News: 5 undersea cables to Middle East damaged

As of February 1, a total of 5 undersea cables, operated by two cable operators, have suffered faults that have left 1.7 million Internet users in the United Arab Emirates offline.  Telephone and Internet traffic to countries like Egypt, Iran and Dubia have been reduced by more than 70% according to some reports. More distant countries like India have experienced a 50% loss in bandwidth, affecting services like call centres. It is theorized that a ship's anchor snagged a cable during a recent storm... unless you prefer the many conspiracy theories that are emerging. Found on Slashdot. Edit: Check out siderea's post (http://siderea.livejournal.com/556026.html) for some interesting information on undersea cables.

Tech: Airplanes over turbines are invisible to radar

The British Ministry of Defense reports that some wind farms can interfere with military radar, rendering aircraft  flying over the turbines virtually invisible. The MoD is working with government and wind farm owners to find a solution to the problem.  Britain plans to greatly increase the number of turbines in operation so this problem could become far more widespread if not immediately addressed.

Tech: MIT develops chip drawing one-tenth as much power

MIT researchers have developed a microchip based on standard fabrication methods that uses as little as 10% of the power of current microchips. They used a scalable voltage approach to deal with the issue of switching errors (where the divide between a 1 and a 0 becomes lost in low-voltage noise), resulting in increasing the number of transistors used each memory cell from 6 to 8. As expected, the cost of reducing voltage and reducing processing speed, but the chip is expected to find use in various medical and military devices that could benefit from ultra-low voltage operation.

News: Twins kick tumour out of their mother

Michelle Stepney, was taken to hospital with a suspected miscarriage; however, it was discovered that not only did she have a tumour in her cervix, but that it had been dislodged by the kicking of the twins she was carrying. She decided to accept only minimal cancer treatment until the twins were delivered, earning her a nomination for Woman of Courage by Cancer Research UK. The twins were born with no problems and she went on to undergo more complete treatment for cancer. Found on MedGadget