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Gates Time to Reboot

June 30, 2008 – 2:31 am
REDMOND, Wash. —  On his final full day at Microsoft Corp., Bill Gates went on stage to reminisce with his longtime friend Steve Ballmer, and neither man could hold back tears as Ballmer handed Gates a large scrapbook as a farewell present. Gates, who is stepping back to focus on his philanthropy, sat with CEO Ballmer in a Microsoft conference room and meandered through moments in Microsoft's history. They stopped to get in a few good digs at IBM Corp., whose first personal computers were loaded with Microsoft's DOS operating system before IBM adopted its own operating software and their relations strained. "They went off with OS 2, we were left with good old Windows, and sure enough the David versus Goliath story came out with the right ending," said Gates, eliciting laughter from the crowd of 830 Microsoft employees. Gates, who founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, admitted that Microsoft has faltered ...

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North Pole May Be Ice-Free This Summer

June 27, 2008 – 8:52 pm
For the first time in recorded history, the North Pole may be free of ice this summer, according to apublished report Friday. The unique prospect of sailing in open waters at the North Pole during the minimum ice cover in August and September has about a 50-50 chance of becoming reality, says one climate scientist's prediction holds true. "The issue is that, for the first time that I am aware of, the North Pole is covered with extensive first-year ice — ice that formed last autumn and winter," Dr. Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center  in Boulder, Colo., told The Independent newspaper in London. "I'd say it's even odds whether the North Pole melts out." One-year ice is highly vulnerable to melting during the summer months, and satellite data over recent weeks has shown the rate of retreat to be faster than last year, when there was an ...

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Recycling comes full circle

June 27, 2008 – 8:45 pm
It has long been seen as the emblem of a throwaway society but the ordinary plastic bottle is about to take on an unlikely role as recycling paragon, with the launch on Thursday of a new reprocessing facility in east London. On a previously derelict site on the outskirts of Dagenham, sandwiched between the roaring A13 and the Thames, the final components are being placed into giant machines which will soon form the cutting edge of recycling in Britain. The Closed Loop recycling plant claims to be the first in the world to take both milk bottles and clear drinks bottles and turn them back into food-grade plastic.Once it is up and running, the £13m facility aims to help create a continuous cycle by enabling manufacturers to use recycled plastic from the UK in their food and drink packaging. "Essentially the consumer buys their product, say, a bottle of Coca Cola. If they ...

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Gadget Controls You Can Wear (Japan)

June 26, 2008 – 10:33 pm
  YOKOSUKA, Japan —  Rolling your eyes to turn up the volume of a portable music player and tapping your fingers to turn on a DVD player are among technologies Japan's top mobile carrier is testing for "wearable" gadgets. In one version, sensors and chips inside headphones detect electrical current produced by movements of the wearer's eyeballs, says Masaaki Fukumoto, executive research engineer at NTT DoCoMo. "We are working on a cell phone of the future," he said at a suburban Tokyo research center.     The new technology may also enable cell-phone cameras to read bar codes used in Japan to get product information, download music and coupons when the user simply looks at the codes, researchers said. Fukumoto showed a wearable cell phone shaped like a ring about the size of a ping-pong ball. When a wearer sticks his fingers in his ears, the sound travels as vibrations through his bones and into his ears, where ...

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Nintendo DS to Learn English (Japan)

June 26, 2008 – 10:26 pm
TOKYO —  The Nintendo DS isn't just fun and games anymore for English students at Tokyo's Joshi Gakuen all-girls junior high school. The portable video game console is now being used as a key teaching tool, breaking with traditional Japanese academic methods. A giggly class of 32 seventh-graders used plastic pens to spell words like "hamburger" and "cola" on the touch panel screen — the key feature of the hit console — following an electronic voice from the machine. It's a sort of high-tech spelling bee. When the students got the spelling right, the word "good" popped up on the screen, and the student went on to the next exercise. The first five students to complete the drills were awarded colorful stickers. "It's fun," said Chigusa Matsumoto, 12, who zipped through the drills to get her sticker. "You can study while you have fun."

