Perens weighs in

Open source luminary Bruce Perens has come out fighting in defence of the latest draft of GPLv3.

Astronomers may have cracked a 45-year mystery surrounding two ghostly spiral arms in the galaxy M106 by using data from a quartet of space observatories.

It's no secret that MySpace has become a favorite target of politicians looking to demonize the latest threat to children. Since there have been a few instances of MySpace-borne sexual assault, it's not hard to see why politicians latched on to the site. But, apart from a few cherry-picked examples, it's not clear that MySpace actually poses any meaningful danger to children. The EFF points to a pair of recent studies that dispute the notion that MySpace represents dangerous territory for children. According to one of them, unwanted online solicitations are actually down since 1999, which would contradict the idea that the rise of sites like MySpace, has been a boon for those that would prey on children. The other study, which looked directly at MySpace found that the vast majority of users have never been the subject of unwelcome advances, and that those who have received them are quite capable of simply ignoring them. Of course, political witch hunts are rarely the result of anything rational, so it's unlikely that these pesky facts will do much to deter politicians.

Out with the old, in with the new

Plenty of people who link computers and other devices to the internet over a wireless network are finding they can no longer connect quite as easily as they once could. That's certainly my experience and, if the many, many emails I received after grumbling about it in public are anything to go by, it's a problem many Register Hardware readers face too.

By da Vinci's mate, you know...

Want to learn how to wash your hands in molten lead? Fancy making an egg dance, or writing appear on rose petals? For such tricky trickery, who would you turn to but the man who taught Leonardo da Vinci his numbers?

A newly developed group of plastics that release nitric oxide (NO) -- a molecule that influences body functions ranging from sexual function to communication among nerves -- may have broad uses in medicine.

One of the biggest scientific surprises from last year's "Stardust" space mission may have resulted from contamination from the spacecraft's rocket boosters, scientists in Spain are cautioning. Stardust was the first U.S. mission to capture samples of a comet (Comet Wild 2) and return that material, believed to hold clues to the origin of the solar system, to Earth for scientific analysis.