Whale Swims through Downtown London

By Erika Pennington

LONDON (AP)—It's a whale of a tale—a bottle-nosed whale swimming up the River Thames past Big Ben and Parliament as rows of worried spectators looked on Friday.The northern bottle-nosed whale was spotted in the afternoon—the first sighting in the river since 1913—as it flailed around the murky waters of the Thames, stirring up patches of what looked like blood as seagulls hovered above and rescue boats stood on the ready.Witnesses reported seeing a second whale in another part of the river Friday, and marine experts spotted two disoriented whales in northeastern Scotland last week, suggesting there was something causing the bottle-nosed whales to become disoriented."It is a race against time to save the animal,'' said Alison Shaw, marine and freshwater conservation program manager at the Zoological Society of London.

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World Traker Track Anyone Using a Cell Phone

by Marc Perton

Forget those piddly wiretaps. The next frontier in warrant-free surveillance is upon us, and it's open to everyone. A UK service called World Tracker apparently uses cell tower data (or GPS, when available) to track the location of just about any GSM cellphone. Just enter the number you want to track into the service's handy Google Maps-based interface, and you'll be able to zoom in on the device's location, with accuracy somewhere between 50 and 500 meters. The first time you try to track a phone, a text message is sent to the owner, who must reply in order to enable tracking (we'll leave it to you to figure out how to work around this if you need to track a spouse, kid or employee). The service is currently compatible with O2, Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile in the UK, and has plans to expand to other markets including Germany, Spain, Norway and the US. If, that is, privacy advocates don't shut it down first.

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Space Junk Cleanup Needed, NASA Experts Warn

Stefan Lovgren

for National Geographic News

Space is filling up with trash, and it's time to clean it up, NASA experts warn.A growing amount of human-made debris—from rocket stages and obsolete satellites to blown-off hatches and insulation—is circling the Earth. Scientists say the orbital debris, better known as space junk, poses an increasing threat to space activities, including robotic missions and human space flight. "This is a growing environmental problem," said Nicholas Johnson, the chief scientist and program manager for orbital debris at NASA in Houston, Texas. Johnson and his team have devised a computer model capable of simulating past and future amounts of space junk. The model predicts that even without future rocket or satellite launches, the amount of debris in low orbit around Earth will remain steady through 2055, after which it will increase.

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How to clean up water-damaged electronics

by Evan Blass

Those of you who read our CES coverage as obsessively as we covered the show may remember a brief mention of an unfortunate incident involving a laptop and some spilled coffee (it was actually hot cocoa). Even though we got the lappy pretty clean with just a few paper towels, a more severe spill might have really blown up our spot, which is why we wish we'd seen this "how-to" a little earlier. Chris J. over at Grynx helpfully recounts the tale of his friend's water-damaged router and the steps he took to get it working again, if not perfectly. We'll leave the deets to Grynx, but basically this rescue mission involves complete disassembly of the affected device, rather counterintuitively running the circuit boards under more water, and using an alcohol-based cleaning agent (not gasoline, warn several commenters) to brush the remaining rust/calcium residue from the guts. Money quote from the article: "If the substance is already dry, as it was for me, then use your wife’s toothbrush (you don’t want to use your own, right?) to brush off as much as possible."

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Use your cellphone as a movie ticket

by Evan Blass

A movie theater in a suburb of America's technology capital has begun trial-running a payment method that allows customers to not only purchase tickets from their cellphones but actually present an on-screen barcode to the tickettaker. The Emagine Entertainment theater in suburban Detroit is the first US theater to implement pay-by-cell technology from Mobile Box Office, which is currently restricted to Internet-enabled phones with color screens. Moviegoers need only go to the MBO site, buy a ticket, wait for a text message with a link back to MBO, and follow the link to a webpage with a unique barcode representing the purchase. Emagine has installed scanners that read the barcode off of the phone's screen and grant access to the theater. Unfortunately, just like with Nokia's kidnapphone, this system seem contingent on being able to get a signal in the vicinity of the theater, so members of the T-MOB will need to continue purchasing their tickets the old-fashioned way.

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Lock that USB port to stop casual data theft

Posted Jan 19th 2006 2:45PM by Marc Perton

We've come across another USB lock, and unlike the half-baked USB Port Security Lock, which attempts to use your USB port as a substitute for a Kensington lock port, Lindy's USB Port goes after the simpler and more practical goal of securing the USB port itself. The device consists of two pieces: a lock that snaps into your port, and a key that you use to pull it out. The idea, of course, is that locking your USB ports will stop casual data theft, and we could see this coming in handy for, say, offices with lots of open cubicles or college data centers. Realistically, though, this probably provides only minimal protection, since you'll still be open to network-based attacks (not to mention CD-burner data theft) -- and we suspect that a brute force attempt to rip this out could totally trash your USB port, forcing fairly expensive repairs. Still, if you want to give it a try, you can get a pack of four in your choice of blue, green, pink, orange or white for just £14.99 ($26.45).

