Why Tax Dollars, Stem Cells Mix
When researchers at Johns Hopkins University this spring restored mobility in paralyzed rodents by implanting human embryonic stem cells into their spinal cords, it was a provocative achievement. It was the first time researchers restored mobility in a mammal using human embryonic stem cells. At a conference on Tuesday at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, scientists showed a dramatic video of mice that progressed from dragging their hind limbs limply behind them to gaining limited movement in those legs. The study was done without federal funding, a potential source of money for embryonic stem cell research that many researchers have lobbied for vigorously. But if studies like this was can be done without federal funding, who needs it? It turns out federal funding is not just about money. It's also about oversight, public opinion, quality science and gaining the respect of colleagues.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,45555,00.html
Open Sourcers Shy From Criticism
One of the difficulties of holding a conference devoted to a certain ethic -- for example, the open-source ethic -- is that after a little while it begins to feel like every speaker is preaching to the choir. The people attending the O'Reilly Open Source Convention going on here this week think that open software is the way to engineer the future. For the most part, the speakers are telling them they're right. What's the point of all this manufactured glee, one wonders? And yet if you see the smiles on these people's faces when some tech bigwig says his big company also uses open software, and that they're switching over to it at an increasing rate, it's easy to see why coders like to come to these things: Glee, even if it's pre-fab, lets you know you're on the right track in life.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,45554,00.html
Race Like the Wind on Sun's Power
A team from the University of Michigan won the world's longest solar car race Wednesday, overcoming scorching heat, summer squalls and a disaster that forced them to rebuild their vehicle a month before the event. Twenty-seven teams completed the American Solar Challenge, a 10-day, 2,300-mile marathon across the United States along historical Route 66. The Wolverines' M-Pulse completed the route in 56 hours, 10 minutes and 46 seconds, more than an hour ahead of second place University of Missouri at Rolla's Solar Miner III. Michigan reclaimed the title it first nabbed in the country's first solar car race in 1990. This year's race began on July 15 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and ended near Los Angeles.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,45550,00.html
Spies Who Love Farm Animals
In Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons, farm animals such as cows have secret lives when people aren't watching. Now, government scientists are about to discover whether cows really do drink and smoke when no one's around. For the first time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has hired two undercover ethologists to spy on barnyard animals. No flick of a cow's tail or blink of a pig's eye will go unnoticed in their surreptitious study of farm animals' behavior patterns. Ethologists have been studying animals in the wild for years, but farmyard ethology is a new scientific discipline. Morrow-Tesch, a research leader at the Livestock Issues Research Unit, said barnyard ethologists want to determine what puts farm animals under stress and develop ways to alleviate it.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,45398,00.html
Writers' Song Sung Blue 
Chuck Cannon moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1984 with dreams of becoming a star. He was sure that once the label executives saw him rock, he'd be on his way. Six years passed, but eventually he found himself nearing that goal -- as a songwriter. Over the past 11 years, Cannon penned a plethora of country music hits. His 1993 song "I Love The Way You Love Me" was voted Song of the Year by the Academy of Country Music, and last year he wrote "How Do You Like Me Now?" the title song of Toby Keith's Country Music Album of the Year. He's more than just pretty good at what he does. But just like other songwriters, Conner, 41, depends on the quarterly royalty checks that come from the record labels and performance rights organizations like ASCAP to support his family. For Conner and the 150,000 songwriters that the National Music Publishers Association represents, those checks could soon be much smaller.
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,45510,00.html
Spreading the Search for ET
The search for intelligent aliens is ramping up. Scientists in California have just begun the most sensitive search yet, in search of laser signals from extraterrestrial sources. Other endeavors that are underway include an ambitious survey of the sky for laser signals to begin next year in Boston; the completion of construction of the Allen Telescope Array, the largest instrument dedicated to the search for ET, in Northern California; and NASA's possible launch of the Kepler Mission, a space-based telescope designed to hunt for Earth-like planets. To date, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, commonly known as SETI, has focused on sifting through radio or microwave transmissions that stream toward Earth from all quarters of the universe. By crunching the data, scientists hoped to detect signals generated by alien civilizations.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,45559,00.html
Rep: Give Fair Use a Fair Shake
Rep. Rick Boucher wants to spring a Russian programmer from jail. Boucher, a maverick Virginia Democrat, is hoping to rewrite a federal law that led FBI agents to arrest Dmitry Sklyarov in Las Vegas, Nevada, last week on copyright felony charges. "It's a broad overreach to have a person arrested under the federal criminal laws simply because they made software that circumvents a technological measure," Boucher said. Boucher said his office will draft a bill to be introduced later this year. The criminal law in question is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was obscure enough when Congress enacted it in 1998, but has emerged as one of the most important and far-reaching technology regulations. Sklyarov is charged with trafficking in a program to bypass Adobe's copy protection for e-books, a federal felony under the DMCA.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,45548,00.html
Rhyming Suicide Notes
