jwz83 - Slashdot User

Self-Assembling Photovoltaic Tech From MIT 128

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday September 07, 2010 @05:17AM from the bright-ideas dept.

telomerewhythere writes "Michael Strano and his team at MIT have made a self-assembling and indefinitely repairable photovoltaic cell based on the principle found in chloroplasts inside plant cells. 'The system Strano's team produced is made up of seven different compounds, including the carbon nanotubes, the phospholipids, and the proteins that make up the reaction centers, which under the right conditions spontaneously assemble themselves into a light-harvesting structure that produces an electric current. Strano says he believes this sets a record for the complexity of a self-assembling system. When a surfactant is added to the mix, the seven components all come apart and form a soupy solution. Then, when the researchers removed the surfactant, the compounds spontaneously assembled once again into a perfectly formed, rejuvenated photocell.'"

UK's Royal Mail Launches First Intelligent Stamps 69

Posted by Soulskill on Monday September 06, 2010 @04:01PM from the stamplons-were-created-by-man dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Royal Mail on Friday issued what it called the world's first 'intelligent stamps,' designed to interact with smartphones using image-recognition technology. The Royal Mail's latest special-issue stamps, devoted to historic British railways, are designed to launch specially developed online content when a user snaps them using an image-recognition application available on iPhone or Android handsets. 'This is the first time a national postal service has used this kind of technology on their stamps and we're very excited to be bringing intelligent stamps to the nation's post,' a Royal Mail spokesman said in a statement. 'Intelligent stamps mark the next step in the evolution of our stamps, bringing them firmly into the 21st century.'"

DoD Takes Criticism From Security Experts On Cyberwar Incident 116

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday September 04, 2010 @06:59PM from the no-mr-bond-i-expect-you-to-torrent dept.

wiredmikey writes "Undersecretary of Defense William J. Lynn is being challenged by IT security experts who find it hard to believe that the incident which led to the Pentagon's recognizing cyberspace as a new 'domain of warfare' could have really happened as described. In his essay, 'Defending a New Domain,' Lynn recounts a widely-reported 2008 hack that was initiated when, according to Lynn, an infected flash drive was inserted into a military laptop by 'a foreign intelligence agency.' Critics such as IT security firm Sophos' Chief Security Adviser Chester Wisniewski argue that this James Bond-like scenario doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The primary issue is that the malware involved, known as agent.btz, is neither sophisticated nor particularly dangerous. A variant of the SillyFDC worm, agent.btz can be easily defeated by disabling the Windows 'autorun' feature (which automatically starts a program on a drive upon insertion) or by simply banning thumb drives. In 2007, Silly FDC was rated as Risk Level 1: Very Low, by security firm Symantec."

Australia Adopts EU's Geographical Indicator System For Wine 302

Posted by timothy on Saturday September 04, 2010 @05:30AM from the all-official-like dept.

onreserve writes with an excerpt from a site dedicated to laws affecting wine: "[L]ast week, Australia signed an agreement with the European Union to comply with the geographical indicator (GI) system of the EU. The new agreement replaces an agreement signed in 1994 between the two wine powers and protects eleven of the EU drink labels and 112 of the Australian GI's. Specifically, this means that many of the wine products produced in Australia that were previously labeled according to European names, such as sherry and tokay, will no longer be labeled under these names. Wine producers in Australia will have three years to 'phase out' the use of such names on labels. Australian labels that will be discontinued include amontillado, Auslese, burgundy, chablis, champagne, claret, marsala, moselle, port, and sherry."

Major Battle Brewing Between French Gov't and ISPs 111

Posted by Soulskill on Friday September 03, 2010 @10:36AM from the race-to-surrender dept.

Dangerous_Minds writes "Drew Wilson has been following HADOPI (France's three strikes law) a lot lately, and the latest developments are that the French ISPs and the French government are edging closer to a full-on war over compensation. The French government apparently requested that ISPs send an invoice of the bills after a certain period of time, but the French ISPs don't feel this is good enough — probably because of worries that the compensation the government will ultimately provide won't be enough. The ISPs are demanding adequate compensation, and if the government doesn't give it to them, they simply will not hand over evidence required to enforce HADOPI law. While HADOPI demands that ISPs cooperate, speculation suggests that if the government takes ISPs to court, the ISPs will simply rely on constitutional jurisprudence to shield them from liability (translation)."

HP Backs Memristor Mass Production 116

Posted by Soulskill on Friday September 03, 2010 @09:05AM from the can't-wait-for-the-next-round-of-patent-battles dept.

neo12 writes with news that Hewlett-Packard is teaming with Hynix Semiconductor, the world's second-largest producer of memory chips, to mass produce memristors for the first time. Quoting the BBC: "HP says the first memristors should be widely available in about three years. The devices started as a theoretical prediction in 1971 but HP's demonstration and publication of a real working device has put them on a possible roadmap to replace memory chips or even hard drives. ... Steve Furber, professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, explained that the potential benefits lie in the fact that memristors are 'much simpler in principle than transistors. Because they are formed as a film between two wires, they don't have to be implanted into the silicon surface — as do transistors, which form the storage locations in Flash — so they could be built in layers in 3D,' he told BBC News. 'Of course, the devil is in the detail, and I don't think the manufacturing challenges have been fully exposed yet.'"

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