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Biotech

Team Builds Viruses To Combat Harmful "Biofilms" 108

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the who-eats-the-eaters dept.
Scientists from MIT and Boston University are creating viruses that will wipe out "biofilms" that contain harmful bacteria on surfaces of the human body and industrial or medical devices. "Bacterial biofilms can form almost anywhere, even on your teeth if you don't brush for a day or two. When they accumulate in hard to reach places such as the insides of food processing machines or medical catheters, however, they become persistent sources of infection. These bacteria excrete a variety of proteins, polysaccharides, and nucleic acids that together with other accumulating materials form an extracellular matrix, or in Lu's words, a "slimy layer," that encases the bacteria. Traditional remedies such as antibiotics are not as effective on these bacterial biofilms as they are on free-floating bacteria. In some cases, antibiotics even encourage bacterial biofilms to form."
Google

Google Maps Shows Chinese Nuclear Sub Prototype 339

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the pants-meet-ankles dept.
mytrip writes "An image of what could be one of China's new nuclear ballistic missile submarines is available on the Google Maps and Google Earth satellite-image site, a defense blogger claimed Tuesday. The satellite picture was discovered by Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists, and announced Tuesday on his blog. Kristensen believes the picture, taken by the Quickbird satellite late last year, reveals China's new Jin-class, or Type 094, nuclear ballistic missile sub. The new sub class is approximately 35 feet longer than its predecessor, the Xia-class, also known as Type 092, according to two images Kristensen compares on the blog. The Jin-class sub has an extended midsection that houses 12 missile tubes and part of the reactor compartment, Kristensen explains."
Encryption

Submission + - DRM Guru: New BluRay Won't Be Cracked For 10 Years (avsforum.com)

Submitted by
Mike
Mike writes: "Supposedly the latest issue of HMM contains a quote from Richard Doherty, a Media analyst with Envisioneering Group which claims that "BD+, unlike AACS, which suffered a partial hack last year, won't likely be breached for 10 years." Doherty also said, "and if so, the damage would affect one film and one player." Will the BD+ format really be impervious to hackers for a decade? I've got ten bucks that says it won't. Any takers?"
Databases

Submission + - PostgreSQL publishes first real benchmark (ittoolbox.com) 1

Submitted by
greg1104
greg1104 writes: "The current version of PostgreSQL now has its first real benchmark, a SPECjAppServer2004 submission from Sun Microsystems. The results required substantial tuning of many performance-related PostgreSQL parameters, some of which are set to extremely low values in the default configuration — a known issue that contributes to why many untuned PostgreSQL installations appear sluggish compared to its rivals. The speed result is close but slightly faster than an earlier Sun submission using MySQL 5 (with enough hardware differences to make a direct comparison of those results unfair), and comes close to keeping up with Oracle on similarly priced hardware — but with a large software savings. Having a published result on the level playing field of an industry-standard benchmark like SPECjAppServer2004, with documentation on all the tuning required to reach that performance level, should make PostgreSQL an easier sell to corporate customers who are wary of adopting open-source applications for their critical databases."
Google

Google to Acquire Postini 147

Posted by CmdrTaco from the must-be-a-monday dept.
Dynamoo writes "Google has announced that it is to acquire Postini, company best known for its corporate spam filtering and security service, but also active in Instant Messaging and compliance area. The deal is to purchase Postini for $625m in cash. The acquisition is slated to enhance Google's application portfolio, and Google will also acquire several very large Blue Chip customers that have previously eluded it."
Power

Submission + - PC Power Management, ACPI Explained In Detail

Submitted by DK
DK writes: Computer performance have increased at an amazing rate in recent years, and unfortunately so does power consumption. An ultimate gaming system equipped with a quad-core processor, two NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra, 4 sticks of DDR2 memory and a few hard drives can easily consume 500W without doing anything! To reduce power wastage, a few industry standards have been developed to make our computers work more efficiently like APM and ACPI. ACPI is the successor of APM and is explained in detail in this article.
Google

Submission + - China's new ballistic-missile sub on Google Earth

Submitted by MsManhattan
MsManhattan writes: A rare public view of China's new ballistic-missile submarine is available on Google Earth, according to Hans Kristensen, a researcher at the Federation of American Scientists. The Chinese military typically keeps a low profile, by the image was captured by the commercial Quickbird satellite late last year. While some features of the sub are discernible from the photograph, such as the overall length, 'the picture was not clear enough to resolve a debate over whether the Jin-class submarine has tubes for 12 or 16 nuclear-tipped missiles,' Kristensen says.
Space