The writings of poets who wound up committing suicide contain words and language patterns that serve as precursors to their eventual fate, researchers say. Using a computer program that examines word usage in written texts, the researchers analyzed 156 poems written by nine poets who committed suicide and 135 poems written by nine poets who did not. They found that the suicidal poets gravitated toward words indicating their detachment from other people and preoccupation with themselves.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,45537,00.html
Huge identity theft uncovered
Key personal data belonging to hundreds of individuals have been shared in an Internet chat room, in what one expert says could become one of the largest identity theft cases ever. The data include Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, date of birth and credit card information — everything a criminal would need to open an online bank account, apply for a credit card, even create the paperwork necessary to smuggle illegal immigrants. It is still unclear how the data ended up in the chat room, but an MSNBC.com investigation has revealed common threads among the victims — including the purchase of a cell phone online from VerizonWireless.com or an AT&T Wireless reseller.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/604496.asp
Why Jim Clark Likes Microsoft
"Buy Microsoft" was the message, and it was coming from a surprising source: Jim Clark, the Silicon Valley wunderkind who sparked the antitrust case against the monopolistic software giant. Clark startled the crowd at the second annual four-day Internet Summit by predicting that Microsoft would surpass America Online (dossier) as the dominant Internet network and volunteered that he holds 1 million shares of the Redmond, Wash.-based company. The event, which ended Tuesday, was held at the ocean-side Ritz Carlton Hotel in Dana Point. Call it the new pragmatism of the Internet economy, and it was widespread at this glitzy gathering of more than 700 executives, venture capitalists and Internet celebrities.
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,16927,00.html
Cold War Foes Find Harmony in Satellite Launch Partnership
In the Port of Long Beach, in the belly of a gleaming 667-foot vessel bristling with radar dishes and transmission towers, American and Russian scientists are building a powerful Ukrainian rocket. Sometime in the next month or so, the rocket and its payload, a communications satellite, will be hoisted onto a massive floating launch platform. Then, with seasoned Norwegian sea captains at the helm, the ship and the platform will each cruise across the Pacific Ocean for a launch from the equator about 1,400 miles southeast of Hawaii. If all goes as planned, the scientists who honed their skills amid the imperial anxieties of the Cold War will mark their seventh such feat with vodka toasts and a Mexican version of borscht whipped up by the ship's Norwegian chef.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/co...ogy%5Fcolum n
Transplanted Marrow Cells Change
Scientists said on Wednesday they had discovered that adult stem cells found in the bone marrow are capable of turning into kidney cells after a bone marrow transplant. The discovery, made in mice and human transplant patients, suggests that bone marrow-derived cells could be used to treat kidney failure, although more research is needed to determine if this is true. The stem cells found in bone marrow are immature cells that can give rise to all cells of the blood and immune system. Past studies have shown they also have the potential to transform into liver cells and researchers in London said their work proves for the first time that these remarkably plastic cells can also transform themselves into kidney cells.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,45543,00.html
RSA poses $200,000 crypto challenge
RSA Security is running a factoring challenge that offers would-be code breakers a prize of up to $200,000 for finding the two numbers of the kind used to create ultra-secure 2048-bit encryption key. The idea of the RSA Factoring Challenge, which has been set before with lower-strength ciphers, is to encourage research into computational number theory and the practical difficulty of factoring large integers. Based on the challenge, RSA and others in the encryption community can chose the kinds of key lengths needed for secure cryptographic systems. There is a trade off between speed and security in choosing key lengths so this kind of research is useful.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/20638.html
Metallica wants 'to share music'
It's official - Metallica supports music sharing and always has. What other conclusion can be drawn from once anti-Napster band's latest missive to its fans? Says the posting, on the Metallica Web site, "we look forward to continuing to share music with you in the future". A reference, perhaps, to Metallica's recent rapprochement with the controversial MP3 sharing service? Possibly, but why then does the band say it's continuing to share music? Have Hetfield, Ulrich and Hammet been secretly downloading the latest Hear'Say singles, we wonder?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/20641.html
New shirt or cloth keyboard?
U.K. startup ElectroTextiles has demonstrated a keyboard made out of a soft, water-resistant cloth--something the company claims could be a breakthrough for mobile computing and text messaging. The fabric, called ElekTex, can receive and transmit electronic impulses without wiring or circuitry, and it can be folded and put into a pocket. The cloth construction also means that it is lightweight -- 28g -- and damage-resistant. "People's first impressions are, 'Whoa, it's fabric, it must be a little flimsy.' But it's very durable," ElectroTextiles co-founder Chris Chapman told journalists. The keyboard, initially for handheld computers, had its preview at the New York Museum of Modern Art and the IT Expo in France this week, and will be on sale by the end of the year. ElectroTextiles is planning a mobile phone handset that can be squashed and dropped, and a car seat that automatically adjusts to fit its occupant. The company is based at Pinewood Studios, outside of London.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02
Printable battery rolls off the presses
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. Paper Power claims the material is non-toxic and non-corrosive, making the battery safe to use without casing.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991069
More news later on
