as the 18,000 pounds of copper in the nine cables they replace.
5/29/2001 09:55:41 AM

Pssst, Buddy - Wanna Buy a PDA for $25? San Jose, California-based MediaSolv announced it has designed a low-cost PDA that will enable real-time Web access and management of e-mail, calendar, contacts and other personal information. The PDA, which will be demonstrated during the CommunicAsia 2001 tradeshow in Singapore in June, will cost as little as US$25.
5/24/2001 11:46:44 AM

brain: Jet setting drains brain Five years of long-haul travel without rest time shrivels parts of the cortex and hippocampus, the thinking and learning parts of the brain, reports Kwangwook Cho of the University of Bristol.
5/21/2001 10:44:47 AM

The RegisterAnd, apart from all that, the whole situation is simply hysterical - both in humour and reaction. To build a female persona, make her go out with yourself, continue a relationship for several months and then announce her death to strangers who had become friends is certainly warped. But then we like warped.
5/18/2001 11:07:07 AM

Forget Electrons - Computing Goes Light-Speed Only recently have researchers come to believe that entanglements were not necessary and could be replaced with quantum interference. But, where sub-atomic particle interference is difficult to achieve even in laboratory conditions, light interference is based on classical 19th century physics.
5/18/2001 10:55:30 AM

Fired Mapmaker's Role in Bush Energy Plan As the group's Eric Wingerter wrote in a letter to Harlow in March: ``Scientists within your agency who have contacted PEER express reluctance to post research findings that may run counter to the policy positions of Interior Secretary Norton.''
5/17/2001 10:10:10 AM

Cypress Flexes MEMS Muscles When no force is applied to the tightly stretched ribbons, they act together like a single, flat mirror. But when alternate ribbons are pulled downwards by electrostatic forces, the two surfaces reflect light at different angles and wavelengths. The light intersects to create an interference pattern or grating, a fundamental building block for all sorts of devices.
5/16/2001 10:51:05 AM

RedHerring.com | Yipes teaches old phone companies new tricks Making its debut on our annual Red Herring 100 list, Yipes offers bandwidth at any speed up to 1 Gbps, a rate 22 times faster than the incumbents' fastest offerings and at a cost estimated to be 40 percent cheaper. And get this: it also allows customers to add or subtract network capacity in 1 Mbps increments on three hours' notice. The regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs) have no idea that Yipes is around or what it is offering, but they will, eventually.
5/15/2001 10:47:25 AM

Fashion Week Has First Fatality ``It was unforeseen, unfortunate and there is no investigation,'' RSPCA spokeswoman Jilea Carney told Reuters on Friday, adding Fashion Week organizers had sought the society's permission to use the rodents.
5/11/2001 09:58:08 AM

RLX Right on cue - and on a day of rolling black outs in California - Transmeta server startup RLX Technology took the wraps off its much talked-about baby. It's a superdense server fitting up to 336 Transmeta CPUs in a rack that can be populated by at most 42 CPUs using today's Intel boards.
5/9/2001 11:12:51 AM

New Earnings Fear: Verbosity Under 300 KB is best !
5/9/2001 10:40:28 AM

Engineering ET: The Path to Alternate Life Forms In two separate research efforts, scientists have altered the very nature of nature by creating cells that break a cardinal rule of biology, incorporating an entirely new basic building block into their cellular structures. It is a first step on a path of neogenesis -- the creation of alternate life forms.
5/8/2001 05:32:38 PM

Sound And Fury RIAA representatives, these members say, have argued that there is no need for tomorrow's CDs to play on today's machines if that's what it takes to thwart illegal copying. Consumer electronics companies are furious, predicting a consumer revolt if people are forced to buy new players for the privilege of facing rigid new copying restrictions.
5/8/2001 10:08:55 AM

Scientific American: Feature Article: Warp Drive Underwater: May 2001 Of late, it has become increasingly apparent that the world's major naval powers are developing the means to build entire arsenals of innovative underwater weapons and armadas of undersea watercraft able to operate at unprecedented speeds. This high-velocity capability - a kind of "warp drive" for water - is based on the physical phenomenon of supercavitation.
5/7/2001 10:39:13 AM

