Dekortage writes "The New York Times reports this morning that IBM will work with Mars — the candy company who makes M&Ms and Snickers, among other things — on a five year project to sequence the cocoa genome. According to Howard-Yana Shapiro, global director of plant science at Mars, the goal is to 'discover the genetic building blocks of traits like disease and pest resistance, drought tolerance and perhaps flavor.' Additionally, the project's results will be available for free from the Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture."

Vandre writes "The popular AJAX library ExtJS released a new version today. There has been a huge controversy among the Ext community. Previously Ext had been accused of not being open source and trying to restrict its users' rights." It seems be boil down to whether the developers like or dislike the GPL, under which the library's new version is available -- the comments illustrate a long-standing divide when it comes to licensing. The foundation which oversees development explains why they've chosen dual-licensing at all.

An anonymous reader notes that Comcast is offering a new 50-Mbps / 6-Mbps package for residential customers for $150, starting in Minneapolis-St. Paul and extending nationwide by mid-2010. The new service will use the DOCSIS 3.0 standard, which is nearing ratification. We've recently discussed Comcast's BitTorrent throttling and promise to quit it, and their low-quality 'HD' programming. How attractive will $150 for 50 Mbps be compared to Verizon's FiOS offerings?

rjshirts writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the Beatles and Apple have signed a reported $400 million dollar deal to bring the entire Beatles Catalog to iTunes. From the article: 'As of today there is no time frame as to when the catalog will appear online, but it seems to just be a matter of time. McCartney himself even said in November that the catalog would be making its way onto the the store some time in 2008. While we have heard this sort of thing time and time again, this might just be the real deal. Prepare yourself — Beatlemania is coming to iTunes.'"

Frizzled writes "Part of the space shuttle crew's scheduled mission for this week is to assemble a massive robot which will 'rise like Frankenstein' from the shuttle's cargo bay. The robot, named Dextre, has 11-foot arms, a shoulder span of nearly 8 feet, a height of 12 feet, and was built by the Canadian Space Agency. 'Dextre can pivot at the waist, and has seven joints per arm. Its hands, or grippers, have built-in socket wrenches, cameras and lights. Only one arm is designed to move at a time to keep the robot stable and avoid a two-arm collision. The robot has no face or legs, and with its long arms certainly doesn't look human.'"

CaptainCarrot writes "Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer has summarized for his readers the new results released by NASA from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which has been surveying the 3K microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang. Some of the most interesting results: The age of the universe is now known to unprecedented accuracy: 13.73 billion years old, +/- 120 million. Spacetime is flat to within a 2% error margin. And ordinary matter and energy account for only 4.62% of the universe's total. Plait's comment on the age result: 'Some people might say it doesn't look a day over 6000 years. They're wrong.'"

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Scientist Charles Bauschlicher and his research team have found a new way to look for 'diamonds in the sky'. It may not be romantic, but diamonds shine especially brightly in the 3.4 to 3.5 micron and 6 to 10 micron infrared ranges, which should make NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope the perfect tool to see them with. Though less common and more monopolized on earth, diamonds are surprisingly common in outer space and the nanometer-sized bits comprise 3% of all the carbon found in meteorites. That means that if meteorite composition is representative of interstellar dust, that dust would contain about 10 quadrillion (1 * 10^16) nanodiamonds per gram."

Babu 'God' Hoover tips us to news out of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy that for the first time, a magnetic pole reversal has been observed in a star other than our own. Tau Bootis, while similar to the Sun, also has a planet more than six times larger than Jupiter orbiting at only a twentieth of the distance between Earth and the Sun. Scientists hope to use this discovery to learn more about the magnetic dynamics in the Sun, which can affect our telecommunications, among other things.

An anonymous reader writes "A New York Times article spells out what most of us probably already knew: real innovation takes lots of time and hard work to come to fruition. The article looks at the origins of new ideas, and attempts to dispel the myth that 'Eureka' moments create change. Comments author Scott Berkun, 'To focus on the magic moments is to miss the point. The goal isn't the magic moment: it's the end result of a useful innovation. Everything results from accretion. I didn't invent the English language. I have to use a language that someone else created in order to talk to you. So the process by which something is created is always incremental. It always involves using stuff that other people have made.'"

