Moon plots and Smart Fabric

Source: PhysOrg You've heard the old joke about selling swamp land in Florida or the Golden Gate Bridge, but a company in China was attempting to sell plots of land on the moon. Lunar Embassy to China had sold 49 acres of land to 34 customers before Chinese authorities stepped in to remind them that no individual can yet claim ownership of the moon. The company has since been fined and order to cease "selling" plots.

Source: PhysOrg It appears that Mars has more water than originally thought - a lot more. A recent radar survey of the Martian south pole revealed a frozen mass that is more than 90% water and as much as 3.7 kilometres thick in places. To imagine the quantity this represents, image enough water to cover Mars' surface to a depth of 11 metres.

Source: ABC News According to a report issued by Symantec, the United States is the source of the most malicious computer activity of any country. More than 1/3rd of all computer attacks in 2006 originated from computers in the US. This doesn't necessarily mean that most of the people causing the problem are from the US; the source of an attack could be a computer that has been infected to act as surrogates.

Source: BBC News New Zealand-based Zephyr has unveiled a new smart fabric that "...gathers information on heart beat, skin temperature, posture, activity and breathing rate when against the skin." They have already entered into an agreement with the US Department of Defense to help them monitor the status of soldiers in the field. The fabric might also be used by athletes to monitor how they react to different training regimes, or patients involved in drug trials to record their physiological in detail.

Source: BBC News Devolo, a German company, has developed a method for transmitting television signals using power lines. A special outlet plug is used as a mini-hub to insert data signals into the electrical wires within a house. Data can then be recovered using special plugs from any power outlet. The system can currently transmit only a single television channel signal, but is working at transmitting multiple channels.

This looks vaguely familiar.....

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7028023.html

"A computerized list is provided with auxiliary pointers for traversing the list in different sequences. One or more auxiliary pointers enable a fast, sequential traversal of the list with a minimum of computational time. Such lists may be used in any application where lists may be reordered for various purposes."

The claims make it appear that someone has succeeded in patenting the doubly-linked list, much like what I learned about back in the late 1980s.