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Terrorist Backhoe Attack

By Kevin Poulsen

In 2004, Department of Homeland Security officials became fearful that terrorists might start using accidental dig-ups as a road map for deliberate attacks, and convinced the FCC to begin locking up previously public data on outages. In a commission filing, DHS argued successfully that revealing the details of "even a single event may present a grave risk to the infrastructure."

"We see people talking about the digital Pearl Harbor from the worms and Trojans and viruses," says Howard Schmidt, former White House cybersecurity adviser. "But in all probability, there's more likelihood of what we call the 'backhoe attack' that would have more impact on a region then a Code Red, or anything we've seen so far."

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Sysgration's "mouse" VoIP phone

by Marc Perton

Sure, Sony managed to apply some high-style to the mouse/VoIP phone the company showed off at CES. But little did they know that Taiwanese manufacturer Sysgration was already upping the ante in the highly competitive phone-mouse market with its own version. And, unlike the Sony, which lacks a keypad, the Sysgration model allows direct entry of phone numbers and sports a retro aqua finish. Actually, we're still not sure whether the Sysgration phone is an actual working mouse, or just a wireless VoIP phone that just looks like a badly designed mouse. Regardless, we can't imagine using it for any purpose

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E-passport Trial Run at SFO Airport

By: Melanie Tan

The Department of Homeland Security has started testing its e-Passport system as of January 15 at Terminal G of the San Francisco International Airport (SFO). The e-Passports feature embedded contactless chips embedded with the holder’s biographic and biometric data. They are also equipped with the security feature called Basic Access Control or BAC, which aids in the prevention of the unauthorized reading or skimming of information from e-Passports. The readers capable of reading these e-Passports will also be tested thoroughly during the trial run.

Participants in the test, which will run through April 15, include citizens of Australia and New Zealand, who are holders of new e-Passports, Singapore Airlines crew and officials, who are holding trial e-Passports, and U.S. diplomatic and official e-Passport holders. The test will be carried out in different locations too as the e-Passport holders will of course need to present them as they arrive at the SFO airport in the US, at the Changi Airport in Singapore or at Sydney Airport in Australia.

All that e-Passports participants have to do is present their e-Passports for a scan. Regular security measures, however, would not be dispensed with. That is, holders still have to go through regular security checks.

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Cellular-enabled iPod?

By: Melanie Tan Apple has filed not just one, but FOUR trademark applications which mentions terms such as digital music, communications and cellular for the phrase "Mobile Me". This development has the whole industry abuzz with speculation that Apple is preparing to launch a cellular-enabled iPod. For one, Shaw Wu and Albert Lin of the American Technology Research predict that an iTunes phone similar to the Motorola Rokr will be coming soon. So is Apple really planning to be a cellular reseller buying bulk minutes from carriers and then reselling them to its loyal consumers? Not everybody believes it. Jupiter Research's Julie Ask states that "Apple sells hardware and software... They don't have an existing subscriber base like cable companies, and they don't have content like ESPN that people have an affinity to." Furthermore, for Apple to launch an iPod mobile phone with such technology, the device would have to have enough browsing capabilities to handle secure micropayments. That's a good argument but will it be reason enough for Apple not to venture into the cellular business anyway? We'll see

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Woodpecker Search Sheds Light on Bigfoot

By Benjamin Radford

As reported around the world, the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), last known to exist in 1944, was sighted in eastern Arkansas in 2004. The sighting prompted a massive (and secret) follow-up search in 2005 of a sixteen-square-mile area of Arkansas forest. When the bird was confirmed to exist, the discovery spawned international headlines, an article in the journal Science, and a book titled The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

While the search for additional evidence of the woodpecker continues, the investigation is instructive for what it did not find: the alleged and elusive Bigfoot. The search for the woodpecker took months of intensive research in the woods of rural Arkansas. Bigfoot believers try to explain away the lack of evidence by suggesting that Bigfoot are out there in remote areas, but few people are out actively looking or listening.