New Scientist: Wave of destruction Two home-made weapons capable of frying electronics and crashing computers have been demonstrated at the US Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.
5/4/2001 10:18:26 AM

Few Blacks Receive Emergency Stroke Medication The authors note that black patients are less likely to receive other potentially life-saving therapies such as angioplasty, bypass surgery, and certain therapies for lung and colon cancer. Also, the rate of stroke and death from stroke is higher among blacks than among whites.
5/3/2001 05:26:52 PM

MS May Have File-Trading Answer During a security workshop on Friday, a Microsoft Research scientist demonstrated how the hidden copyright fingerprint is so securely affixed to the audio that it remains intact even if a jazz song is played aloud on speakers in a noisy room and then re-recorded.
5/1/2001 10:30:28 AM

Mirror Tests Reflect Dolphins' Intelligence Dolphins like tatoos !
5/1/2001 10:23:43 AM

Q276304 - Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords Your password must be at least 18770 characters and cannot repeat any of your previous 30689 passwords. Please type a different password. Type a password that meets these requirements in both text boxes.
4/30/2001 10:53:57 AM

IBM Breakthrough May Lead to Smaller Computer Chips IBM researchers said they built the first array of transistors out of carbon nanotubes -- tiny cylindrical structures of carbon atoms that are some 50,000 times thinner than the diameter of a human hair.
4/27/2001 09:59:20 AM

Sealed crustless sandwich (US Patent 6004596) A sealed crustless sandwich for providing a convenient sandwich without an outer crust which can be stored for long periods of time without a central filling from leaking outwardly. The sandwich includes a lower bread portion, an upper bread portion, an upper filling and a lower filling between the lower and upper bread portions, a center filling sealed between the upper and lower fillings, and a crimped edge along an outer perimeter of the bread portions for sealing the fillings therebetween. The upper and lower fillings are preferably comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least jelly. The center filling is prevented from radiating outwardly into and through the bread portions from the surrounding peanut butter.
4/25/2001 11:19:53 AM

Technology Review - Power to the People Spread enough micropower throughout the grid, and the grid itself will begin to learn tricks that could make regionwide power outages an unpleasant memory.
4/23/2001 10:14:46 AM

No More Exploding Cows in the Alps The Austrian province of Vorarlberg will ban the practice of blowing up dead cows with explosives on its picture-postcard Alpine meadows.
4/19/2001 10:10:54 AM

News: Scientists teach computer to speak The company behind this work, Dutch-based firm Artificial Intelligence (AI), caused a stir in technology circles recently by claiming to have developed a computer that had learnt language to the level of a 15 month-old child.
4/18/2001 10:08:05 AM

The Robot With the Mind of an Eel (washingtonpost.com) The cyborg is no RoboCop, but it is a revolutionary experiment in combining a mechanical device with living tissue. The robot is controlled by an immature lamprey eel brain that was removed, kept alive in a special solution and attached to the hockey-puck-sized robot by wires so it can receive signals from the device's electronic eyes and send commands to move the machine's wheels.

4/17/2001 10:16:12 AM

Options dream turns to nightmare "I don't expect them to have any choice but to let me off," Braybrook said. "You can't squeeze water from a stone."
4/16/2001 10:13:08 AM

New Scientist: Power dressing Your sweater could one day provide all the power you need to run your MP3 player, mobile phone or palmtop computer - as long as you're not standing in a darkened room.
4/13/2001 10:15:22 AM

Fed Up Resident Prompts Police to Blow Up Car A caller believed to be a disgruntled London resident warned police about a suspect vehicle. Worried about public safety after a spate of suspected Irish Republican bombings in London, police responded swiftly by blowing up the car, reported to be a 20,000 pounds Alfa Romeo. The Evening Standard reported that the car was left in the street in Chiswick two months ago by its unsuspecting owner before he went on a business trip to Hong Kong.

