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Submission + - Hacker Uncovers Chinese Olympic Fraud

Submitted by SkeptOlympics
SkeptOlympics writes: A new chapter in the ongoing controversy surrounding China's women's gymnastics team opened today, as search engine hacker stryde.hax found surviving copies of official registration documents issued by China's General Administration of Sport of China. The incriminating documents, expunged by censors from the official site and from Google's document cache, still appear in the document translation cache of Chinese search giant Baidu, here and here, showing the age of one of China's gold medal winning gymnasts to be 14 instead of 16, the minimum age for competition presented on her government issued passport. Now that official government documentation is available, how long will the IOC be able to keep a lid on this scandal?
Medicine

Submission + - Nanomaterials more dangerous than we think

Submitted by
bshell
bshell writes: "A Canadian panel of leading scientists warns that nanomaterials appearing in a rapidly growing number of products might potentially be able to enter cells and interfere with biological processes. According to a story in the Globe and Mail newspaper, the Council of Canadian Academies concluded that "there are inadequate data to inform quantitative risk assessments on current and emerging nanomaterials."

"Their small size, the report says, may allow them "to usurp traditional biological protective mechanisms" and, as a result, possibly have "enhanced toxicological effects." Chair of the panel is Pekka Sinervo, dean of the University of Toronto's faculty of arts and science. The council is an independent academic advisory group funded by the federal government, but operating at arms-length from Ottawa. The 16-member panel that wrote the new report included some of Canada's leading scientists and top international experts on nanomaterials.

When experts like this agree on something this big it's probably worth paying attention."
Announcements

Submission + - Hans Reiser leads police to Nina's body 1

Submitted by jlmcgraw
jlmcgraw writes: CBS5.com is reporting that Hans Reiser is leading police to the location in the Oakland Hills where he buried Nina's body
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Tin whiskers - fact or fiction?

Submitted by
bLanark
bLanark writes: "Some time ago, most electronics were soldered with old-fashioned lead solder, which has been tried and tested for decades. In 2006, the EU banned lead in solder, and so most manufacturers switched to a lead-free solder. Most made the switch in advance, I guess due to shelf-life of products and ironing out problems working with the new material.

Lead is added to solder as it melts at low temperature, but also, it prevents the solder from growing "whiskers" — crystaline limbs of metal.

The affect of whiskers on soldered equipment would include random short-circuits and strange RF-effects. Whiskers can grow fairly quickly and become quite long

Robert Cringley wrote up this some time ago, and, it seems that the world has *not* been taking notice. I guess cars (probably around 30 processors in a modern car) and almost every appliance would be liable to fail sooner than expected due to tin whiskers. Note that accelerated life-expectancy tests can't simulate the passing of time for whiskers to grow.

I've googled and there is plenty of research into the effects of tin whiskers. I should point out that the wikipedia page linked to above states that tin whisker problems "are negligible in modern alloys", but can we trust Wikipedia?

So, my question is: was the tin whisker problem overhyped, was it an initial problem that has been solved in the few years since lead-free solder came into use, or is it affecting anyone already?"
Privacy

Submission + - TSA bans ID-less flight (cnet.com)

Submitted by
mytrip
mytrip writes: "In a major change of policy, the Transportation Security Administration has announced that passengers refusing to show ID will no longer be able to fly. The policy change, announced on Thursday afternoon, will go into force on June 21, and will only affect passengers who refuse to produce ID. Passengers who claim to have lost or forgotten their proof of identity will still be able to fly.

As long as TSA has existed, passengers have been able to fly without showing ID to government agents. Doing so would result in a secondary search (a pat down and hand search of your carry-on bag), but passengers were still permitted to board their flights. In some cases, taking advantage of this right to refuse ID came with fringe benefits — being bumped to the front of the checkpoint queue."
Biotech

Submission + - Plastic-Decomposing Bacteria Discovered By Teen (wired.com)

Submitted by
ganelo
ganelo writes: "Original article by the Record, summary by Wired.