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Freecycle Network

If you just want to give something away, like your old laptop, you have any number of outlets. Your local newspaper probably has a free section in the classifieds; you can post it on Craig's List; you can drop it off at a thrift store or donate it to a charity that will refurbish and resell it. But if you want to give away your old laptop and be part of a potential revolution in the process, you might turn to Freecycle.org. The Freecycle Network hopes to encourage a "worldwide gift economy" -- one old laptop, bottle of nail polish, gas stove or People magazine at a time.

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Carbon gets more hydrogen

Hydrogen is a clean-burning fuel, but using it as an environmentally friendly energy source requires finding clean ways to produce it. One of the most promising approaches is solar water-splitting, a scheme to use sunlight to drive the chemical separation of hydrogen and oxygen from water.

The catalyst is the key to splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen. Much recent research has focused on titanium dioxide catalysts, and last year researchers found that nanotubes made of titanium dioxide are more effective than bulk titanium dioxide. The catch is pure titanium dioxide only works with ultraviolet light, which makes up only a small portion of sunlight.

Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin have found a way to add carbon to the titanium dioxide nanotubes in order to shift their catalytic activity from ultraviolet to visible light. They also found that the length of the nanotubes plays a key role; 3.3 microns is optimum.

The carbon-infused titanium dioxide nanotubes generated more hydrogen from sunlight than pure titanium dioxide nanotubes.

(Novel Carbon-Doped TiO2 Nanotube Arrays with High Aspect Ratios for Efficient Solar Water Splitting, Nano Letters, January 11, 2006)

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Magnetic logic advances

Magnetic memory chips, which retain data after the power is turned off, are becoming available and could eventually supplement or even replace disk drives in computers. Several research teams are looking to take this technology beyond simply storing data by using it in computer chips that process data.

Researchers from the University of Notre Dame and the Technical University of Munich in Germany have taken a step toward magnetic logic chips with a prototype device that carries out the basic binary logic operations necessary for computing. The device uses nanoscale magnets in a quantum dot cellular automata architecture that was previously developed at Notre Dame.

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Fujitec eases bottlenecks

By Anna Guido

A new elevator system developed by Fujitec America Inc. alleviates passenger bottlenecks in lobbies and in other high-traffic areas.

The Destination Floor Guidance System - which was put into operation Friday in the Metropolitan Park West Tower in downtown Seattle - minimizes stops by grouping together passengers with common destinations

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Bored meetings

By Marc Abrahams
The Guardian

Do you believe, as someone somewhere perhaps does, that meetings, meetings, meetings, followed by more meetings are altogether a good thing? If so, Alexandra Luong and Steven G Rogelberg think you should think again. In a newly published study, they say: "We propose that despite the fact that meetings may help to achieve work-related goals, having too many meetings and spending too much time in meetings per day may have negative effects on the individual."

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PowerFilm solar charger - it's foldable

By: T.O. Whenham

We have seen lots of solar chargers for your gadgets over the last few months. The PowerFilm F-15 600 by PowerFilm Solar isn’t the cheapest one by any means, but it also definitely isn’t the heaviest or least portable. It’s a foldable solar charger, so it rolls up into a small bundle you can slide into a backpack when you aren’t using it, or it can roll out to soak up plenty of rays. When it is folded up it measures 10.3” x 3.5”, but it folds out to 20.5” x 23” and it only weighs just a hair over half a pound.

The PowerFilm F-15 600 provides 10 watts (you can get one in 20 watts, too) and operates at 15.4 volts. It can be used to charge electronic devices, to charge or power 12V systems or you can use the battery charger pack to charge your batteries. You can even daisy chain them if you need more power.

This charger will let you take your devices anywhere where there is sun. It has a 3 year warranty, so it must be pretty durable. It better be for the price. You will have to drop $299 to get one of your own

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Destination Pluto: NASA begins a 10-year voyage

WASHINGTON – NASA's first mission to the solar system's last planet is now in a race against time.

Tuesday, the clock starts as the New Horizons spacecraft prepares to hurtle from its Florida launchpad on a 10-year, 3 billion-mile journey to where the roan world of Pluto tracks a frigid course through the borders of the solar system.

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Anonymity on a Disc

By Quinn Norton

To many privacy geeks, it's the holy grail -- a totally anonymous and secure computer so easy to use you can hand it to your grandmother and send her off on her own to the local Starbucks.

That was the guiding principle for the members of kaos.theory security research when they set out to put a secure crypto-heavy operating systems on a bootable CD: a disc that would offer the masses the same level of privacy available to security professionals, but with an easy user interface.