4/10/2001 09:59:38 AM

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Super laser advances fusion research One of the world's most powerful lasers, called the Omega, has imploded a super-cooled pellet of solid hydrogen as part of a research program to find ways to compress it to a critical point for nuclear reactions to occur.
4/6/2001 01:08:41 PM

New Scientist: Easy writer Bob Brennan, a software engineer at Cambridge-based start-up Synapse Solutions, has developed a piece of software that allows you to write a program by keying in what you want it to do in everyday language.
4/5/2001 11:34:31 AM

New Substance Freaks Physics Experiments on a newly created composite material have shown that it bends microwaves passing through it in a direction that seems to defy the laws of physics, scientists said on Thursday, in a discovery that could help in making more advanced lenses and antennas.
4/5/2001 11:18:42 AM

Beyond 2000 | Engineering-Construction & Design | A Matter Of Size Negating the need to worry about batteries running low on power, or finding an energy source to replenish flagging supplies, a simple shot-glass full of butane or propane added to the world's smallest engine is all that will be needed to juice up a laptop for two hours of use.
4/4/2001 10:33:57 AM

About 80% of Bay Area web firms will fail, San Francisco study finds In an ominous sign for this Internet boomtown, the authors of a new study project that about 80% of the remaining dot-com companies in the Bay area will collapse in the next year, wiping out some 30,000 jobs.
3/29/2001 10:16:43 AM

Technology Review - Fiber Crosses the 10-Trillion-Bit Barrier French and Japanese engineers have squeezed more than 10 trillion bits per second through single optical fibers. This record capacity equals about 150 million simultaneous telephone conversations.
3/29/2001 09:43:33 AM

RedHerring.com | Why water is weird Water -- heavier when chilled, lighter when frozen, absorbing enormous heat with but a slight rise in temperature, the foundation of life, the most common of liquids, and the strangest. If only we knew how it worked.
3/26/2001 09:37:07 AM

New Scientist: Sharp shooter A revolutionary display technology finally promises to make high-resolution, widescreen televisions more affordable.
3/26/2001 09:32:26 AM

Two Telescopes Link to Look for Extrasolar Planets Two telescopes atop a dormant Hawaiian volcano have been linked to make an optical instrument powerful enough to look for planets outside our solar system.
3/16/2001 09:35:09 AM

Fat Folks Seek Gold, Stardom The final winner will be chosen from the two best slimmers by the audience and he or she will earn in gold the weight lost. The folks desperate enough to join this show will also be subjected to temptations, including a wall-mounted fridge full of their favorite snacks.
3/16/2001 09:28:45 AM

Man Shot Dead As Bulletproof Magic Fails A Ghanaian man was shot dead by a fellow villager while testing a magic spell designed to make him bulletproof, the official Ghana News Agency reported.
3/15/2001 09:50:45 AM

[ I N S I D E ] Bertelsmann, Perhaps Hedging Napster Bet, Will Try New Digital Format Bertelsmann may have one foot in the Napster camp, but the other is with the rest of the music industry in trying to find a new format for its music that will be piracy resistant. On Monday, BMG Entertainment announced that it has settled on one such format, as it signed a deal to release future recordings on DataPlay media.
3/13/2001 10:18:39 AM

Copy This! Can 'Military' Technology Beat Digital Piracy? ''If you try to hack it, it destroys itself,'' explains company CEO George Friedman. Hasta la vista, John Perry Barlow!
3/13/2001 10:03:33 AM

Music of the Genome These haunting "gene melodies" come from deep within you--do you recognize them? The Human Genome Project has recently completed the sequence of the entire human genome. Every note of this piece was generated directly from this Human Genome data. I processed the genome sequences using special software I wrote to convert the sequences directly into melodies and rhythms. Then I combined the several genome melodies using an ordinary music sequencer.
3/12/2001 10:26:49 AM

Canadian Firm Uses Pig Latin to Fool Napster Block Aimster Chief Executive Officer Johnny Deep said last week that changing file names with encryption makes it illegal to systematically remove the altered files. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act outlaws the reverse engineering of encryption schemes, Deep said. Encryption is defined as ``the scrambling and descrambling of information using mathematical formulas or algorithms.''
3/12/2001 09:47:28 AM

Light At the End of the Silicon British scientists said on Wednesday they have squeezed light out of silicon, overcoming a decade-old obstacle holding back the computer industry and assuring that microchips can get smaller and faster.
3/7/2001 11:25:27 AM

