Chips are good for you!
Yes, you read correctly, chips are good for you, just not the edible variety. The chip in question has been developed by scientists in Sydney and is designed to be implanted into the spinal chord of patients in order to control pain effectively.
The full story can be found here.
How safe are your passwords?
A recent attack on blogging site Gawker.com has highlighted serious problems with the passwords most people use to protect their online accounts, a large proportion of people use the same password for all of their online accounts and an even larger number admit to using a handful of similar passwords for all of their accounts.
The full article can be found here.
Big Brother is watching you?
According to an article on the BBC, the idea that Big Brother is watching you could well become a reality and it could well turn out to be your big brother, if you have one that is.
A website called Internet Eyes is allowing, for a small fee, members of the public access to live streams from CCTV cameras and offer rewards should you manage to prevent a crime from being committed. The question is, is the system going to be open to potential abuse?
The BBC article can be found here.
A paradigm shift is occuring?
With the advent of cloud computing and the arrival of services such as Amazon’s EC2 and S3, Google’s App Suite and Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform coupled with the release of Google’s Chrome OS, is this the beginning of the end for traditional operating system as we know and love? If Google are to be believed in a recent article, the answer is yes.
Perhaps cloud computing could be seen as an evolution of older ways of delivering applications, such as the Time-sharing model of computing, made popular in the 1960′s?
Cheaper mobile calls when roaming europe?
Well maybe, if the European Commission gets its way, it’s looking likely that roaming charges will be scrapped. This in theory should make calls as cheap as they would be if they had been made at home. The legislation, if successful, will likely take effect in 2015.
The full story can be found here.
We’re a shallow bunch in the UK, apparently!
According to a recent news article, people in the UK apparently spend their time online searching for such cultural delights as Justin Beiber, Cheryl Cole and the online dating service Chatroulette.
Without meaning to sound at all cynical, one fails to see how a carefully considered opinion on the cultural state of an entire nation can be determined by the search activities logged by a single search engine.
The full article can be found here.
1968 – The year of the hyperlink and powerpoint!
It may seem a little unlikely but a lot of what we now take for granted in our day to day dealings with computers can be seen in a 1968 demonstration in San Francisco.
The demo in question involved computer scientist Douglas Engelbart giving a presentation in which he used a mouse to manipulate a pointer on a screen, used a wysiwyg editor which could be seen as the forerunner to the modern dtp package and even computer generated slides (powerpoint anyone?).
All this forty years ago to the day, amazing stuff!
The full story can be read here.
Apple owe Steve Jobs small fortune!
Well, not quite, a grand total $37.91 is apparently owed to Jobs. The amount includes $0.20 of dividends from Time Warner, $35 in unclaimed income from Apple and two shares in IBM. It’s more than certain that the billionaire chief executive won’t be losing any sleep over his unclaimed fortune.
Full story can be found here.
US Military Develop New Killer Weapon
The US military have developed a cunning new weapon, drugged dead mice, to be dropped from helicopter.
The mice are being used as a new way of dealing with the plague of brown tree snakes that have caused havoc on the island of Guam since World War II. Previous solutions such as using snake traps and sniffer dogs inspecting outbound ships have so far proven to be of little use in containing the spread of the snakes. The mice in question are drugged with a substance called acetaminophen, known as paracetamol in the UK, whilst fairly harmless to humans is highly poisonous to the brown tree snake.
The article can be read here.
Huge online twitch!
A huge online database of bird calls has been created by the Michigan State University in the United States. The database is said to hold over ten thousand bird calls from just over three thousand species in 45 countries and new calls are being added all the time.
A database of this size should keep the bird watchers around the world busy for some time.
The full story can be found here.