Science and technology news blog

If you are travelling to the UK, then you need to prepare for your accomodation, as like any other place. For that, I suggest having a look at CheaperThanHotels.co.uk which is a very good place for travel information. You can search for London hotels, Edingurgh hotels, Glasgow hotels and more in your budget range.

Who wouldn’t want to travel to the UK and enjoy the nightlife that is offered in places like London, Edinburgh and Glasgow. The multi-cultural society of England has come a long way. The food, the people, everyone lives peacefully with each other. There is so much to see and do in England that you really need to prepare very much in advance. And this is where CheaperThanHotels.co.uk comes to the rescue.

There are a lot of other websites that offer a searchable database, however this is still worth a look if you are interested in making a booking for a hotel. There are also discounts available on group bookings. There are package deals and last minute deals. Not a site to be missed.

I just signed up with Blogsvertise.com and its seems to be a great way of making money using your blogging skills and experience. I am still awaiting approval, but I have no doubt that this service can make me a lot of extra money in the near future. Blogsvertise.com will find out the website/products that I need to write about and the best part is that I dont really need to say nice things about that particular product. And I still end up making money. Now thats a cool idea.

Scientists have long debated whether water flowed on the red planet, with evidence increasing in recent years. The presence of water would raise the possibility of at least primitive life forms existing there.

Images from a camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show alternating layers of dark- and light-toned rock in a giant rift valley.

Within those deposits are a series of linear fractures, called joints, that are surrounded by “halos” of light-toned bedrock, according to researchers from the University of Arizona.

Their findings, published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science, were being presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

Lead author Chris H. Okubo said the “halos” indicate areas where fluids, probably water, passed through the bedrock. Minerals in the fluid strengthen and bleach the rock, he said, making it more resistant to erosion than other areas.

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The energy consumed by data center servers, cooling equipment, and related infrastructure more than doubled in the United States and worldwide between 2000 and 2005, according to a new study.

A jump in the number of servers—especially lower-end servers costing less than $25,000—accounts for 90% of the additional power consumption, says the study’s author, Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford University and a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The study was commissioned by Advanced Micro Devices, which is touting its energy-efficient processors. Only 5% to 8% of the increase in data center electricity consumption is attributed to power use per unit.

Driving the server proliferation is the insatiable appetite for Web content, such as video on demand, music downloads, and Internet telephony, Koomey says.

The total electricity bill to operate data center servers and related infrastructure equipment in the United States was $2.7 billion in 2005, compared with $1.3 billion in 2000. Worldwide, the total bill was $7.2 billion in 2005, compared with $3.2 billion in 2000.

Looked at differently, U.S. data center power consumption in 2005 was equivalent to about five 1,000- megawatt power plants, or five typical nuclear or coal power plants, Koomey says.

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The price of exploring inner space went up Thursday.

At a news conference in Beijing, an international consortium of physicists released the first detailed design of what they believe will be the Next Big Thing in physics: a machine 20 miles long that will slam together electrons and their evil-twin opposites, positrons, to produce fireballs of energy recreating conditions when the universe was only a trillionth of a second old.

It would cost about $6.7 billion and 13,000 person-years of labor to build the machine, the group reported. And that does not include the cafeteria and parking.

“The good thing is that we have developed a design that can address the challenging physics goals and meet the technical requirements, and we have worked very hard to cost-optimize it, yet it (not surprisingly) does remain expensive,” Barry Barish, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology and chair of the design team, which includes 60 scientists from around the world, said in an email interview before the announcement.

The location of today’s announcement, at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Beijing, underscores the growing role and ambition of Asia, particularly Japan and China, to become major players in high-energy physics, a field that has been dominated by the United States and Europe in the last century.

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Despite being pounded by the Holiday Blizzard of 2006, North American Aerospace Defense Command remains on alert for the nation and ready to track Santa Claus, according to NORAD officials. “NORAD Tracks Santa Operations Center is schedule to begin operations as scheduled at 2 a.m. Christmas Eve,” said Michael Perini, Director of NORAD and U.S. Northern Command Public Affairs.

More than 800 Santa tracking volunteers will cycle through the center answering telephone calls and e-mails from children around the world wanting to get a fix on Santa Claus’ whereabouts.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command annually “tracks” the flight of Santa Claus and associated reindeer across the skies on Christmas Eve, posting sighting data and imagery of the icon on its website.

The NORAD Tracks Santa Web site, http://www.noradsanta.org, went live Nov. 17 and has already garnered an amazing 48,695,357 page views. Last year the site received 907,958,865 page views from 204 countries and territories around the world.

Beginning at 2:00 a.m. MST on December 24, the Web site will provide minute-by-minute updates on Santa’s journey around the world.

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Hi guys, website had been down for a couple of days as I was moving hosts. Everything has been moved now and the website is up and running.

BANK or pub workers who demand their customers produce the Federal Government’s new smartcard as a form of ID could go to jail for up to five years or be fined $55,000, under draft legislation.

