A collection of interesting stories

Do you know in which provinces it is legal to "flick your high beams to warn of speed traps? - The answer currently is that British Columbia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland have no law on the books stating that this is an illegal act. Your mileage (kilometrage?) may vary in other provinces.

So how does today rate on the Barf-o-meter? -  Improbable Research publishes a link to the Honolulu Advertiser that has posted a rating scale for the likelihood of you becoming seasick on the Oahu-Maui ferry run. The scale is based loosely on the Beaufort Scale. Personally, I've never been seasick, but that comes of spending most of my youth working on the water.

Ride along with Cassini - JPL has developed made freely available a plugin that allows you to virtually ride along with the Cassini probe using your web browser. NASA refers to it as their "... first 3-d interactive mission experience...".

Songwriters may see less money coming to them - That is, if the RIAA has their way. They have petitioned the US's Copyright Royalty Board to have the cut of each song sold online that goes to the songwriter to be reduced from 13% of wholesale to 9% of wholesale. Meanwhile, digitial music companies (like Apple) want that to be reduced to 4%.

Engineers think like terrorists - A recent Oxford University paper proposes that there is a statistical link between having an Engineering background and participation in Islamic terrorist groups, specifically that engineers are strongly overrepresented among Islamist groups linked with violent activities. The reason, they say, is that the mindset of the Engineer is inclined toward extremely conservative and religious positions. They extrapolate that the results would not be limited to violent forms of Islamism but would also be visible in the extreme right-wing American and Canadian populations.

Tech: patient has jaw replaced with one grown from stem cells

A 65 year-old Finnish patient  had his upper jaw replaced with transplanted bone grown from his own stem cells. The stem cells were gathered from the patient's body fat, attached to a scaffold, and grown in his abdomen for nine months. Not only did bone cells grow; blood vessels and other tissue were also generated. Found on Slashdot.

Tech: Embryo created from three parents

British researchers were able to create an embryo using the genetic contributions of three parents. The scientists started with a non-viable embryo from one woman, scrubbed it of its mitochondrial DNA, then infused it with the mitochondrial DNA of a second female donor before fertilizing it with sperm cells contributed by a third (obviously male) donor. The embryo was allowed to grow for 10 days to demonstrate it could potentially be viable before it was destroyed. That said, the sperm didn't have to come from a male donor. British scientists have also discovered how to turn bone marrow from a female donor into sperm cells. This may allow lesbian couples to have children, albeit only female children would be produced (due to the lack of a Y-chromosome), and the child runs a significant risk of suffering sever health problems. So far, this research has been limited to experiments with mice. Both articles found on Slashdot.

More articles from the queue

Canadian songwriters propose collective licensing - This Slashdot article links to a proposal by the Songwriters Association of Canada in which each internet and wireless customer in Canada pays a $5 yearly fee, and in return can freely share any and all music they purchase as they see fit. They money would be distributed among songwriters, performers, music publishers and record labels.

Stanford offers free conversion of photos to 3D - Researchers at Stanford university have made available a new online service (http://make3d.stanford.edu/) to test drive a new process that attempts to infer 3D structures from a single 2D image. The process uses a Markov Random Field to infer the position and orientation of each a 3D patch corresponding to each point in the image, and from that generate a mesh model. The original image is then laid over the 3D mesh to allow you to perform a limited fly-through of the image.

You can save lives or save money - A research group in the Netherlands has determined that smokers and obese people cost less to a health care system in the long run because they die sooner. Meanwhile, thin and healthy people cost the system the most because they tended to live longest. The conclusion was that reducing smoking and obesity rates will increase, not decrease, overall health care costs.

US privacy board is running on empty - In 2007, the Privacy and Civil Liberty Oversight Board was created  to keep an eye on US anti-terrorist activities to ensure that the privacy and civil liberties of US citizens were being safeguarded. The terms for all members of the board expired on January 30th, but no candidates have yet been nominated to sit on the board.

Shapeshifting robots from magnetic swarms - New Scientist reports on attempts by US researchers to build "claytronic" robots that cling together, allowing them to assume any shape. Follow the link to view a video of what they envision to be the outcome of this research. In larger test robots, electromagnetism was used to share power, communicate, move, and sense their environment. The test robots had wheels, but they were unpowered so they could only maneuver using their electromagnets and by working together.