Monitoring the saltiness of the ocean water could provide an early indicator of climate change. Significant increases or decreases in salt in key areas could forewarn of climate change in 10 to 20 years time. Presenting their findings at a recent European Science Foundation (ESF) conference, scientists predicted that the waters of the southern hemisphere oceans around South Africa and New Zealand are the places to watch.

9 out of 10 crooks use ready-made code

Phishing kits are helping to dumb down the process of creating fraudulent websites. Back in the day, setting up a bogus facsimile of a banking site required a modicum of programming skills. No more.

Blog: Presence of exploit code puts pressure on Yahoo to fix the security flaws.

Filed under: Gaming, Laptops

Confirming something that we had already seen hints of, Intel has announced that it is looking forward to quad core laptops hitting the scene throughout 2008. Mooly Eden, GM of Intel's mobile platform group, said that we won't see these quad cores in business class laptops for a while, even being honest enough to admit that there aren't enough multi-threaded applications out there to justify it. In practically the same breath, PC World mentions that the chip will target high-level gaming laptops, which is cool because gamers will no doubt lap the new chips up: even if gaming is for the moment a very much single-threaded activity. Architecturally the new chip will have to differ from Intel's current offerings such as Santa Rosa, so you can probably expect to pay quite a premium until they hit the mainstream. (Not that you didn't know that already.)

[Image credit]

P.S. Bonus points for most imaginative insult in response to the fatal mistake of using Apple's Intel logos to illustrate this post.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

A link between brain development genes and speakers of tonal languages has been shown for the first time

Blog: RedFlag Chinese 2000 Software will employ about 50 new employees to work on Chinese-specific improvements to the open-source OpenOffice.org software, and Sun will help train them.

Westminster offers prizes to get citizens using city Wi-Fi

City wireless LAN pioneer Westminster City Council has kicked off a competition to find new applications to run on its planned city-wide Wi-Fi network.

Filed under: Displays, Storage

NEC's relatively low-key system-on-glass technology is getting a substantial upgrade today, as the company announced that it has "developed an LCD module that incorporates all chips, including the LSI, with memory on the glass substrate." Current LCD modules have the pixel-driving chips right on the glass with LSI / memory embedded on a "separate board and attached to the module," but this new approach enables the firm to cram DRAM, DACs, and other necessary functions onto a polysilicon thin film right on the glass. The prototype device is a 1.1-inch TFT LCD display with 160 x 120 pixels and DRAM that can store a meager 230-kilobytes on data, and while the company is unsurprisingly dubbing it the "world's first" of its kind, the commercial realm won't be seeing an end product for a good "two to three years."

[Via Nikkei]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

If US ignores our laws can we ignore theirs?

House of Cards Antigua and Barbuda - a nation of 70,000 in an area roughly half the size of San Francisco - has formally requested that the WTO allow it to suspend its intellectual property obligations to the United States, AP reports.

Google has proposed to the FCC a way to let wireless spectrum owners auction off rights to that spectrum to other companies.

I'm on Everest...no Everest!

Brit climber Rod Baber has succeeded in making the world's highest mobile phone call - a 40-second chat from the top of Everest, news agencies report.