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This was supposed to go up yesterday
Oct. 3rd, 2007 03:12 pmwashingtonpost.com - Technology |
| New Service Eavesdrops on Internet Calls - A startup has come up with a new way to make money from phone calls connected via the Internet: having software listen to the calls, then displaying ads on the callers' computer screens based on what's being talked about. A test of Puddingmedia's beta software was a mixed success: Relevant ads appeared when this reporter talked about restaurants and computers, but the software was oddly insistent that he should seek a career as a social worker, showing multiple ads and links pointing to that field. |
LiveScience.com |
| Eggshells Could Help Power Hydrogen Cars - Eggs give many of us the fuel we need to start the day, but leftover eggshells of the future could provide fuel to start hydrogen cars. The fragile leftovers can be ground up and used to filter out carbon dioxide, a pesky by-product of hydrogen production, engineers said. In fact, it's now the most effective carbon dioxide absorber ever tested. |
New Scientist Tech - Technology |
| Quantum chip rides on superconducting bus - For the first time the components that underlie quantum computing's great potential – qubits – have been linked on chips like those in conventional computers. Two US research teams used superconducting circuits to make two of the quantum components linked by a quantum information cable or bus. |
Technology Review Feed - Tech Review Top Stories |
 Gene Tests That Help People Quit Smoking - New research suggests that genetic testing could quickly distinguish which smokers would benefit from bupropion. The findings add to a growing number of studies linking genetics to nicotine addiction and the ability to quit, and raise the possibility that quitting strategies could be more effectively tailored to individual patients. |
Slashdot |
| Internet Uses 9.4% of Electricity In the US - ribuck writes "Equipment powering the internet accounts for 9.4% of electricity demand in the U.S., and 5.3% of global demand, according to research by David Sarokin at online pay-for-answers service Uclue. Worldwide, that's 868 billion kilowatt-hours per year. The total includes the energy used by desktop computers and monitors (which makes up two-thirds of the total), plus other energy sinks including modems, routers, data processing equipment and cooling equipment." |
| Canadian Copyright Official Dumped Over MPAA Conflict - An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian government's top copyright policy maker has been moved aside after revelations that she was in a personal relationship with Hollywood's top Canadian lobbyist. The development is raising questions about how the MPAA got an anti-camcording bill passed in only three weeks and what it means for the introduction of a Canadian DMCA." |
PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news |
| Why don't painkillers work for people with fibromyalgia? - People who have the common chronic pain condition fibromyalgia often report that they don’t respond to the types of medication that relieve other people’s pain. New research from the University of Michigan Health System helps to explain why that might be: Patients with fibromyalgia were found to have reduced binding ability of a type of receptor in the brain that is the target of opioid painkiller drugs such as morphine. |
| Babies raised in bilingual homes learn new words differently than infants learning one language - Infants who are raised in bilingual homes learned two similar-sounding words in a laboratory task at a later age than babies who are raised in homes where only one language is spoken. This difference, which is thought to be advantageous for bilingual infants, appears to be due to the fact that bilingual babies need to devote their attention to the general associations between words and objects (often a word in each language) for a longer period, rather than focusing on detailed sound information. |
| 6 Die From Brain-Eating Amoeba in Lakes - It sounds like science fiction but it's true: A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die. Even though encounters with the microscopic bug are extraordinarily rare, it's killed six boys and young men this year. According to the CDC, the amoeba called Naegleria fowleri (nuh-GLEER-ee-uh FOWL'-erh-eye) killed 23 people in the United States, from 1995 to 2004. This year health officials noticed a spike with six cases - three in Florida, two in Texas and one in Arizona. The CDC knows of only several hundred cases worldwide since its discovery in Australia in the 1960s. |
| Childhood TV viewing a risk for behavior problems - Daily television viewing for two or more hours in early childhood can lead to behavioral problems and poor social skills, according to a study of children 2.5 to 5.5 years of age conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
A University of Washington professor has discovered what may be a massive body of water, about the size of the Arctic ocean, under East Asia. The subterranean ocean can be seen on these images as a large red spot. It's existence had been theoretically predicted, but now they have proof of its existence.
D-Wave, a company based in British Columbia, will be demonstrating the worlds first commercially-available quantum computer, just in time for Valentine's day. The 16-qubit machine being demonstrated is referred to as an adiabatic quantum processor because it can handle thermal noise that has, in the past, been a serous limitation to getting quantum computers out of the lab. There is some skepticism that the system will work, including from one of the researchers who developed the adiabatic model on which the computer is based. Well, the proof will be in the pudding, as they say (whoever "they" are). 
An entertaining interview with Scott Rosenberg, author of "Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software" which attempts to demonstrate, to the uninitiated, just how difficult it is to develop good software.