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New RFID Blocking Wallet

Posted by Hemos

If, like me, you're more than a little concerned about the privacy aspects of RFID there's a useful enthusiast's web page on making your own RFID-blocking wallet. OK, it's never going to win any prizes for beauty or garner fashion awards but should be effective and seems perfectly practical.

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New consumer fuel cell is close to market

By: T.O. Whenham

There has been a lot of buzz in the last couple of weeks about Direct Methanol Fuel Cells. Panasonic was one of the companies with a prototype to show off and smaller, consumer-ready items in the works. Well, it turns out that DMFCs aren’t the only item on the horizon. In fact, one alternative will be ready for us well before the DMFCs. Medis Technology is readying for market a disposable fuel cell powered by a borohydride alkaline solution instead of methanol.

The Medis fuel cells will be able to provide you with 30 hours of talk time for your mobile phone or 60 hours for your MP3 player. When all the juice has been sucked out of the cell it looks like you just chuck it and buy a new one. It might sound like it would hurt to throw something like that away, but it will cost less than $20, so it won’t be too bad. You’ll have to wait until the end of the year to get one (or several) of your own, though.

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Mainstream calibration with $89 huey

by Marc Perton

Photographers, graphic designers and other pros have long used color-calibration tools like the ColorVision Spyder to make sure that what they see on their display matches their final output as closely as possible. Now, Pantone hopes to bring the calibration experience to mainstream consumers, with the huey, an $89 device that the company says is targeted at "digital photo enthusiasts, gamers and any computer user wanting absolute color and clarity." While we can see prosumer digicam users showing some interest in this, point-and-shooters who print at CVS are unlikely to fall for the pitch. And we really don't see the gaming connection; gamers are likely to push their own gamut, and not worry about what color Pantone tells them that blood on their screen needs to be in order to match a print profile.

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Snap&Send digital postcard

by Evan Blass

Why send someone a generic postcard with a cheesy canned photo when you can break them off a 'card containing a set of your very own (but also cheesy) vacation photos? Australian University of NSW student Stuart Calvey thinks folks would gladly shell out $25 for what is basically a disposable digicam in a thin, mailable, cardboard housing. His Snap Send digital postcard concept is making the rounds on the web, which may help the already-accomplished inventor (he won a Packaging Council of Australia award in 2003 for another product) find a backer for his innovative idea. Calvey envisions commercial Snap Sends as bare-bones two megapixel cameras (sorry folks, you don't even get a "delete" option here) with decent LCDs that can be propped up by the recipient for a slideshow or taken to a photo lab for developing prints. We know that someone who's reading this has the clout to make this project happen, so here's your chance to grab this kid's idea for a song before he loses his youthful naivete and goes all Apple with the lawyers and the patents and stuff.

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New spacecraft ion engine tested

The European Space Agency and the Australian National University have successfully tested a new design of spacecraft ion engine that dramatically improves performance over present thrusters and marks a major step forward in space propulsion capability.

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15 Tech Concepts for 2006

Predicting the future is kind of like predicting the weather. Weather men pretty much know what's going to happen tomorrow but after that it gets a little fuzzy. Popular Mechanics has put out a good article about what they think this next year will hold. The article covers the top fifteen predictions in the categories of auto, communications, energy, computing, and science.

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First Galileo signals received

The pioneer spacecraft in Europe's satellite-navigation system, Galileo, has taken a major step towards securing the network's allocated frequencies. Giove-A transmitted the first of its navigational signals to ground stations in the UK and Belgium on Thursday. The UK-built satellite was launched on 28 December from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It is a demonstrator for the network that will give Europe its own version of the US Global Positioning System.

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Wikipedia Plagiarism Ends Journalist's Career

Tim Ryan, a 21 year veteran entertainment columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin, was fired yesterday after an investigation revealed multiple instances of his incorporating unattributed paragraphs from other sources. This case is unique in that it was first revealed by Wikipedia after an attentive Wikipedia editor noted similarities between a Wikipedia article and one of Ryan's columns. However he wasn't fired until after other news outlets started to run the story. Sadly, though the Star-Bulletin has admitted to the plagiarism, they failed to publicly acknowledge that Wikipedia was responsible for bringing this situation to light.

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NASA capsule returns to Earth

By ALICIA CHANG

A space capsule ferrying the first comet dust samples to Earth parachuted onto a remote stretch of desert before dawn Sunday, drawing cheers from elated scientists.

The touchdown capped a seven-year journey by NASA's Stardust spacecraft, which zipped past a comet in 2004 to capture minute dust particles and store them in the capsule.

"It's an absolutely fantastic end to the mission," said Carlton Allen, a scientist with NASA's

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