Amazon touts Kindle app for BlackBerry addicts
Amazon has introduced a Kindle application for BlackBerry addicts with itchy thumbs.
Is this the first 256GB flash drive in the US?
Kingston claims the DataTraveler 310 is the first 256GB USB Flash drive in the United States. It’s definitely going to add more capacity to someone’s pants.
Sprint preps enigmatic 4G handset for 2010 launch
Sprint Nextel is reportedly preparing to launch its first 4G handset during the first half of 2010.
Deranged WoW player shot during violent family dispute
A drunk and deranged WoW player was recently shot by an irate grandfather after attempting to choke his mother to death.
Source:Deranged WoW player shot during violent family dispute
WISE telescope offers up 'candy store' of images
NASA has released the first pictures from its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, WISE.
Google mobs Mobile World Congress
Google "hearts mobile" was the message delivered by the firm’s CEO at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
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Eric Schmidt said mobile would be a core priority for his giant search behemoth going forward and that he had already allocated his best boffins to the job, programming away to make the wireless world a more googly place.
It would also appear that Google has dropped its old mantra of “Don’t be evil” with Schmidt declaring Google’s new mantra was “Mobile First” – which is rather more honest anyway. Perhaps Google could integrate it to “Don’t be evil on the go.”
Google has made a number of important acquisitions in the mobile and voice space, especially in terms of snapping up the mobile advertising firm AdMob which will give Google a leg up in mobile search advertising.
But Schmidt was keen to emphasize that it wasn’t all about advertising, at least superficially. Indeed, he claimed, it was all about computing power, interconnectivity and the cloud.
“The phone is where these three all interconnect and you need to get these three waves right if you want to win,” warbled Schmidt banally. He also delivered a stern warning and psychic prediction for the future of tech, booming “If you don’t use the power of the cloud you will fail.”
Yes, the end is nigh, repent, repent non-cloudy sinner.
And driving this cloudy mobile phenomenon? Well that would be the likes of Facebook, Spotify and of course Google, all of which are seeing massive upsurge in mobile internet usage.
In some places, Google said it was even seeing more mobile web searches than PC web searches, although the only two countries singled out for special mention were South Africa and Indonesia.
As it did back in December in a press conference in Mountain View, Google also used MWC to show off its voice search technology, image recognition tech using phone cams and a new offering called optical character recognition (OCR) which when demoed translated a German menu into English. It was impressive, the crowd swooned.
Android too was creating a bit of a buzz at MWC, a fact Schmidt acknowledged noting that over 60,000 handsets a day with the OS were being flogged by handset vendors, a 100% increase over last quarter. Also impressively, and a blow to Intel and Nokia’s claims that they will create the world’s first truly open and cross platform OS, Schmidt told the audience Android now ran on no less than 26 different devices.
Take note, Intel. Only the paranoid androids survive.
And poking Apple in the eye, it was also announced during the press conference yesterday that Android now even supports full flash version 10.1.
Put that in your iPad and smoke it.
Claim: School spied on students with laptop webcams
The Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania has been accused of using laptop webcams to spy on students in their homes.
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Indeed, the parents of one Blake J. Robbins have filed a lawsuit against the district claiming that officials remotely accessed the school-issued laptops and snapped webcam photos of their son.
According to BoingBoing, the Robbins family became aware of the alleged breach of privacy when Blake was disciplined for "improper behavior" in his home.
"The Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. If true, these allegations are about as creepy as they come," wrote BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow.
"The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students’ clickstreams and emails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying."
However, Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technia cautioned that events may have "played out differently" than the complaint alleges.
"If it was a MacBook, for example, Blake may have used the built-in Photo Booth software to take a picture of himself doing something questionable while at home, which may or may not be against the school’s policy," speculated Cheng.
"If that photo got posted online or even synced back with the school’s admins the next day, it’s possible that [the school] was given access to the photo for disciplinary purposes."
Nvidia exec arrested after 'bomb threat'
An Nvidia marketing director was hauled off a plane and chucked in jail last week after allegedly joking that he had a bomb.
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Yushing Lui, 47, was settling into his seat before the Cathay Pacific Airways flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong when a flight attendant offered to take his jacket, says the Mercury News.
He was a regular visitor to the US, and speaks fluent English.
According to prosecutors, when she asked whether there was anything important in the pockets, he said he had a bomb.
He says he told her there was a million dollars inside.
The flight attendant called airport police who, astonishingly, did not find a bomb.
Lui was freed on $10,000 bail after Judge Beth Freeman decided it was just too risky to let him loose without. His trial is scheduled for March 8.
Scientists recreate Big Bang 'quark soup'
Physicists have created a ‘quark soup’ with a temperature of four trillion degrees Celcius – almost as hot as the temperature just after the Big Bang.
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The relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) smashed gold ions together at nearly the speed of light to create matter at the hottest temperature ever reached in a laboratory. It’s hot enough to melt protons and neutrons into a plasma of quarks and gluons, and about 250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun.
The quark-gluon plasma, or QGP, is the same substance that filled the universe a few microseconds after it came into existence 13.7 billion years ago.
Although it survives for much less than a billionth of a trillionth of a second, its properties can be determined using RHIC’s detectors to look at the thousands of particles emitted during its brief lifetime.
"There are many ways that photons can be produced in these violent collisions. We were able to ‘eliminate’ the contribution from these other sources by exploiting RHIC’s flexibility to measure them directly and to make the same measurement in collisions of protons, rather than of gold nuclei," said Barbara Jacak, a professor of physics at Stony Brook University and spokesperson for the PHENIX collaboration.
"Thus we could pin down excess production in the gold-gold collisions, and determine the temperature of the matter that radiated the excess photons. By matching theoretical models of the expanding plasma to the data, we can determine that the initial temperature of the ‘perfect’ liquid has reached about four trillion degrees Celsius."
Moving forward, Brookhaven physicists are planning to upgrade RHIC over the next few years to increase its collision rate and detector capabilities.
"These technical improvements will facilitate studies of rare signals providing measurements of even better precision on temperature, viscosity, and other basic properties of the nearly perfect liquid quark-gluon plasma created at RHIC," said Steven Vigdor, Brookhaven’s Associate Laboratory Director for Nuclear and Particle Physics.
Cheap DNA test diagnoses genetic diseases
Quick, cheap gene tests for many diseases could be just around the corner, with the development of a DNA test that works on a drop of saliva.
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"This technology offers a speedy, cost-efficient alternative to existing methods of DNA analysis," says Dr Juan Diaz-Mochon of Edinburgh University‘s School of Chemistry.
"Our method could help reach the goal of complete genome analysis in a few hours for less than $1,000."
The researchers say that the test, based on chemical analysis, delivers reliable results without the need for expensive enzymes used in conventional DNA testing.
It’s successfully been used to detect genes linked to cystic fibrosis, they say. CF is known to be caused by a single faulty gene.
The team hopes soon to test whether it can decode entire human genomes.
"We plan to test the technology further, extend our collaborations with leading researchers and companies in the DNA sequencing field and establish our first commercial operations within the next six months," said the university’s Professor Mark Bradley.
Such a test, say the researchers, would enable improved personal diagnosis, allowing prompt, appropriate treatment for patients.
We think the insurance companies might quite like it too.
The study appears in Angewandte Chemie.