Gallery of CSS Descramblers If code that can be directly compiled and executed may be suppressed under the DMCA, as Judge Kaplan asserts in his preliminary ruling, but a textual description of the same algorithm may not be suppressed, then where exactly should the line be drawn?
3/7/2001 11:23:02 AM

Pentagon unveils ‘non-lethal’ device The Pentagon on Thursday unveiled a new “non-lethal” weapon designed to drive off an adversary with an energy beam that inflicts pain without causing lasting harm.
3/2/2001 10:45:57 AM

Researchers Prepare Solar Sail Test A U.S.-Russian consortium plans to send a craft skyward that floats, not on the wind, but on the gentle pressure of the sun's rays.
2/27/2001 03:56:52 PM

Jonathan Lebed: Stock Manipulator, S.E.C. Nemesis -- and 15 He wanted to get rich. He wanted to tune out his school-kid life. And neither his parents nor the S.E.C. was in a position to stop him.
2/27/2001 10:11:39 AM

Nude Awakening for Shoplifters An Austrian supermarket worker has been letting female shoplifters off scot-free if they pose naked for photographs, police said Tuesday.
2/27/2001 09:39:10 AM

Search project prepares to challenge Google - Tech News - CNET.com Project Pandango, the work-in-progress of Seattle-based i5 Digital, attempts to determine that priority by examining the Web surfing histories of a wide network of computers on the Web.
2/26/2001 12:54:46 PM

SMT and Intel Simultaneous Multi Threading - the business of making one processor look like several software applications - is being snuck into Intel's Foster.
2/26/2001 10:38:03 AM

The Alan Greenspan Index: The Only Index That Matters . Just tell us what you want, plain and simple. Just announce your targets this year for the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P 500. Tell us that you are going to raise interest rates the second we exceed those targets by one point, and lower rates the second we fall below them. The markets will immediately gravitate to your targets and stay there. Hell, you'll never have to change rates again. You can take that richly deserved vacation -- heaven knows its hard, thankless work dragging the economy into a recession! And think of all of the secondary benefits, Alan. Thousands of analysts and journalists (like myself) will be thrown out of work. No need for analysis once you set the targets. And all that unemployment will keep inflation down. Once again, everybody wins! To quote George Carlin, "I should have been in marketing."
2/23/2001 07:20:06 PM

FEED | Digital Culture - Gift for the Gab Until now, group communication was itself an unsolved problem. As anyone who has asked Jeeves knows, computerized grasp of human language is a long way off, and attempts to design a simple language for predator agents has similarly failed. Giles and Jim follwed a much more radical approach: They allowed the agents to evolve their own language.
2/23/2001 07:03:23 PM

Red Herring - Popping the optical bubble February 22, 2001 Ever since Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) paid a whopping $6.9 billion for fledgling Cerent in 1999, any startup with the words photonics or optical networking in its business plan could expect to raise millions of dollars in venture capital before the founders even hit Control-Save on their PowerPoint presentations.
2/22/2001 11:44:20 AM

Boot your dog Boutchia said her feelings for Smidgen are similar to those she feels for a real dog. She's owned a number of dogs in the past. She even freaked out when Smidgen was ill. "But one day, when I couldn't get her to boot up, I was sick to my stomach. I thought my head was going to explode."
2/22/2001 11:34:55 AM

The Key Vanishes: Scientist Outlines Unbreakable Code A computer science professor at Harvard says he has found a way to send coded messages that cannot be deciphered, even by an all-powerful adversary with unlimited computing power. And, he says, he can prove it.
2/20/2001 05:49:53 PM

VCs turn off the tap on funding More ominously, the same venture capital firms that are slashing middle-stage funding are also demanding far greater stakes in portfolio companies, particularly those in the highly volatile Internet and software niches. That signals that even the venture capital community--the most high-risk investor category--is approaching the battered technology industry with an extra dose of caution.
2/19/2001 10:30:46 AM

Self-Healing Material Developed To heal tiny cracks automatically, the Illinois researchers sprinkled capsules about the thickness of a human hair throughout an experimental fiberglass-like compound. When a crack appeared, capsules in its path broke open, spilled their contents and sealed the cracks.
2/16/2001 03:42:17 PM

