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Submission + - Alternatives to China's Rare Earth Monopoly (technologyreview.com)

KantIsDead writes: MIT's Technology Review adds to the ongoing discussion of China's monopoly on rare earth metals, an issue that was temporarily catapulted to national attention during China's rare earth embargo of Japan. The current article focuses on the search for alternatives to rare earth metals that would undercut China's monopoly and allow nations to develop their industry without fearing the hand of a Chinese embargo.

From the article:

"In the U.S., the Chinese dominance of rare-earth mineral production has prompted a surge of funding focused on developing permanent magnets that use less, if any, rare-earth materials, such as nearly $7 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E). In one of these projects, University of Nebraska researchers are working to enhance permanent magnets made with an alloy iron and cobalt, or FeCo. This class of materials is sold today, but delivers half or less of the power of the best rare-earth-based magnets. The Nebraska researchers will focus on ways to dope the structural matrix of these alloys with traces of other elements, thereby rearranging their molecular geometry to create stronger, more durable permanent magnetic materials."

Submission + - China blanks Nobel Peace prize searches (cnn.com)

1 a bee writes: CNN is reporting that China is attempting to block all communication regarding Peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo. Even texting is affected:

Text-messaging on mobile phones is not immune from censors, either. A Shanghai-based netizen, @littley, tweeted his unfortunate experience: "My SIM card just got de-activated, turning my iPhone to an iPod touch after I texted my dad about Liu Xiaobo winning the Nobel Peace Prize."

Might as well add slashdot to the censored list..

KDE

KDE SC 4.7 May Use OpenGL 3 For Compositing 187

An anonymous reader writes "KDE SC 4.5 is about to be released and KDE SC 4.6 is being discussed. However, Martin Graesslin has revealed some details about what they are planning for KDE 4.7. According to Martin's blog post, they are looking at OpenGL 3.0 to provide the compositing effects in KDE SC 4.7. OpenGL 3.0 provides support for frame buffer objects, hardware instancing, vertex array objects, and sRGB framebuffers."
Digital

MeeGo, Zero To VT320 In Seventeen Seconds 150

muirhead writes "Installing MeeGo on an Eee PC 1000 netbook is quick, slick, and easy. The user interface is colorful and stylish with many quirky animations. MeeGo's features are easy to discover and it is fast and responsive. Underneath it all though there is still just a netbook. That means it's got a display screen that has no significant weight behind it. That means typing on an undersized keyboard that has no life. All of these undesirable features can, however, be fixed by adding 9kg (~20lbs) of VT320 video terminal."
Cellphones

Nokia Trades Symbian For MeeGo In N-Series Smartphones 184

An anonymous reader writes "Nokia announced that moving forward, MeeGo would be the default operating system in the N series of smartphones (original Reuters report). Symbian will still be used in low-end devices from Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. The move to MeeGo is a demonstration of support for the open source mobile OS, but considering the handset user experience hasn't been rolled out and likely won't be rolled out in time for its vague June deadline outlined at MeeGo.com, could the decision be premature?"
Linux

Adobe (Temporarily?) Kills 64-Bit Flash For Linux 272

An anonymous reader writes "It seems that with the release of the 10.1 security patches, Adobe has, at least temporarily, killed 64-bit Flash for Linux. The statement says: 'The Flash Player 10.1 64-bit Linux beta is closed. We remain committed to delivering 64-bit support in a future release of Flash Player. No further information is available at this time. Please feel free to continue your discussions on the Flash Player 10.1 desktop forums.' The 64-bit forum has been set to read-only."
Firefox

Hardware-Accelerated Ogg Theora For Firefox Mobile 176

An anonymous reader writes "Matthew Gregan is working on bringing David Schleef's DSP accelerated port of Theora to Firefox Mobile. He writes on his blog: 'The C64x+ DSP is often found in systems built upon TI's OMAP3 SoC, such as the Palm Pre, Motorola Droid, and Nokia N900. Last year, Mozilla funded a port, named Leonora, of Xiph's Theora video codec to the TI C64x+ DSP. David Schleef conducted the port impressively quickly and published his results. The intention of this project was to provide a high-quality set of royalty-free media codecs for a common mobile computing platform. The initial focus is Firefox Mobile on the N900, so I am working on integrating David's work into Firefox. To experiment with other facilities Firefox could use to accelerate video playback, and test integration, I've been hacking on a branch of a stand-alone Ogg Theora and Vorbis player originally written by Chris Double called plogg.'"
Image

Woman Claims Wii Fit Caused Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome 380

Amanda Flowers always liked her Wii Fit but now she can't get enough of it. Amanda claims a fall from her balance board damaged a nerve and has left her suffering from persistent sexual arousal syndrome. From the article: "The catering worker said: 'It began as a twinge down below before surging through my body. Sometimes it built up into a trembling orgasm.' A doctor diagnosed her with persistent sexual arousal syndrome due to a damaged nerve."
Space

Rogue Brown Dwarf Lurks In Our Cosmic Neighborhood 188

astroengine writes "The UK Infrared Telescope in Hawaii has discovered a lone, cool brown dwarf called UGPSJ0722-05. As far as sub-stellar objects go, this is a strange one. For starters, it's the coolest brown dwarf ever discovered (and astronomers using the UKIRT should know; they are making a habit of finding cool brown dwarfs). Secondly, it's close. In fact, it's the closest brown dwarf to Earth, at a distance of only 10 light years. And thirdly, it has an odd spectroscopic signature, leading astronomers to think that this might be the discovery of a whole new class of brown dwarf."
The Media

Wikileaks Releases Video of Journalist Killings 1671

linguizic writes "Today Wikileaks released a video of the US military firing large caliber weapons into a crowd that included a photojournalist and a driver for Reuters, and at a van containing two children who were involved in a rescue. Wikileaks maintains that this video was covered up by the US military when Reuters asked for an official investigation. This is the same video that has supposedly made the editors of Wikileaks a target of the State Department and/or the CIA, as was discussed a couple weeks ago." Needless to say, this video is probably not work safe (language and violence), and not for the faint of heart.
Networking

Ubisoft DRM Causing More Problems 279

Joe Helfrich writes "Ubisoft's Settlers 7 servers have been causing problems for over a week for users worldwide, and Australian gamers are hardly able to connect at all. 'The problem reportedly strikes after the game has already confirmed an active Internet connection, and prevents the user from playing even the single-player campaign, returning the error "server not available." But they are available, because other people are logged into them and merrily playing away.' Wonder how they're going to describe this one as an attack."
Censorship

Venezuela's Last Opposition TV Owner Arrested 433

WrongSizeGlass writes "AP is reporting the owner of Venezuela's only remaining TV channel that takes a critical line against President Hugo Chavez was arrested Thursday. 'Guillermo Zuloaga, owner of Globovision, was arrested on a warrant for remarks that were deemed "offensive" to the president,' Attorney General Luisa Ortega said. This comes on the heels of last week's story titled Venezuela's Chavez To Limit Internet Freedom."
Earth

Planned Nuclear Reactors Will Destroy Atomic Waste 344

separsons writes "A group of French scientists are developing a nuclear reactor that burns up actinides — highly radioactive uranium isotopes. They estimate that 'the volume of high-level nuclear waste produced by all of France’s 58 reactors over the past 40 years could fit in one Olympic-size swimming pool.' And they're not the only ones trying to eliminate atomic waste: Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin are working on a fusion-fission reactor. The reactor destroys waste by firing streams of neutrons at it, reducing atomic waste by up to 99 percent!"

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