An anonymous reader writes "Nanoparticles have been able to disable cancerous cells in living human bodies for the first time. The results are perfect so far, killing tumors with no side effects whatsoever. Mark Davis, project leader at CalTech, says that 'it sneaks in, evades the immune system, delivers the siRNA, and the disassembled components exit out.' Truly amazing."

kkleiner writes "Doctors at the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) along with colleagues at the University College London, the Royal Free Hospital, and Careggi University Hospital in Florence have successfully transplanted a trachea into a 10 year old boy using his own stem cells. A donor trachea was taken, stripped of its cells into a collagen-like scaffold, and then infused with the boy's stem cells. The trachea was surgically placed into the boy and allowed to develop in place. Because his own cells were used, there was little to no risk of rejection. This was the first time a child had received such a stem cell augmented transplant and the first time that a complete trachea had been used."

bdcrazy writes "A man was recently awarded $1.5M in a jury trial after his hand was injured by a Ryobi table saw. The saw did not include the patented 'Saw Stop' technology that the plaintiff argued would have prevented all the problems." 60 similar cases have now been filed nationwide. TechDirt makes the argument that this jury decision is completely crazy: "If the government is going to require companies to use a patented technology, it seems that the only reasonable solution is to remove the patent on it and allow competition in the market place." If the decision stands, not only will the price of table saws go way up, but other hungry patent-holders will probably get a gleam in their eye.

Glyn Moody writes "Here's a problem for free software: most social networks are built using it, yet through their constant monitoring of users they do little to promote freedom. Eben Moglen, General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation for 13 years, and the legal brains behind several versions of the GNU GPL, thinks that the free software world needs to fix this with a major new hardware+software project. 'The most attractive hardware is the ultra-small, ARM-based, plug it into the wall, wall-wart server. [Such] an object can be sold to people at a very low one-time price, and brought home and plugged into an electrical outlet and plugged into a wall jack for the Ethernet, and you're done. It comes up, it gets configured through your Web browser on whatever machine you want to have in the apartment with it, and it goes and fetches all your social networking data from all the social networking applications, closing all your accounts. It backs itself up in an encrypted way to your friends' plugs, so that everybody is secure in the way that would be best for them, by having their friends holding the secure version of their data.' Could such a plan work, or is it simply too late to get people to give up their Facebook accounts for something that gives them more freedom?"

It appears that today might be the end of a very long road to health care reform. There's been a lot of debate on the subject really leading back before the election. The mainstream sounds like an echo chamber, so I'm hoping you guys have better insight. Will this bill do what the administration claims to do, or is it as bad for the future of America as Fox says?

ElectricSteve writes "It's been a long time coming. While Arthur C. Clarke's geosync satellites have taken to space, and James Bond's futuristic mobile technology has become commonplace, still the dream of sustained personal flight has eluded us — until now. At $86,000, the Martin Aircraft jetpack costs about as much as a high-end car, achieves a 30-minute flight time, and is fueled by regular gasoline. A 10% deposit buys you a production slot for 12 months hence." Here's a video of some indoor test flights. This isn't Buck Rogers's jetpack — it's about 5 by 5 feet and weighs more than the average human. You won't be able to commute with it (the FAA has not certified this class of device) so it's recreational only for now.

gollum123 sends an excerpt from the NY Times on how Google has taken a lead in language translation, in one of the company's few unqualified successes as it attempts to broaden its offerings beyond search. "...Google's quick rise to the top echelons of the translation business is a reminder of what can happen when Google unleashes its brute-force computing power on complex problems. The network of data centers that it built for Web searches may now be, when lashed together, the world's largest computer. Google is using that machine to push the limits on translation technology. Last month, for example, it said it was working to combine its translation tool with image analysis, allowing a person to, say, take a cellphone photo of a menu in German and get an instant English translation. ...in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a so-called statistical approach. They found that if they fed the computer thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, it could learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts. It turns out that this technique, which requires huge amounts of data and lots of computing horsepower, is right up Google's alley. ...Google's service is good enough to convey the essence of a news article, and it has become a quick source for translations for millions of people."

blozza2070 notes the news that Jeff Jaffe has been appointed CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium. Until January Jaffe was CTO at Novell and, while his name hasn't come up very often in this community, he is one of the architects of the Novell-Microsoft patent deal. A reading of Jaffe's blog while at Novell tends to paint him as a software patent supporter, Microsoft apologist, and no fan of the FSF. This strongly worded page at Boycott Novell features copious links to support the above characterization.

bjb writes "While helping a somewhat computer illiterate person figure out a problem recently, they mentioned that PDF files had recently stopped working. Upon investigation I found something installed called 'PDF Suite.' Never having heard of it, I Googled it with 'malware' and other key words, but nothing turned up, though my suspicion remained (and was somewhat confirmed by WOT.) So my question is, where can you go to find out if something is legitimate? Because the person I'm helping is on a dial-up connection, downloading malware detection applications (and updates) is too heavy consider. And I don't maintain a USB stick with such apps, since I don't do this kind of thing very often. Where can you quickly find information?"

CWmike writes "Today Cisco Systems introduced its next-generation Internet core router, the CRS-3, with about three times the capacity of its current platform. 'The Internet will scale faster than any of us anticipate,' Cisco's John Chambers said while announcing the product. At full scale, the CRS-3 has a capacity of 322Tbit/sec., roughly three times that of the CRS-1, introduced in 2004. It also has more than 12 times the capacity of its nearest competitor, Chambers said. The CRS-3 will help the Internet evolve from a messaging to an entertainment and media platform, with video emerging as the 'killer app,' Chambers said. Using a CRS-3, every person in China, which has a population just over 1.3 billion, could participate in a video phone call at the same time. (Or you could pump nearly one Library of Congress per second through the device, or give everyone in San Fransisco a 1Gbps internet connection.) AT&T said it has been using the CRS-3 to test 100Gbit/sec. data links in tests on a commercial fiber route in Florida and Louisiana."

kkleiner writes "For many years countless individuals in the US have had to watch with envy as dogs and horses with joint and bone injuries have been cured with stem cell procedures that the FDA has refused to approve for humans. Now, in an exciting development, Regenerative Sciences Inc. in Colorado has found a way to skirt the FDA and provide these same stem cell treatments to humans. The results have been stunning, allowing many patients to walk or run who have not been able to do so for years. There's no surgery required, just a needle to extract and then re-inject the cells where they are needed. There has always been a lot of hype around stem cells, but this is the real deal. Real humans are getting real treatment that works, and we should all hope that more companies will begin offering this procedure in other states soon."

krebsonsecurity writes "Organized cyber-criminal gangs stole $25 million in the 3rd quarter alone last year, by pilfering the online bank accounts of small to midsized businesses, the FDIC reported last week. In contrast, traditional bank robbers hauled just $9.4 million in 1,184 bank robberies during that same period, according to an analysis of FBI bank crime statistics by krebsonsecurity.com. From that story: 'The federal government sure publishes a lot more information about physical bank robberies than it makes available about online stick-ups. Indeed, the FBI's bank crime stats are extraordinarily detailed. For example, they can tell you that in the 3rd quarter of last year, bank robbers were more likely to hold up their local branch between the hours of 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. on a Wednesday than at any other time or day of the week; they can tell you the number of tear gas and dye packs taken with the loot, the number of security cameras activated, the number of food stamps taken, even what percentage of suspected perpetrators had illegal drug habits at the time of the robberies. About the only thing the stats don't tell you is what brand of jeans the perpetrators were wearing and whether the getaway car had cool vanity plates. What do we get about e-crime statistics from the federal government? One guy from the FDIC giving a speech at the RSA conference."