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8,465 articles from FEBRUARY 2012

• TUESDAY 7. FEBRUARY, 2012
• 15:54 3D Printer Creates Elderly Woman's New Jawbone

  Read the story at Discovery
  A medical dilemma has inspired a world-first achievement.  

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• 15:47 Tiles and Extra Security: Windows 8 Is Coming

  Read the story at Sci-Tech Today
  This will be the year those anticipating a new Microsoft operating system have been waiting for. Windows 8 is set to arrive sometime in 2012, with new functions, a user interface dubbed Metro that takes its cue from tablet computers, and a focus on security.

  As with the Windows Phone 7 operating system or the XBox 360 console, there are no longer program icons, but large colored tiles that also convey live information. Just like with Phone 7, controls have been optimized for touchscreens, although keyboards and mice can still be used.

  Also, because of its mobile focus, Windows 8 will run on energy-saving ARM processors, which, until now, have largely been unique to smartphones and tablets.

  If you'd already like a look, check out Windows Developer Preview, which has been set up for free online by Microsoft. There you'll find a fully functional advance version of Windows 8. A beta version, along with its new app store, has been announced for the end of February.

  Testers will quickly notice that the new system starts significantly faster than its predecessors. That's because Windows 8 stores part of its working memory on the hard drive when it powers down. That means, at start up, it only has to read back this information, much faster than loading up every driver.

  Microsoft has also cut down on resources required for operations, meaning Windows 8 system requirements are no greater than those for Windows 7.

  Controls have been updated for Windows Explorer. There is now a menu bar, which will be familiar to users of Office 2007 or 2010. The goal is to reduce the confusion of submenus and make it easier to access significant commands more quickly.

  It's also possible to pause orders to copy or move files, even if it's via network transmission. That means copying and transferring can...

   

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• 15:41 City in Louisiana Blazes High-Speed Internet Trail

  Read the story at Sci-Tech Today
  In this tradition-rich city known for its crawfish touffe and zydeco stomps, high-speed Internet rules. Web videos upload in a few quick seconds. Surgeons review online pathology reports from their living rooms. University students share bulky research files with one another electronically at lightning speeds.

  More than 800 miles of fiber-optic cable hum invisibly underground in Lafayette, a city of 120,000, delivering Internet speeds of up to 100 megabits per second, or 100 Mbps -- rare for even major cities. The cutting-edge connectivity in the heart of Cajun country is due not to a private telecom giant but to a public municipal service that offers higher speeds and often lower rates than the private sector.

  It hasn't come without a fight. From the time the cybernetwork was just a far-fetched concept, the city's two main private providers, Cox Communications and BellSouth (now AT&T), have fought the initiative every step of the way -- from an information campaign against the project to civil lawsuits.

  LUS Fiber, a subsidiary of Lafayette Utilities System, the city-owned power company, offers the speedy Internet service along with cable television and phone service. The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled in favor of the city in 2007, allowing the project to proceed.

  "We expected some opposition. But no one has had the level of push-back we got here in Louisiana," LUS Fiber director Terry Huval says. Telecom companies "want to nip it in the bud to keep other municipalities from doing the same thing."

  The battle over broadband in Lafayette is part of a growing number of clashes across the USA that pit municipalities against telecom firms for the right to deliver Web access to homes and businesses. More than 150 local governments across the country have built or are planning to build cybernetworks, says Christopher Mitchell of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local...

   

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• 15:26 Men Don't Read Online Dating Profiles

  Read the story at Discovery
  They just look at the pictures; women do the reading.  

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• 15:03 Bike Doping: Can Plasticizers Nab a Cheater?

  Read the story at Discovery
  As the science of anti-doping gets tougher on would-be cheaters, so too do the standards of proof for authorities.  

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• 14:53 Water Pressure Turned Into Power

  Read the story at Discovery
  A unique device turns excess water pressure from reservoirs, water treatment plants and factories into electricity.  

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• 14:24 Australia`s sheep are naturally itching for tea tree`s good oil

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  Scientists at UQ's Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI) have discovered that one of Australia's best known folk remedies might help to alleviate the sheep industry's biggest headache.  

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• 14:24 Behavior of parent organisms may influence genes passed on to next generation

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  Timing is everything, and if there was ever a scientist whose legacy was tarnished by bad timing, it was Jean Baptiste Lamarck. The French naturalist lived from 1744 to 1829 - and published his own evolutionary theory decades before Darwin's theory went public in 1859.  

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• 14:24 Clarity needed on use of chemical weapons, says UK report

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  A report examining the role of neuroscience research in military and civilian law enforcement contexts, led by a Queen Mary, University of London academic, has called on the government to provide clarity on the use of chemical weapons.  