Welcome to .NET - how MS plans to dominate digital music sales Once upon a time Microsoft discovered the Internet, and the browser wars ensued. More recently it's become apparent that the company sees music sales as the Next Big Thing, but so far, the extent, intricacy and all-encompassing nature of its plans for Digital Rights Management and secure content distribution haven't been widely grasped. When they are, the browser wars may look like a sideshow.
2/15/2001 01:35:28 PM

Red Herring - Is it spam or Spammimic? February 15, 2001 Before hastily deleting that next piece of unsolicited spam in your email, you might want to check whether it contains a secret message. Visitors to Spammimic.com can now hide a cryptic message in what appears to be (depending on one's point of view) a seemingly innocuous piece of spam.
2/15/2001 09:20:54 AM

N-Scribe: How It Works The n-scribe pen consists of a ballpoint pen and its cover. To use the pen, the cover is removed and clipped to any paper, notebook or other flat surface you are writing on – no special paper is required. As you write, the pen emits infrared light that is received by the two infrared sensors in the pen cover. Together they work like a miniature global positioning system, similar to the guidance system in a cruise missile, constantly adjusting and transcribing the location of the pen in relationship to the two fixed points.
2/13/2001 01:05:15 PM

RedHerring.com - Isolating the fifth element of taste February 09, 2001 A fifth taste -- umami -- was admitted last year to the gustatory pantheon, and a growing awareness of its role in the flavor and pleasurable sensations of food is changing the way food processors, nutritionists, and chefs think about what they do. The artful use of umami can make mediocre fare taste better, and good food taste great.
2/12/2001 02:56:39 PM

Biggest hard drive Here's a poser for you: What do you get if you cram 5000 miles of fibre-optics in a smallish box? A tangle that would terrify the keenest knitter in the universe? Or, just possibly, the world's largest hard drive.
2/9/2001 10:06:13 AM

USATODAY.com The Internet's biggest players, trying to shore up shaky bottom lines, are making customers pay for services that once were free.
2/9/2001 09:55:22 AM

Akamai walks fine line with Web hosters Technology for speeding content across the Web, pioneered by companies like Akamai, has matured to the point that these content distribution companies can handle far more than the fast delivery of Web page elements like static graphics and text they began with two years ago. Now Akamai, which analysts say remains the biggest name in the business, is creeping into new territory and threatening to take significant amounts of business away from Web hosting centers, even as these companies scramble to reinvent themselves
2/7/2001 10:33:30 PM

New Scientist: Hands-off approach Asleeve of metal buttons sewn onto an old pair of exercise tights picked up electrical signals from the nerves controlling the pilots' arms. This system could interpret the nerve signals precisely enough to pick up the fine arm movement needed to land a plane safely.
2/6/2001 09:38:10 AM

New Scientist: Silicon and cells Living tissue has been hooked up to electronic circuitry by scientists in Germany. The technique could lead to implants that communicate with the body and hybrid sensors made from biological material and silicon.
2/2/2001 09:55:03 AM

Super Bowl Crowd Faced Computer Scan for Crooks Thousands of Super Bowl fans were subjected to a ``computerized police lineup'' at America's biggest sporting event last weekend as police used cutting-edge technology to scan the crowd for pickpockets and terrorists, civil libertarians said on Thursday.
2/1/2001 10:37:06 PM

First 480Mbps USB 2.0 controller arrives The first USB 2.0 integrated peripheral controller, capable of data rates of 480 Mbps was launched yesterday by Cypress Semiconductor, but adoption could be held up by chipset delays.
1/31/2001 10:30:32 AM

Science Says Women Dig Fast Cars A study to be published this spring in Human Nature found that men will do almost anything to put their wealth and/or strength on display -- from buying expensive fast cars to taking up parachuting. In other words, they'll do anything to get laid.
1/31/2001 10:17:32 AM

Self-Made Cells Show Life Could Come From Space Tiny little bubbles that can build themselves in the freezing vacuum of space suggest that life, or the seeds of life, could have originated out in the cosmos, scientists say
1/30/2001 09:31:49 AM

