Four Spanish teenagers sent a camera-operated weather balloon into the stratosphere. The boys built the electronic sensor components from scratch. Gerard Marull Paretas, Sergi Saballs Vila, Marta Gasull Morcillo and Jaume Puigmiquel Casamort attached a £56 camera to a heavy duty £43 latex balloon, and sent their science project 20-miles above the Earth. Team leader Gerard Marull, 18, said, "We were overwhelmed at our results, especially the photographs, to send our handmade craft to the edge of space is incredible."

An anonymous reader writes "A few months back, Warner Music Group started pitching universities on the idea of a new program where they would pay a chunk of money to an organization named Choruss to provide 'covenants not to sue' those students for file sharing, leading many in the press to claim that the record labels are looking to license ISPs to let users file share. Even the EFF has called it a 'promising new approach.' However, the details are quite troubling and suggest that the plan is really a bait-and-switch idea." (More below.)

stoolpigeon writes "QT 4.5 has arrived and is now available for download. This new release is quite significant due to licensing changes that now make it simpler to use QT in a wider range of products without cost as well as a number of new features. The latest version of Webkit is now integrated into the product. Qt 4.5 sees the introduction of QtBenchLib, a new component to make measuring the performance of the toolkit and checking for regressions easier. Mac developers who use Qt will note a major reworking of 4.5 on the Mac, now providing 64-bit support. QT Creator is a new IDE that looks to have combined a number of previously separate tools. And there is much more."

After three years of research, including examining 503 pieces of fluff from his own belly button, Georg Steinhauser has discovered a type of body hair that traps stray pieces of lint and draws them into the navel. Dr Steinhauser's observations showed that "small pieces of fluff first form in the hair and then end up in the navel at the end of the day." Chemical analysis revealed the pieces of fluff were not just made up of cotton from clothing. Wrapped up in the lint were also flecks of dead skin, fat, sweat and dust. Unfortunately, further study has failed to yield a hair or fiber that would give Dr. Steinhauser the last three years of his life back.

snitch writes "Last week Mozilla released Bespin, their web-based framework for code editing, and only a few days later Boris Bokowski and Simon Kaegi implemented an Eclipse-based Bespin server using headless Eclipse plug-ins. With the presentation of the web-based Eclipse workbench at EclipseCon and the release of products like Heroku, a web-based IDE and hosting environment for RoR apps, it seems that web-based IDEs might soon become mainstream."

CommonCents noted an Apple announcement a few hours before the anticipated keynote. He says "Apples' latest must have gadget does away with the keyboard. With the new MacBook Wheel, Apple has replaced the traditional keyboard with a giant wheel."

Barence writes "The deplorable speed of British broadband connections has been revealed in the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, which show that 42.3% of broadband connections are slower than 2Mb/sec. More worryingly, the ONS statistics are based on the connection's headline speed, not actual throughput, which means that many more British broadband connections are effectively below the 2Mb/sec barrier. Better still, a separate report issued yesterday by Ofcom revealed that the majority of broadband users had no idea about the speed of their connection anyway."

ACTRAiSER writes "A recent Post on Bugtraq claims the hack of the Xbox 360 Security Protection Hypervisor. It includes sample code as well." From Bugtraq "We have discovered a vulnerability in the Xbox 360 hypervisor that allows privilege escalation into hypervisor mode. Together with a method to inject data into non-privileged memory areas, this vulnerability allows an attacker with physical access to an Xbox 360 to run arbitrary code such as alternative operating systems with full privileges and full hardware access."

mattnyc99 writes "Popular Mechanics has a new, in-depth preview of NASA's Orion spacecraft, tracking the complex challenges facing the engineers of the CEV (which NASA chief Michael Griffin called 'Apollo on steroids') as America shifts its focus away from the Space Shuttle and back toward returning to the moon by 2020. After yesterday's long op-ed in the New York Times concerning NASA's about-face, Popular Mechanic's interview with Buzz Aldrin and podcast with Transterrestrial.com's Rand Simberg raise perhaps the most pressing questions here: Is it worth going back to the lunar surface? And will we actually stay there?"