Plastic takes thousands of years to decompose — but 16-year-old science fair contestant Daniel Burd made it happen in just three months. The Record reports that Burd mixed landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew. The plastic indeed decomposed more quickly than it would in nature; after experimenting with different temperatures and configurations, Burd isolated the microbial munchers. One came from the bacterial family Pseudomonas, and the other from the family Sphingomonas.
"
Medicine

Submission + - 'Re-Pet' Service is a Reality (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous
Anonymous writes: Some of you may have seen the 6th day, the movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger a few years back. If you recall there was a 're-pet' cloning service to get your dog back if you ever lost them. Enter 'Best Friends Again'... "A US biotech company on Wednesday announced it will auction off the right for five dog owners to have their furry best friend cloned, with bidding starting at 100,000 dollars. 'BioArts International ... will sell five dog cloning service slots to the general public via a worldwide online auction,' the California-based biotech start-up said in a statement." — Article can be seen here
Announcements

Submission + - Rocket-powered Race Plane League

Submitted by capnkr
capnkr writes: Wired has the story: "The Rocket Racing League on Monday detailed plans to move from a sci-fi fantasy to a full-fledged commercial enterprise — including "vertical drag races" using rockets.

At a press conference at the Yale Club in New York, Rocket Racing League CEO Granger Whitelaw said rocket-powered planes will fly their first exhibition race in August at the EAA AirVenture air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with at least three more races to follow in 2008.
Announcements

Submission + - Dell Abandons It's Customization Roots (latimes.com)

Submitted by LiveFreeOrDieInTheGo
LiveFreeOrDieInTheGo writes: Dell intends to scale back it's build-to-order model to reduce costs; meanwhile, Dell intends to increase prepackaged systems. The goal: $3B USD savings by 2011. The downside: customers expect Dell to build-to-order. The deeper downside: Dell will outsource more production (assembly). The upside: this could open the door to agile competitors.
The Courts

Submission + - Large Hadron Collider sparks 'Doomsday' lawsuit 6

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: In what can only be considered a bizarre court case, a former nuclear safety officer and others are suing the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to stop the use of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) until its safety is reassessed. The plaintiffs cite three possible 'doomsday' scenarios which might occur if the LHC becomes operational: the creation of microscopic black holes which would grow and swallow matter, the creation of strangelets which, if they touch other matter, would convert that matter into strangelets or the creation of magnetic monopoles which could start a chain reaction and convert atoms to other forms of matter.

CERN will hold a public open house meeting on April 6 with word having been spread to some researchers to be prepared to answer questions on microscopic black holes and strangelets if asked.
Novell

Submission + - De Icaza regrets Novell/Microsoft pact (thestandard.com)

Submitted by
Ian Lamont
Ian Lamont writes: "Novell Vice President and GNOME architect Miguel de Icaza sounded off at a MIX 08 panel on a number of topics. First, he claimed that he was 'not happy' with Novell's cross-patent licensing agreement with Microsoft, saying that if he had his way, the company would have stayed with the open-source community. He also said that neither Windows nor Linux are relevant in the long term, thanks to Web 2.0 business models:

'They might be fantastic products ... but Google has shown itself to be a cash cow. There is a feature beyond selling corporate [software] and patents ... it's going to be owning end users."
He also tangled with Mike Schroepfer, a Mozilla engineering executive, about extending patent protection for Moonlight to third parties. However, de Icaza did say that Novell has done the best it could to balance open-source interests with patent indemnification."
Editorial

Submission + - "Death star" aimed at Earth (cosmosmagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A spectacular, rotating binary star system is a ticking time bomb, ready to throw out a searing beam of high-energy gamma rays thta could lead to a major extinction event — and Earth may be right in the line of fire, Australian science magazine Cosmos Magazine is reporting.
Censorship

Submission + - Wikileaks Gets Domain Back, Injunction Dissolved

Submitted by
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes: "The judge in the Wikileaks case has dissolved the injunction against Wikileaks, which means that it can get its .org domain back. He defended his prior ruling because it was based on the pittance of information the bank and registrar had provided him, saying 'This is a case in which we had a (dispute) with named parties, and the parties were duly served. One of which properly responded and came to this court with a proposed settlement in this lawsuit... Nobody filed any timely responses to the court's order.'"
Space

Submission + - Astronomers Say Dying Sun Will Engulf Earth

Submitted by iamlucky13
iamlucky13 writes: A minor academic debate among astronomers is the final fate of the earth. As the sun ages and enters the red giant stage of its life, it will heat up, making the earth inhospitable. It will also expand, driven by helium fusion so that its outer layers reach past the earth's current orbit. Previously it had been believed that the sun would lose enough mass to allow earth to escape to a more distant orbit, lifeless but intact. However, new calculations, which take into account tidal forces and drag from mass shed by the sun, suggest that the earth will have sufficiently slowed in that time to be dragged down to its utter destruction in 7.6 billion years. It looks like the earth destruction manual can update Fallback Method 3 with the good news.

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