Black Hole On/Off Switch Fuels Feast or Famine The idea of a black hole on a Weight Watchers diet might seem counterintuitive. Don't black holes suck everything inward?
1/29/2001 11:43:47 AM

Rats Dream a Little Dream, Too Wilson believes the rat dreams have a purpose. Research has shown that humans and other animals learn -- even tasks -- better when they literally sleep on it.
1/25/2001 11:16:27 AM

Google Link Is Bush League When you type "dumb motherfucker" into Google, the search engine's top result is a site about President Bush.
1/25/2001 09:31:44 AM

USATODAY.com "I think we can do a stop-action move like in the movie The Matrix ," the technical manager told CBS director of field operations Larry Barbatsoulis, "but from video as a live replay."
1/24/2001 11:20:34 AM

Itanium The Itanium may prove to be more than just one awful chip. It could be two awful chips, in one integrated flip-chip package.
1/23/2001 11:23:28 AM

Desktop Black Hole Possibly on the Horizon What was little more than a distant dream a week ago -- an experiment to create a laboratory system that simulates the physics of a black hole -- might now be done within five years, says one researcher.
1/23/2001 11:11:01 AM

Scully'd Kill for this Telescope The All-Sky OSETI project's leader, Paul Horowitz of Harvard University, said the search assumes there are civilizations scattered around the galaxy every few hundred light years and that they have built signal beacons based on lasers.
1/22/2001 01:59:07 PM

More bandwidth New research shows how telecoms companies might be able to deliver more information, at a faster speed, over the same airwaves
1/21/2001 05:22:50 PM

Thin phone The disposable device is the brainchild of Randice-Lisa Altschul, who has 22 patents on the technology. Called the Phone-Card-Phone, it is the thickness of three credit cards and made from recycled paper products. It comes with 60 minutes of calling time and a hands-free attachment.
1/19/2001 09:52:35 AM

Scientists Hold Light Particles Captive The secret was slowing down atoms of rubidium so they would not absorb the photons. The atoms change their magnetic spin just slightly -- a change that allows them to store information from the photons. Hitting the cloud of hot rubidium gas with another laser pulse releases the first pulse.
1/19/2001 09:37:26 AM

New Scientist: A clear winner A team led by Yuji Matsumoto of the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Titech) in Yokohama were looking for a material that was both a semiconductor and a permanent magnet, or "ferromagnet". They succeeded--and were amazed to find that the material is transparent as well.
1/18/2001 10:50:16 AM

How to Boost Radio Waves Researchers at Lucent Technologies in New Jersey and Harvard University in Massachusetts showed how data transmission rates of radio signals can be raised by a factor of three by using multiple antennae, according to the latest edition of the science journal Nature.
1/18/2001 10:47:58 AM

'Ginger': Kamen's Stirling Idea Ginger/IT is more likely to be a Stirling engine, or a scooter powered by an energy saving, environmentally friendly Stirling engine.
1/16/2001 10:21:27 AM

Redherring.com - Transmeta's chips charge into servers January 12, 2001 This year, at least four companies will release servers based on Transmeta's Crusoe processors. These aren't upright tower servers; they are slim, pizza box-shaped units designed to be stacked in racks. Rack servers formed the fastest-growing segment of the Intel-based server market last year, according to the market research firm IDC. Their main requirements are low power and low heat, which just happen to be Crusoe's strong suits.
1/15/2001 09:53:46 AM

CNET.com - News - Personal Technology - Mysterious "Ginger" may be a scooter "Ginger," the mysterious, purportedly world-changing device that has caught the attention of the technology industry this week, may be something as simple as a scooter.
1/12/2001 05:55:23 PM

MP3 creators ready 'son of MP3'
The new version of MP3, provisionally called MP3 Pro, will offer 128Kbps quality at 64Kbps file sizes, according to Thomson, which announced the technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. In other words, you'll get CD quality audio at a file size that would previously only provide FM radio quality.
1/12/2001 10:24:01 AM

Discovery Could Help Insomniacs Ptacek said the family gets normal sleep, as deep and long as most people. The difference is that they start earlier and awaken earlier. Members of the family tend to grow sleepy in late afternoon and usually are slumbering in bed by 7 p.m. They generally awaken spontaneously around 2 a.m. For them, he said, it is a natural pattern.
1/12/2001 10:14:55 AM