Companies that demand the card would face fines of up to $275,000.

The Government’s $1.1 billion access card will replace up to 17 social service cards such as the Medicare card by 2010 and will be required by anyone who wants to get government benefits.

But privacy and consumer advocates have raised fears that because almost every Australian will need one, the access card could become an ID card.

The Government’s legislation is designed to address fears that the access card is an Australia card in disguise.

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MELBURNIANS are being subjected to unprecedented surveillance, with pedestrians in the CBD snapped by at least two security cameras every minute.

As new research names Australia among the most watched societies in the Western world, a Sunday Herald Sun tally found Melbourne’s eight most central city blocks contain no fewer than 95 cameras—with almost 350 more spread across the city centre.

Popular restaurant and shopping strips in Carlton, Prahran, South Melbourne and Richmond also have dozens of cameras watching public footpaths.

An average of two cameras per minute were spotted during a walk through the inner city this week.

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In a forthcoming Virginia Law Review paper, entitled “The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design,” two law professors investigate how the fashion industry manages to thrive despite rampant copying of clothing designs.

The paper’s authors, Kal Raustiala of the University of California, and Chris Sprigman, start by observing that the fashion industry has what they term a “low-IP equilibrium,” in which clothing designs enjoy almost no copy protection and designers frequently turn large profits by copying each others’ work. In spite of the lack of IP protection for clothing designsor rather, because of this lack, the authors arguethe fashion industry remains vibrant and profitable, exhibiting none of the negative effects on creativity that advocates of strong intellectual property (IP) rights would predict in the absence of government-enforced monopolies on creative “content.”

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Just weeks after its controversial patent cooperation agreement with Microsoft, Novell is hitting out at statements made by Microsoft executives that the deal acknowledges that Linux infringes on its intellectual property.

Novell has been under fire from many members of the Linux and open-source community since entering into a set of broad collaboration agreements with Microsoft to build, market and support a series of new solutions that will make Novell and Microsoft products work better together, including providing each other’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products.

Recent statements from Microsoft officials such as CEO Steve Ballmer that the deal effectively acknowledges that Linux infringes on his company’s intellectual property have exacerbated these criticisms from the open-source community.

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It has been nearly a year since AOL launched its next generation Triton AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) client.

In that time, however, AOL never actually advertised to its AIM 5.9 users directly in their AIM client that an upgrade was available. Instead, users had to go to AOL.com to get Triton.

That situation changes today with the release of AIM 6.0, which is being advertised to all AIM users.

AIM 6.0 builds on the Triton code base, which has also now been exposed via the Open AIM SDK.

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Paranthropus robustus, a dead-end branch of the early human family tree, has been described as a “chewing machine” that was mostly jaws and not much brains.

While the label may still apply, pioneering dental detective work has revealed unexpected news about the species’ dietary variety.

Using lasers to vaporize tiny particles of tooth enamel, researchers in the United States and Great Britain analyzed the chemical makeup of 1.8-million-year-old fossil teeth from four individuals unearthed in the Swartkrans cave site in South Africa.

Different types of edible plants leave unique chemical signatures in living tissue, including teeth.

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The early hominid Paranthropus robustus might not be as specialized an eater as researchers thought. Using a new laser technique, anthropologists peered into the teeth of these hominids to discover that the primate actually ate a variety of foods.Between 2.4 and 1.4 million years ago, P. robustus roamed the African savanna. Researchers surmised that, because they had large molars with thick tooth enamel and strong jaw muscles, they ate low-nutrient, fibrous foods whereas their toolmaking relatives, Homo habilis and Homo erectus, ate softer foods such as fruit and meat. “A lot of things made these guys look like chewing machines,” says Matt Sponheimer, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Human teeth, by comparison, are quite dainty.” This apparently rigid diet was blamed for P. robustus’s extinction later in the Pleistocene as the climate became drier and more seasonal.

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Around 80 per cent of e-mails on the internet, equivalent to 6.5 billion emails a day, are spam. These unwanted emails are not only generated by professional spammers, but also by ‘botnets’ – where the PCs of unsuspecting customers are secretly infected with rogue software to form a robotic network that generates vast quantities of unwanted spam . These compromised machines can be used in turn to attack other PCs and websites.

BT is taking a pioneering role in the global battle against spam by implementing the world’s first fully-automated ‘spam buster’ system to track down and tackle professional spammers and ‘botnet’-infected customers on the BT broadband network.

The new spam detection system selected by BT - Content Forensics from StreamShield Networks – scans millions of e-mails a day, providing BT with detailed reports on the location and size of spam-related problems originating from the BT network. Not only does the StreamShield Networks’ solution save time and resources by automatically identifying spam problems, it can prevent valuable bandwidth being wasted on unwanted spam and virus infected traffic.

BT’s Customer Security team can then take immediate action against professional spam operators, which could include terminating rogue accounts and adding offending IP addresses to industry-wide blacklists.