Japan is reportedly toying with the idea of educating and licensing "sommeliers" to help potential buyers wade through the vast sea of options available for a new cellphone purchase. "Japan's communication ministry is looking to the private sector to manage the potential nightmare exam and certification process, with children's online safety highlighted as an important part of the plan. Mobile sommelier sounds like a pretty sweet title, we can totally feel how an HTC TyTN II might be paired with an earthy unlimited plan followed by the soft nutty finish of a 200-minute a month daytime calling package."

BotKicker writes "A Japanese team has created the first full-size humanoid robot that won't fall over if you push it. A video shows it staggering and regaining balance after blows from a researcher. Being able to withstand shoves and kicks is essential if robots are to truly be our buddies, they reckon. 'The robot's balancing ability depends on its joints. For one thing they are never kept rigid, even when standing still, meaning they yield slightly when the robot is pushed. Force sensors within each joint also work out the position and velocity of the robot's centre mass as it moves around. Control software rapidly figures out what forces the robot's feet need to exert on the ground to bring it back into balance, and tells the joints how to act.'"

bbc writes "Project Gutenberg has volunteered to host all it legally can of the IMSLP's catalog. The Canadian provider of free public domain music recently caved to legal threats from an Austrian sheet music seller. On the Book People mailing list, Project Gutenberg's founder Michael Hart wrote: 'Project Gutenberg has volunteered to keep as much of the IMSL Project online as is legally possible, including a few of the items that were demanded to be withdrawn, as well as, when legal, to provide a backup of the entire site, for when the legalities have finally been worked out.'"

ChainedFei writes "Wired News notes that the Spectrum auction is moving forward, with the FCC placing a minimum bid for the C-block spectrum being offered at $4.6 billion. That, coincidentally, was the amount that Google fronted as a minimum bid to endorse certain open standards for the spectrum being sold. This is essentially a move to shut out smaller possible competitors while also maximizing the money the auction will generate for the grade-A areas of the spectrum. In addition, any single bidder wishing to purchase the entirety of the spectrum must front a minimum of $10 billion. 'According to the FCC, nearly all of that C block aggregate reserve price will go toward a package of U.S. national licenses. This portion of the spectrum also happens to be the one with two open access conditions attached to its sale mandating that all devices be allowed to access the band and that all applications can be able to run across the network. If the reserve price isn't met, the auction will be rerun without these two conditions in place, according to the FCC.'"

StatisticallyDeadGuy writes "A University of Georgia scientist has developed a statistical system that can, she claims, predict the outcome of wars with an accuracy of 80 percent. Her approach, applied retrospectively, says the US chance of victory in the first Gulf War was 93%, while the poor Soviets only had a 7% chance in Afghanistan (if only they'd known; failure maybe triggered the collapse of the USSR). As for the current Iraq conflict: the US started off with a 70% chance of a successful regime change, which was duly achieved — but extending the mission past this to support a weak government has dropped the probability of ultimate success to 26%. Full elaboration of the forecasting methodology is laid out in a new paper (subscription required — link goes to the abstract). Some details can be gleaned from her 2006 draft (PDF)."

food4thought writes "The Economic Times reports that Orkut has signed a pact with Indian Cyber Crime Cell. They have now pledged to block any 'defamatory or inflammatory content', or hand over IP address information to police if asked.' Deputy Commissioner of Police (enforcement) Sanjay Mohite said the pact means they do not have to go through the lengthy process of asking the Central government to communicate with Orkut. The practice so far has been to first send a request to the Centre's computer emergency response team in New Delhi. This team processes the request through its channels and even if a forum is finally blocked, the "culprits" still remain untraceable as no IP addresses can be obtained ... "Now we can do away with the process and not just directly ban content but also obtain details of IP addresses and service providers quickly," Mohite said.' How long before we see these 'informal arrangements' elsewhere?"