Mystery Invention 'Ginger' Has Tech World Buzzing A planned book about a mysterious invention said to be more important than the World Wide Web and capable of generating fantastic riches has gripped a down-on-its-luck technology industry in need of a miracle.
1/12/2001 09:59:38 AM

Scientists Clone Endangered Gaur, But It Dies Noah was cloned using the cells of a male gaur that died eight years ago. Its skin cells were frozen at the time.
The team at Advanced Cell, based in Worcester, Massachusetts, took the nucleus out of hundreds of skin cells and put them into the hollowed-out eggs of domestic cows. They got 40 embryos and implanted them into cows. Only one successful pregnancy resulted. Noah was born weighing 80 pounds, the researchers reported.
1/12/2001 09:53:19 AM

Light Reading - The Global Site For Optical Networking Lightpointe’s solution is to combine free-space optics with a millimeter or microwave radio backup. When the free-space optics stops working in fog, the microwave kicks in and restores the connection. The microwave won’t work in heavy rain, but the free-space optics will –- and luckily, you don’t get fog and heavy rain at the same time.
1/11/2001 10:23:46 AM

New Scientist: Killer virus
A virus that kills every one of its victims, by wiping out part of their immune system, has been accidentally created by an Australian research team. The virus, a modified mousepox, does not affect humans, but it is closely related to smallpox, raising fears that the technology could be used in biowarfare.
1/11/2001 10:07:00 AM

CNN.com - Technology - Proposal to limit copyright on hard drives draws fire - January 10, 2001 A proposal now under consideration by a technology standards organization lays the groundwork for content protection capabilities on your next hard drive and has privacy advocates crying foul.
1/11/2001 10:01:35 AM

Light Reading - The Global Site For Optical Networking A group of U.K. universities calling itself the Ultrafast Photonics Collaboration (UPC) is working on ways to push transmission technologies to new limits. It's aiming to cram 100 terabits per second down a single strand of fiber -- more than ten times the current record (see Siemens Claims Speed Record ).
1/10/2001 11:35:16 AM

Galaxies Made of Nothing? New Theory of Mysterious Dark Matter Theorists attempting to explain some of the "missing mass" in the universe now say there may be entire galaxies that are dark. The new idea, proposed by Neil Trentham of the University of Cambridge, along with colleagues Ole Moller and Enrico Ramirez-Ruizof, suggests that for every normal, star-filled galaxy, there may be 100 that contain nothing, or at least nothing that we understand.
1/10/2001 11:02:19 AM

Peer-to-peer monsters are on the way The OceanStore team has set its sights even higher, said Bolosky, talking about serverless networks consisting of 10 billion computers, containing 1023 bytes of data.
1/10/2001 10:58:09 AM

New Scientist: Quantum quiet
However the [quantum] information will survive 3.6 times longer if it is encoded in certain more complex quantum states involving a pair of ions, report physicists David Kielpinski, David Wineland and their colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado.
1/8/2001 10:15:46 AM

The Sound of One Hand Typing
The Half Keyboard looks like the left half of a standard keyboard. It has the same full-size keys and letter layout, but each key also doubles for its opposite right-hand key, which is activated when the space bar is held down.
1/8/2001 10:10:08 AM

Apple, Compaq adding recordable DVD drives
Apple is expected to unveil new Power Macs next week capable of recording DVDs and CDs, according to sources who warn that these plans could change at the last minute. Compaq this week announced a new Presario consumer PC with a combo DVD/CD recordable/rewritable drive. That system ships in March.
1/5/2001 02:45:38 PM

American men ditch sex for PCs
Eight per cent of men questioned by Youth Intelligence on behalf of Playboy magazine said they spent less time under the covers with their partner because they were too occupied with their hi-tech gadgets.
1/5/2001 09:53:05 AM

Mysterious monolith appears in Seattle park
A mysterious black monolith has been erected in a Seattle park calling to mind a similar structure from Stanley Kubrick's seminal film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
1/3/2001 01:10:00 PM