sparksfly writes "The Terrestrial Shrub Rover is a solar-powered vehicle that looks, as you may have guessed, exactly like a large shrub. According to designer Justin Shull, 'In the spirit of NASA and its forthcoming 2020 lunar expeditions in preparation for colonizing the moon, the Terrestrial Shrub Rover presents the opportunity to explore terrestrial and social environments back on Earth from within a manned, foliage bedecked, solar electric powered rover.'

Attorneys for Dominica Juliano claim that she was burned and developed psychological problems after a store clerk aimed a hand-held price scanner at her face. Store attorneys say their scanners uses a harmless LED light and that the girl had serious health problems before she was scanned. From the article: "Dominica Juliano was 12 when she and her grandmother entered the Country Fair store in Erie in June 2004. A clerk allegedly called the girl 'grumpy' before flashing his hand-held bar code scanner over her face and telling her to smile. Attorneys for Ms. Juliano and her guardian say the girl was sensitive to light and burned, and later developed post-traumatic stress and Tourette's syndrome."

Enigma23 writes "As reported on news.com.au, scientists from the International Cancer Genome Consortium of 12 institutes around the world will today release the first DNA profiles of some of the most prevalent types of tumors. While the story asserts that 'A new era of cancer treatment has dawned,' I'm a bit more skeptical, given that gene therapy and immunotherapy are still very much in their infancy at the current time."

Anonymous Dupeur writes "Only 12 hours after the start of operation of the Large Hardon Collider at an unprecedentedly high energy level, a discovery had been made. Today, in its press release, CERN disclosed the observation of a new class — paleoparticles. 'It's awful,' explains Alain Grand, still shocked by the discovery. 'It left horrible tracks inside the detector that made the physicists on duty at the time feel quite sick.' No wonder. The particle consists of two strange quarks and one top quark but no beauty or charm quark. The physicists have nicknamed it the 'neutrinosaurus.' This marks a first success of the — finally — started experiment."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, the defendant has filed a motion for new trial, attacking, among other things, the constitutionality of the jury's $675,000 award as being violative of due process. In his 32-page brief (PDF), Tenenbaum argues that the award exceeded constitutional due process standards, both under the Court's 1919 decision in St. Louis Railway v. Williams, as well as under its more recent authorities State Farm v. Campbell and BMW v. Gore. Defendant also argues that the Court's application of fair use doctrine was incorrect, that statutory damages should not be imposed against music consumers, and that the Court erred in a key evidentiary ruling."

kkleiner writes "Singularity Hub has just unveiled its second annual roundup of the best robots of the year. In 2009 robots continued their advance towards world domination with several impressive breakouts in areas such as walking, automation, and agility, while still lacking in adaptability and reasoning ability. It will be several years until robots can gain the artificial intelligence that will truly make them remarkable, but in the meantime they are still pretty awesome."

It seems that Swedish regulators have decided to extend the requirement of not calling yourself a bank to the registration of domain names. Now anyone that tries to register a .SE domain name with the word "bank" in it will need to prove they are a legitimate bank. Hopefully there are no blood banks or anyone with the last name of "Banks" that might want a .SE domain. Here is a Google translation of the demand issued by the authorities to the .SE registry.

hampton2600 writes "The Wikimedia Foundation is proud to present our new mobile site optimized for modern high-end phones. The interface is focused on being clean and easy to read on your mobile device. We currently officially support reading on the iPhone and Android phones. The new gateway is written entirely in Ruby (using the Merb framework) and the Git repository can be found here. We are looking for open source help with supporting other phone types and translations into new languages. Currently 8 languages are supported, but we'd like to support all languages Wikipedia supports. This is an active project and we are looking for new features, etc. from the community."

circletimessquare notes a New Scientist piece calling attention to a recent study by the National Academy of Sciences, which attempts to raise awareness of the dangers of severe solar electromagnetic storms. "In 1859, amateur astronomer Richard Carrington noticed 'two patches of intensely bright and white light' near some sunspots. At the same time, Victorian era magnetometers went off the charts, stunning auroras were being viewed at the equator, and telegraph networks were disrupted — sparks flew from terminals and ignited telegraph paper on fire. It became known as the Carrington event, and the National Academy of Sciences worries about the impact of another such event today and the lack of awareness among officials. It would induce un-designed-for voltages in all high-voltage, long-distance power lines, and destroy transformers, as Quebec learned in 1989. Without electricity, water would stop flowing from the tap, gasoline would stop being pumped, and health care would cease after the emergency generators gave up the ghost after 72 hours. Replacing all of the transformers would take months, if not years. The paradox would be that underdeveloped countries would fare better than developed ones. Our only warning system is a satellite called the Advanced Composition Explorer, in solar orbit between the Sun and the Earth. It is 11 years old and past its planned lifespan. It might give us as much as 15 minutes of warning, and transformers might be able to be disconnected in time. But currently no country has such a contingency plan."