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Submission + - FTTH coming to Lincoln, Nebraska

Submitted by andyring
andyring writes: Lincoln, Neb., in the heart of silicon prairie is getting gigabit fiber to every home and business in the next four years. It's a wet dream for anyone in the tech world. No install fees, no contracts, no modem rentals, guaranteed minimum of 100 mbit, no throttling, etc. It'll provide phone and TV as well. I've read the entire franchise agreement and it's a very good arrangement for the city. Interestingly enough, it's largely possible because back in the 1970s, a public works guy had the brilliant idea to install conduit to all the city's traffic signals. So there's more than 300 miles of conduit already installed and leasable.

A local company, Nelnet, bought a western Nebraska company, Allo Communications apparently because the top Nelnet guy couldn't get fiber to his home very easily. So he figured, heck, I'll just buy the company and get fiber to the whole city.
Medicine

Cutting Umbilical Cord Early Eliminates Stem Cells 139

Posted by timothy from the just-leave-it-on-a-few-years dept.
GeneralSoh writes "Delaying clamping the umbilical cord at birth may have far-reaching benefits for your baby, according to researchers at the University of South Florida's Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair — and should be delayed for at least a few minutes longer after birth. This new recommendation published in the most recent Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine (14:3) notes that delaying clamping the umbilical cord allows more umbilical cord blood and crucial stem cells to transfer from mama to baby."
Privacy

Facebook, Others Giving User Private Data To Advertisers 154

Posted by kdawson from the naked-we-stand dept.
superapecommando sends along a Wall Street Journal report that indicates that Facebook's privacy troubles may be just beginning. "Facebook, MySpace, and several other social networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent. The practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code. ... Several large advertising companies ... including Google Inc.'s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.'s Right Media, said they were unaware of the data being sent to them from the social networking sites, and said they haven't made use of it. ... The sites may have been breaching their own privacy policies as well as industry standards. ... Those policies have been put forward by advertising and Internet companies in arguments against the need for government regulation."
Science

The Fruit Fly Drosophila Gets a New Name 136

Posted by timothy from the hope-you-used-pencil dept.
G3ckoG33k writes "The name of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster will change to Sophophora melangaster. The reason is that scientists have by now discovered some 2,000 species of the genus and it is becoming unmanageably large. Unfortunately, the 'type species' (the reference point of the genus), Drosophila funebris, is rather unrelated to the D. melanogaster, and ends up in a distant part of the relationship tree. However, geneticists have, according to Google Scholar, more than 300,000 scientific articles describing innumerable aspects of the species, and will have to learn the new name as well as remember the old. As expected, the name change has created an emotional (and practical) stir all over media. While name changes are frequent in science, as they describe new knowledge about relationships between species, these changes rarely hit economically relevant species, and when they do, people get upset."
Games

Correlation Found Between Brain Structure and Video Game Success 110

Posted by Soulskill from the correlation-does-not-equal-yadda-yadda dept.
kghapa writes "Still want to argue that video games shrink your brain? While video games have been previously shown to stimulate brain activity and improve coordination skills, a recently published study has directly linked structures in the human brain with video game aptitude. And yes, apparently size does matter in this case. Quoting: '... each subject received 20 hours of training to play a video game specifically created for research purposes, called Space Fortress. It's basically an Asteroids-type arcade game, in which the object is to knock down and destroy an enemy fortress while dodging space mines. However, the game has lots of extra twists that require close attention. Some of the players were told to focus exclusively on running up a high score, while others were told to shift their priorities between several goals. The result? The subjects who had more volume in an area called the nucleus accumbens did significantly better in the early stages of training. Meanwhile, those who were well-endowed in different areas of the striatum, known as the caudate nucleus and putamen, handled the shifting strategies better.'"

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