DynaSoar writes "MSNBC is carrying an AP article reviewing a book, due out January 7, that claims to show definitive evidence that Bell stole the essential idea for telephony from Elisha Gray. Author Seth Shulman shows that Bell's notebooks contain false starts, and then after a 12-day gap during which he visited the US Patent Office, suddenly show an entirely different design, very similar to Gray's design for multiplexing Morse code signals. Shulman claims that Bell copied the design from Gray's patent application and was improperly given credit for earlier submission, with the help of a corrupt patent examiner and aggressive lawyers. Shulman also claims that fear of being found out is the reason Bell distanced himself from the company that carried his name. And if Gray Telephone doesn't seem to roll off the tongue, Shulman also noted that both of them were two decades behind the German inventor Johann Philipp Reis, who produced the first working telephony system."

wile_e_wonka writes to tell us Researchers at Harvard and the Montreal-based McGill University are working on a drug that would allow psychiatrists to dampen painful memories in their patients when combined with therapy. "They treated 19 accident or rape victims for ten days, during which the patients were asked to describe their memories of the traumatic event that had happened 10 years earlier. Some patients were given the drug, which is also used to treat amnesia, while others were given a placebo. A week later, they found that patients given the drug showed fewer signs of stress when recalling their trauma."

coondoggie writes us with a link to the Network World site, as he tends to do. Today he offers an article discussing the cancellation of a presentation which would have undermined chip-based security on PCs. Scheduled during the Black Hat USA 2007 event, the event's briefing promised to break the Trusted Computing Group's module, as well as Vista's Bitlocker. Live demos were to be included. The presenters pulled the event, and have no interest in discussing the subject any more. "[Presenters Nitin and Vipin Kumar's] promised exploit would be a chink in the armor of hardware-based system integrity that [trusted platform module] (TPM) is designed to ensure. TPM is also a key component of Trusted Computing Group's architecture for network access control (NAC). TPM would create a unique value or hash of all the steps of a computer's boot sequence that would represent the particular state of that machine, according to Steve Hanna, co-chair of TCG's NAC effort."