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• 14:24 Diabetes linked to higher rate of birth defects

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  (Medical Xpress) -- Pregnant women with diabetes are almost four times more likely to have a baby with a birth defect than women without the condition and the likelihood is linked to the mother's glucose level, according to a new study.  

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• 14:24 Energy mythbusting: The truth about those energy-saving tips

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  You've read the energy-saving tips. You've armed yourself with caulk. You're ready to do some serious damage to your gas and electric bills. Not so fast.  

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• 14:24 Engineering safer drinking water in Africa

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  In the United States and other developed countries, fluoride is often added to drinking water and toothpaste to help strengthen teeth. But too much naturally occurring fluoride can have exactly the opposite effect.  

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• 14:24 Entire genome of extinct human decoded from fossil

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  (PhysOrg.com) -- In 2010, Svante Pääbo and his colleagues presented a draft version of the genome from a small fragment of a human finger bone discovered in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia. The DNA sequences showed that this individual came from a previously unknown group of extinct humans that have become known as Denisovans. Together with their sister group the Neandertals, Denisovans are the closest extinct relatives of currently living humans.  

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• 14:24 Intel packs performance and reliability into its latest SSD 520 series

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  Intel Corporation announced today its fastest, most robust client/consumer solid-state drive (SSD) to date, the Intel Solid-State Drive 520 Series (Intel SSD 520), a 6 gigabit-per-second (gbps) SATA III SSD produced using Intel compute-quality 25-nanometer (nm) NAND memory process technology. Aimed at delivering world-class performance for even the most demanding PC enthusiasts, gamers, professionals or small-medium businesses (SMBs), the Intel SSD 520 has fast throughput performance, new security features and unmatched reliability to meet even the most intensive user requirements.  

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• 14:24 Mars Express radar gives strong evidence for former Mars ocean

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  (PhysOrg.com) -- ESA's Mars Express has returned strong evidence for an ocean once covering part of Mars. Using radar, it has detected sediments reminiscent of an ocean floor within the boundaries of previously identified, ancient shorelines on Mars.  

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• 14:24 Modeling microbes to manage carbon dioxide

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  (PhysOrg.com) -- In the past decade, microbiologists began realizing that communities of microbes process energy and materials, which affects their environments. To understand how microbial communities function in a natural ecosystem, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory scientists developed a novel kinetic model that represents microbial community dynamics in soil pores.  

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• 14:24 Molecular path from internal clock to cells controlling rest and activity revealed in new study

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  (PhysOrg.com) -- The molecular pathway that carries time-of-day signals from the body's internal clock to ultimately guide daily behavior is like a black box, says Amita Sehgal, PhD, the John Herr Musser Professor of Neuroscience and Co-Director, Comprehensive Neuroscience Center, at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania.  

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• 14:24 My connectome, myself

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each of which is connected to many others. Neuroscientists believe these connections hold the key to our memories, personality and even mental disorders such as schizophrenia. By unraveling them, we may be able to learn more about how we become our unique selves, and possibly even how to alter those selves.  

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• 14:24 New form of hafnium oxide developed

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  (PhysOrg.com) -- A novel material developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge is opening up new possibilities for next generation electronic and optoelectronic devices, and paving the way for further component miniaturisation.  

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• 14:24 Nigeria lead poisoning 'worst in modern history': HRW

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  A lead poisoning epidemic in Nigeria's north that has killed 400 children and affected thousands is the worst in modern history, but cleanup has not even begun in many areas, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday.  

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• 14:24 Should your business 'go mutual' to survive the downturn?

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  (PhysOrg.com) -- Wisdom has it that employee-owned firms are small, undercapitalised and less efficient than conventional firms. The success of the John Lewis Partnership, the story goes, must be the exception.  

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• 14:24 Study shows chimps able to understand needs of others

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  (PhysOrg.com) -- By setting up a unique experiment, a small team of researchers has found that chimpanzees are able to understand need in other chimps, despite their general disinclination to offer aid when they see it. Shinya Yamamotoa, Tatyana Humleb, and Masayuki Tanakac set up a way to test their idea that chimps are able to understand some part of what is going on in the minds of others around them, and as they describe in their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they found a way to demonstrate it.  

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• 14:24 The search for life's stirrings

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  Scientists studying how life arose on Earth are stumped by several key steps in that eventual process, but a Harvard scientist studying the earliest cells says that seemingly intractable problems in this field have sometimes proved to have simple, even elegant solutions.  

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• 14:24 Univision, Disney look at English news channel

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  (AP) -- Univision and Disney are in talks to create a 24-hour news channel for Latinos in English, two sources close to the negotiations said Monday.  

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• 14:24 With single laser pulses on single molecules

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  (PhysOrg.com) -- Physicists at MPQ (Max Planck Institute) succeed in resolving the internal dynamics of individual molecules using UV femtosecond laser pulses.  

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