NASA Purchases $19M Russian Space Toilet 245

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'd-poop-in-that dept.
Gary writes "NASA has paid $19 million for a Russian-built international space station toilet system. The toilet system, similar to the one already in use in the station's Zvezda Service Module, is scheduled to arrive at the space station in 2008 and will offer more privacy for a crew expected to double from three to six by 2009. The space station toilet physically resembles those used on Earth, except it has leg restraints and thigh bars to keep astronauts and cosmonauts from floating away. NASA says purchasing the multi million dollar toilet is a bargain compared to developing one from scratch."
Software

Submission + - Watching cities in 4D 1

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "Computer scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Microsoft Research have developed 4D Cities, a software that shows the evolution of a city over time. New Scientist writes that you can see a city change in four dimensions. So far, the team has only modeled Downtown Atlanta by scanning historical photos. The software automatically sorts these snapshots into date order and then builds an animated 3D model that shows changes. This application will be useful for architects, historians or town planners. Now the researchers want to develop models for other cities. Read more for additional references and a 4D map of Downtown Atlanta."
United States

Submission + - IRS Tracking Party Affiliation (thenewstribune.com) 1

Submitted by
cybermage
cybermage writes: "According to the News Tribune, the IRS is tracking the party affiliation of taxpayers in the over twenty states that require identification of party affiliation on voter registration forms. The IRS is using the voter registration data to try to locate tax cheats. Some in Congress are looking to take steps to have the IRS purge such information and put a halt to IRS plans to outsource collections until the issue is resolved."
Privacy

Submission + - Germany's Home Seretary plans new anti terror laws

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: According to Germany minister of Interior Wolfgang Schaeuble terror suspects should not be able to use the phone. Heise reports about the new plans of the controversial politician:

In an interview with German newsweekly Der Spiegel, Germany's Home Secretary says that "conspiracy" needs to be made a crime and "dangerous parties" need to be "incarcerated" as "combatants." [...] Schäuble also says that the "intentional killing of suspects" is not a taboo strictly ruled out by the German Basic Law, but rather a "legal problem" that the Home Secretary says "still has to be looked into." The example he mentioned was the possible capture of Osama bin Laden. Schäuble is thus calling for the German government to be given more legal "leeway."[...] Germany's Home Secretary believes that these measures are necessary because Germany is "in the crossfire of Islamic terrorism"; he also remembers the time before September 11, 2001. For that reason, Schäuble says the "monitoring of communication" is "vital.


Schaeuble plans also to enact a law that would allow state authorities to search computers per internet connection, but many experts suspect that the Federal Police is not capable to enforce this "online searches".
Data Storage

Submission + - Recovering A Hosed HD... For Dummies 1

Submitted by AC
AC writes: If you have ever lost tens of gigabytes of data due to sudden hard drive failure (which, of course, typically happens the day before your backup solution was scheduled to be deployed), you are not alone in this. This article documents for the common good how to recover nearly everything off a badly broken drive thanks to a variety of tools ranging from a freezer to a small Python script.
Software

Linux 2.6.22 Kernel Released 273

Posted by kdawson from the when-you-must-have-the-latest dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the official release of the 2.6.22 kernel: 'It's out there now (or at least in the process of mirroring out — if you don't see everything, give it a bit of time).' The previous stable kernel, 2.6.21, was released a little over two months ago. New features in the 2.6.22 kernel include a SLUB allocator which replaces the slab allocator, a new wireless stack, a new Firewire stack, and support for the Blackfin architecture. Source-level changes can be tracked via the gitweb interface to Linus' kernel tree."
Sony

Sony Says UMD Is Here To Stay 160

Posted by Zonk from the well-that's-a-relief dept.
PlayStation Portable senior marketing manager John Koller spoke with the Pocket Gamer site about the much-maligned UMD format. The disc used in the PSP for both games and movies, few stores carry UMD movies any more. Just the same, says Koller, Sony supports it 100%. From the interview: "'UMD possesses many strengths, from size to form factor to portability,' he says. The same can easily be said of the UMD's cartridge counterpart on Nintendo DS. However, ease of UMD manufacturing is seen as a winning benefit. 'Duplication of UMDs is much easier, cheaper than cartridges,' Koller adds. 'We've really optimized time and cost by going with a disc-based format.' On the topic of UMD weaknesses, Koller is candid: 'There's no question the biggest weakness is related to porting games from other platforms. Publishers are concerned about the size of UMD because they can't cram a DVD game on to it.'"

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