6499591
submission
TechReviewAl writes:
A U.S. company and its Chinese partner are piloting a bus powered by ultracapacitors in Washington D.C. Ultracapacitors lack the capacity of regular batteries but are considerably cheaper and can be recharge completely in under a minute. Sinautec Automobile Technologies, based in Arlington, VA, and its Chinese partner, Shanghai Aowei Technology Development Company, have spent the past three years demonstrating the approach with 17 municipal buses on the outskirts of Shanghai.
6430145
submission
TechReviewAl writes:
Technology Review reports that the Chinese government has for the first time targeted the Tor anonymity network. In the run up to in China's "national day" celebrations, the government started targeting the sites used to distribute Tor addresses and the number of users inside China dropped from tens of thousands to near zero. The move is part of a broader trend that involves government's launching sensorship crackdowns around key dates. The good news is that many Tor users quickly found a way around the attack, distributing "bridge" addresses via IM and twitter.
6416655
submission
TechReviewAl writes:
Researchers in Germany have developed a surgical tool that uses chemical analysis to identify cancerous tissue as a surgeon cuts. The instrument uses a modified mass spectrometer--a device that uses ionized molecules to perform very accurate chemical analysis--to pinpoint tumors so that surgeons can make sure they remove everything. Mass spectrometry has been used to study biopsied biological samples before, but never used in-situ. The key was to harness ionized gas already produced by the electro-scalpel.
6247571
submission
TechReviewAl writes:
A new start-up called Ginkgo BioWorks hopes to make synthetic-biology simpler than ever by assembling biological parts--such as strings of specific genes--for industry and academic scientists. While companies already exist to synthesize pieces of DNA, Ginkgo assembles synthesized pieces of DNA to create functional genetic pathways. (Assembling specific genes into long pieces of DNA is much cheaper than synthesizing that long piece from scratch.) Company cofounder Tom Knight (also a research scientist at MIT) says: "I'm interested in transitioning biology from being sort of a craft, where every time you do something it's done slightly differently, often in ad hoc ways, to an engineering discipline with standardized methods of arranging information and standardized sets of parts that you can assemble to do things," says Knight.
6244083
submission
TechReviewAl writes:
Former astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz believes that the private sector can revitalize NASA, and his company is developing a plasma rocket to back up that claim. Chang Diaz argues that private industry can be used to develop much of the basic technology needed for space exploration, allowing NASA to focus on more sophisticated and critical components. His company, Ad Astra's is developed a variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket (VASIMR) that will be used to reposition the International Space Station. Last week, the rocket passed an important milestone in testing--reaching 200-kilowatts (enough to move the ISS). A video of the rocket can be seen here.
6243923
submission
TechReviewAl writes:
Researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara hijacked the Mebroot botnet for about a month and used it to study drive-by downloading. The researchers managed to intercept Mebroot communications by reverse-engineering the algorithm used to select domains to connect to. Mebroot infects legitimate websites and uses them to redirect users to malicious sites that attempt to install malware on a victim's machine. The team, who previously infiltrated the Torpig botnet, found that at least 13.3 percent of systems that were redirected by Mebroot were already infected and 70 percent were vulnerable to about 40 common attacks.
6197661
submission
chrb writes:
Dell's new Latitude Z laptop includes an unusual feature — an ARM processor, alledgedly codenamed BlackTop which runs a modified version of Suse Linux, and is capable of near-instant bootup. Dell's research has apparently found that some early users spend 70% of their time in the Linux environment.
6194827
submission
Barence writes:
Google has removed links to notorious file-sharing site The Pirate Bay in its search results. The move is a reaction to a takedown notice issued under the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), although it's unclear who filed the complaint. The ban isn't particularly effective: The top result is now The Pirate Bay's Wikipedia entry, which provides a prominent link to the site's homepage. It's also possible to search The Pirate Bay itself using Google, by typing "site:http://thepiratebay.org" into the search bar.
