Peace Corps Online writes "Vascular surgeon David Nott performed a life-saving amputation on a boy in DR Congo following instructions sent by text message from a colleague in London. The boy's left arm had been ripped off and was badly infected and gangrenous; there were just 6in (15cm) of the boy's arm remaining, much of the surrounding muscle had died and there was little skin to fold over the wound. 'He had about two or three days to live when I saw him,' Nott said. Nott, volunteering with the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, knew he needed to perform a forequarter amputation requiring removal of the collar bone and shoulder blade and contacted Professor Meirion Thomas at London's Royal Marsden Hospital, who had performed the operation before. 'I texted him and he texted back step by step instructions on how to do it,' Nott said."

KentuckyFC writes "Steganography is the art of hiding a message in such a way that only the sender and receiver realize it is there. (By contrast, cryptography disguises the content of a message but makes no attempt to hide it.) The central problem for steganographers is how much data can be hidden without being detected. But the complexity of this problem has meant it has been largely ignored. Now two computer scientists (one working for Google) have made a major theoretical breakthrough by tackling the problem in the same way that the electrical engineer Claude Shannon calculated the capacity of an ordinary communications channel in the 1940s. In Shannon's theory, a transmission is considered successful if the decoder properly determines which message the encoder has sent. In the stego-channel, a transmission is successful if the decoder properly determines the sent message without anybody else detecting its presence (abstract). Studying a stego-channel in this way leads to some counter-intuitive results: for example, in certain circumstances, doubling the number of algorithms looking for hidden data can increase the capacity of the steganographic channel"

brianmed writes to tell us that Stanford researchers have created a new use for silicon nanowires that promise to reinvent lithium-ion batteries. "The new version, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours, a boon to ocean-hopping business travelers. [...] The lithium is stored in a forest of tiny silicon nanowires, each with a diameter one-thousandth the thickness of a sheet of paper. The nanowires inflate four times their normal size as they soak up lithium. But, unlike other silicon shapes, they do not fracture."

nm writes "The Mozilla Corporation's subsidiary in China has signed a deal with Chinese search engine giant Baidu. Baidu is already included as an option in Firefox's Chinese localization, but this deal formalizes the relationship between Mozilla and and the search company. Mozilla has established several other initiatives in China to help increase Firefox adoption, particularly in universities. The article notes that Firefox has seen limited uptake in China; the browser Maxthon is the second most popular after Internet Explorer. Maxthon is thought to have as much as 30 percent of the Chinese browser market."

coondoggie writes "Earlier this year Captain America was slain as the climax to Marvel Comics' Civil War event. The renowned hero will be buried in the next issue of Marvel Comics' 'Fallen Son,' due on July 5. 'Writer Jeph Loeb has been busy working through the stages of grief in his most recent titles, according to an Associated Press story. A book centered on Wolverine dealt with denial; one with the Avengers covered anger; and Spider-Man battled depression. With the story line so relevant to present-day politics, and the timing of the latest issue so precise, it's hard not to think the whole thing is one big slam on the government.'"

DECS writes "At today's Apple annual shareholder meeting, a series of proposals were presented for voting after which CEO Steve Jobs answered a series of questions from the audience. Jobs talked about Greenpeace, stock options, the iPhone, Mac OS X Leopard, and .Mac."

Stephen Samuel writes "The CBC is reporting that Star Trek actor James Doohan ("Scotty") achieved his hopes of having his ashes launched into space when a package containing some of his ashes, ashes of Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper and about 200 other people were carried into sub-orbital space by a 6 meter (20') rocket. The rocket was launched by UP Aerospace from "Spaceport America", a commercial spaceport being developed in the southern New Mexico desert."

An anonymous reader sends in word of the well-known artist Todd Goldman, who has been accused of stealing images and ideas from an Internet comic artist/author and others, and profiting from them. Goldman has now threatened to sue the Web page that pointed out the apparent theft to the world.

airshowfan writes "When a geosynchronous satellite is launched into space, no human ever gets to touch it again. This means that, other than for minor software issues, there is no way to fix it if it breaks, so it has to work perfectly, almost autonomously, for 20 years non-stop. There is also no way to refuel it once it's out of thruster fuel, the reason why it can't last more than 20 years even if it gets to that mark working very well, with batteries and solar cells still going, which is often the case. If only there were a robotic spacecraft in geostationary orbit that could change broken satellite components and refuel those older satellites, then satellites would be a lot less risky and would last a lot longer. Does this robotic spacecraft mechanic sound like science fiction? It launches tonight."

Underpants writes "Bob Cringely posts the results of his 2006 predictions (only 69% successful, so Bob is sad). He also lists his calls for 2007; none are particularly shocking, but some are at least interesting. 2007 predictions from the article: '4) No one DRM technology emerges as the winner and the RIAA begins to back off as it loses a few legal cases. Still, no Internet-only song wins a Grammy or is even recognized as existing. 9) Zune 2.0 appears, isn't brown, but still nobody buys it. 10) The year the net crashed (in the USA). Video overwhelms the net and we all learn that the broadband ISPs have been selling us something they can't really deliver.'"

DECS writes "Despite CNET's wild claims, Roughly Drafted is reporting that Apple's market position and recent performance show the company has the ability, capacity, and interest in shaking up the mobile phone industry. Something that service providers, manufacturers, and consumers desperately need."

Wowzer writes "Sony is up to the same old tricks again. Following in the footsteps of their fake PSP Graffiti campaign, Sony has hired marketing company Zipatoni to set up a YouTube-based viral marketing scheme for the Sony PSP. The company did this by registering the domain alliwantforxmasisapsp. There are no disclaimers to show it isn't 'real', but the website's whois points out it's setup by Zipatoni." From the C&VG article: "The lies don't end there, fake comments have been posted at Kotaku only linking to the Youtube video to increase its pageviews: 'Good call on DJ max. Regarding music: if changes were to be made for westerners, this guy should be considered - LOLZ'" Update: 12/13 02:37 GMT by Z : The Washington Post has an article stating that the FTC will look into situations like this, if they perchance to come up.

El Lobo writes "Looks like things are heating up again in the browser wars. Google has been openly supporting Firefox, so now Yahoo is displaying a new feature on search results pages for FireFox users. It appears that Yahoo is pushing downloads of IE7 from Microsoft and including itself as the default search engine installed in the file menu area." I got the invitation to download IE7 when running Firefox on a Mac, and even when running IE5 under CrossOver; but not when running IE7 under Parallels.

evanwired writes "Quinn Norton offers a great first-hand account of the first South Korean Hacker con. Marked by conservative dress and polite conversation, the group was nevertheless still very much concerned with the shortcomings of computer security." From the article: "A police crackdown three years ago left South Korea's hacking community broken and fragmented. One of the conference's more animated speakers, 'Xpl017Elz,' complained that many of Korea's best and brightest hackers wound up emigrating to more receptive environments with better pay for security researchers. But he also demonstrated a large and difficult divide between how the hacker communities behave in Korea and the United States. Xpl017Elz's presentation focused on four (of a reported seven) attacks he developed against Red Hat's Fedora Core using ExecShield. He demonstrated privilege escalation, where a logged-in user can become root and take over the machine, and remote code execution, wherein an external attacker can gain root without a login."