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Meteorite could hold solar clues

June 26, 2008 – 10:03 pm
A rare type of meteorite that could hold clues to the birth of our Solar System has been bought by London's Natural History Museum. The chemistry in the Ivuna meteorite is thought to contain information about the conditions that gave rise to the Sun and planets 4.5 billion years ago. It landed in Tanzania in 1938 as one 705g stone, since split into samples. Pieces from the UK sample, the largest in any public collection in the world, will be removed for study. Most Ivuna samples are held in private collections, or by the Tanzanian government. It is a so-called carbonaceous chondrite. It contains dust granules that may have been part of the cloud of material that came together to form our Solar System. Unlike most rock found in our stellar neighbourhood, it has not been altered by major heating sometime in its history and, as such, gives researchers a remarkable view on the past. Dr Caroline ...

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Fossil fills out water-land leap

June 26, 2008 – 10:01 pm
Scientists say a fossil of a four-legged fish sheds new light on the process of evolution. The creature had a fish-like body but the head of an animal more suited to land than water. The researchers' study, published in the journal Nature, saysVentastega curonica would have looked similar to a small alligator. Scientists say the 365-million-year-old species eventually became an evolutionary dead end. Counting digits About one hundred million years before dinosaurs began to roam the Earth, Ventastega was to be found in the shallow waters and tidal estuaries of modern day Latvia. According to lead author, Professor Per Ahlberg, from Uppsala University, Sweden, this creature had the head of a tetrapod, an animal adapted to live on land. The body, though, was fish-like but with four primitive flippers. "From a distance, it would have looked like an alligator. But closer up, you would have noticed a real tail fin at the back end, a gill flap at the side ...

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Burma blocks emergency telecoms

June 25, 2008 – 9:57 pm
Two teams of foreign aid workers dedicated to delivering emergency telecoms in disaster areas have been forced to leave cyclone-hit Burma. The members of Telecoms Sans Frontieres (TSF) left the country after attempts to reach affected areas were blocked. The charity, which described the situation as "unprecedented", said it had no other choice but to leave. TSF finally reached Burma on 1 June after waiting nearly a month to be granted visas to enter the country. "The frustration is that we were allowed into the country but not allowed to deploy," TSF spokesman Oisin Walton told BBC News. Many international charities were allowed into Burma following a visit to the area by UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon. But repeated attempts to get the necessary authorisation to visit affected areas such as the Irrawaddy Delta, were met with a wall of silence. "We got no reply at all," said Mr Walton. Time lags TSF is a specialist agency which works ...

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Police look to digital switchover

June 25, 2008 – 4:15 pm
The tape recorder has been a constant in police interviews for the last 20 years but it could soon be consigned to the bin. Plans to conduct and store interviews in digital format could radically speed up the time it takes to bring criminals to justice, say experts. The majority of forces still rely on analogue recorders, with many having up to half a million tapes in storage. No timeframe has been set to switch the 43 police forces in England and Wales. Networked evidence Time is running out for analogue tape which has already become a dead format on the high street; something that has an impact on police use of tape recorders. "Spares are getting harder to find and it is time for a change," said Andy Griffiths, Detective Chief Inspector with Sussex Police who also sits on the ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) steering committee for investigative interviewing. The steering committee has been ...

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Need a Body Part?

February 19, 2008 – 11:00 pm
Someday - maybe not too far in the future - a machine may grow the new body part you need. That would be a miracle as some "98,000 people are on a waiting list for transplants right now" according to CBS News. CBS says a research team at Wake Forest University believes any body part replacement you need can be grown. From blood vessels to muscle tissue, Atala and his team at Wake Forest University believe that in theory anything inside the body can be grown outside the body, CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews reports. And it's real: They've made 18 different types of tissue so far. "That's a heart valve?" Andrews asked. Atala said: "This is an engineered heart valve." What he pointed to was a pulsing heart valve to be transplanted into a sheep. "When people ask me 'what do you do,' we grow tissues and organs," he said. "We are making body ...

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