Science News reports on recent research indicating that any kind of multitasking while driving is dangerous. Not just the obvious distraction of juggling a cell phone, but even talking to a passenger or listening to a book on tape. The researchers used a driving simulator inside an MRI machine to measure brain activations. "Attending to what someone says galvanizes language-related brain areas while simultaneously reducing activity in spatial regions that coordinate driving behavior. This finding suggests that people who combine relatively automatic tasks, such as speech comprehension and car driving, exceed a biological limit on the amount of systematic brain activity they can accommodate at one time, the researchers propose. As a result, the less-ingrained skill — in this case, driving, which is learned long after a person grasps a native language — takes a neural hit."

schliz writes to mention that in a recent interview with ITNews researcher John Shalf explained the purpose and some of the technical details of the newly-announced "iPod supercomputer." "Microprocessors from portable electronics like iPods could yield low-cost, low-power supercomputers for specialized scientific applications, according to computer scientist John Shalf. Along with a research team from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Shalf is designing a supercomputer based on low-power embedded microprocessors, which has the sole purpose of improving global climate change predictions."

Ezhenito noted some research pointing out the (maybe) surprising bit of research that 6 botnets are responsible for 85 percent of the world's spam. That seems a bit high to me, but the only aspect of spam I am an expert in is *getting* it.

An Associated Press article about the impact of the internet on journalism has a few interesting findings. A few years ago, it was expected that the internet would democratize news coverage. While print media is being rapidly reborn online, web-based news appears to be constraining the number of conversations instead of expanding them. "The news agenda actually seems to be narrowing, with many Web sites primarily packaging news that is produced elsewhere, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's annual State of the News Media report. Two stories - the war in Iraq and the 2008 presidential election campaign - represented more than a quarter of the stories in newspapers, on television and online last year, the project found. Take away Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, and news from all of the other countries in the world combined filled up less than 6 percent of the American news hole, the project said."

The as-yet unreleased second iteration of iPhone hardware may already be compromised, reports Engadget and News.com. Members of the 'iPhone Dev Team' have (supposedly) made use of the recently released SDK to gin up a Beta 2.0 software hack. "Unlike previous hacks, this one isn't specific to the latest firmware version, it exploits the way that Apple designed the iPhone's main bootloader. According to the iPhone Dev Team, the iPhone verifies whether or not firmware code has been signed with an RSA certificate before allowing it to be written to memory. The team has apparently figured out a way to disable that check and allow unsigned code to be written to memory."

christo writes "In what appears to be a first, the US House of Representatives now has a Congressman with coding skills. Democratic Representative Bill Foster won a special election this past Saturday in the 14th Congressional District of Illinois. Foster is a physicist who worked at Fermilab for 22 years designing data analysis software for the lab's high energy particle collision detector. In an interview with CNET today, Foster's campaign manager confirmed that the Congressman can write assembly, Fortran and Visual Basic. Will having a tech-savvy congressman change the game at all? Can we expect more rational tech-policy? Already on his first day, Foster provided a tie-breaking vote to pass a major ethics reform bill."

An anonymous reader writes "CNet has published an incredibly detailed look at the most critical examples of vaporware ever seen in the tech sector. We're familiar with Wired's yearly round-ups, but this decades-long retrospective look at the most promising of all technologies that never saw the light of day, holds some fascinating technology I've never even heard of, including the wonderfully-named three-dimensional atomic holographic optical data storage nanotechnology. 'Continual delays, setbacks and excuses are the calling cards of a product that becomes vapourware. Windows Vista ran the risk of joining the club, and the terrific multiplayer first-person shooter Team Fortress 2 was in production for almost a decade before it was released in 2007. Devoted TF fans feared it would become a distinguished entrant in the who's who of vapourware. You might say Google Mail is in the running, having been in beta since 2004.'"