Twenty years ago, nearly all the world’s nations agreed to significantly reduce the loss of biodiversity by 2010. (The United States signed the accord but, like other treaties, the Senate has not ratified it.) Well, it’s 2010 and we are nowhere near that goal. While the Convention on Biological Diversity is currently meeting to update its targets for 2020, a new study released by Science says one-fifth of the world’s vertebrate species are threatened with extinction. But the good news is things would be a whole lot worse if we had done nothing at all.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Making natural products at industrial scale with plant stem cells
Vegetarians might not like hearing this, but… plants have stem cells too. Like ours, these stem cells are undifferentiated and grow indefinitely in culture. And also like ours, they hold therapeutic promise, since many drugs and insecticides, not to mention perfumes and pigments, are derived from plants.These products are currently produced using plant cells grown in suspension cultures that have undergone a process called dedifferentiation, which eliminates any specialized properties (like those of root or leaf cells). But these dedifferentiated cells don’t grow that well. They tend to form clumps in large growing tanks, and the process can induce genetic changes in them. These problems inspired recent work described in Nature Biotechnology, in which scientists have isolated and cultured plant stem cells, called cambial meristematic cells (CMCs).
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Tablets eating netbooks abroad, not just in US
Pity the poor netbook. It used to be cool, but every month there's yet more talk of the new kid on the block, the tablet, stealing its marketshare. And it's not just that consumers are deciding between a netbook and a tablet, and picking the latter over the former—the ongoing economic slump also factors into the steady trickle of reports, anecdotes, and industry executive comments on the phenomenon. The latest data point supporting the tablet/netbook cannibalization trend comes from IDC, which attributes some of the softness in PC sales in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) to tablet sales both real and planned. From the group's most recent report:
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Envy stimulates the economy—and is why you bought your iPhone
The year is 2007 and your friend pulls a shiny new iPhone out of his pocket. It's the first one you've ever seen, and you stare agape as he lovingly taps the screen. A feeling starts to bubble up inside—contempt? Rage? Hunger? No—it's that biblically reviled emotion we know as envy.While it's no secret that envy often drives us to action, it's only recently that scientists have realized there might be a brighter side to envy, at least for businesses. Some assume that generating envy will boost sales, but just as often pushing for envy seems to create resentment and sales slump. According to a recent study that involved perception of iPhones, this envy response can actually be tuned based on different factors that push consumers toward or away from a product.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Comcast gives "TV anywhere" a nudge in the right direction
Cable operator Comcast has opened up its Web-based portal for TV shows to everyone—another small crack in the wall between television delivered over the air versus via the Internet.Fancast.com has programs from about 90 content partners, and for Comcast customers access to the premium digital channels they pay for as well. The array of programming is a small subset of 225 already available from Hulu, the Web-based video service whose backer include NBC Universal, News Corp. (Fox) and The Walt Disney Company (ABC), even though Hulu serves up much of the programming on Xfinity. But unlike Hulu, XFinity includes programming from CBS.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Sour ruling for LimeWire as court says to turn off P2P functionality
LimeWire's days as a major player on the P2P scene appear to be over. Judge Kimba Wood has issued an injunction forcing LimeWire to disable "the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality" of its software.After years of litigation—the RIAA first sued LimeWire in 2006—Judge Wood ruled in the RIAA's favor this past May. In granting the RIAA's motion for summary judgment, she found that LimeWire was liable for inducing copyright infringement, despite asking users to affirm that they were not using the software for that purpose. The company didn't help its case, as it made little to no effort to police infringement by its users via fingerprinting or content-filtering.
LimeWire had thoughts of going straight in August 2007, and planned to launch its own music store selling 256Kbps DRM-free tracks. Unsurprisingly, the labels weren't willing to offer their wares on a service also known for warez.
The P2P stalwart is still holding out hope of transforming into a legitimate destination for music, though. "While this is not our ideal path, we hope to work with the music industry in moving forward," a LimeWire spokesperson told Ars. "We look forward to embracing necessary changes and collaborating with the entire music industry in the future." The spokesperson also noted that the company isn't "shutting down," but it will be using its "best efforts" to stop supporting and distributing P2P software and to ramp up filtering.
LimeWire now faces a January trial for damages, and the RIAA is looking forward to compensation for the "billions" of infringements that took place. "The court has now signed an injunction that will start to unwind the massive piracy machine that LimeWire and Gorton used to enrich themselves immensely," an RIAA spokesperson told Ars. "In January, the court will conduct a trial to determine the appropriate level of damages necessary to compensate the record companies for the billions and billions of illegal downloads that occurred through the LimeWire system."
The injunction marks another victory in the RIAA's campaign against file-sharing. As recently as two-and-a-half years ago, LimeWire was the most popular P2P app out there, and it's still widely used. Disabling the functionality that file-sharers find useful will no doubt cause usage to bottom out, and some LimeWire users are likely to "go straight." But there are numerous other places for the discerning pirate to find illicit content, including BitTorrent, private hubs, and Usenet. Big Content's never-ending game of Whac-A-Mole continues.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Nook Color features LCD display, shorter battery life at $249
A new version of Barnes and Noble's Nook was announced today at a special event in New York City. The Nook Color, which B&N is billing as a hybrid tablet and e-reader device, has a full-color 7" LCD screen and will be joining the original e-ink Nook in B&N's lineup. The Nook Color still has built-in WiFi and runs on Android, but lacks 3G support. B&N has announced its plans to launch a Nook Developer program that will allow for third-party Android apps to get some Nook screen time. The Nook software is also newly integrated with Facebook and Twitter.
The new "VividView" display in the Nook Color has a 1024x600 resolution with 16 million colors, as well as a lamination film on its surface to help reduce glare from the backlight. Of course, the partial evolution into a tablet means a tabletization of the battery life: the Nook Color gets only eight hours of use with the WiFi off (for comparison, the regular Nook gets 10 days with WiFi off).
The Nook Color starts at $249, with the first-generation Nook still at $149. B&N is taking preorders now, and the device will ship starting November 19.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Premier chat 007: Ars talks with the Entertainment Software Association
This live chat is only available to Ars Premier subscribers and begins at 1:00pm CDT on Thursday, October 28 (see it in your own timezone). This is a rare chance to speak directly with someone from the US gaming industry's trade group, and have your questions answered about the state of gaming today.
We've spoken with Mr. Taylor about the politics of gaming in the past and he's a lively, informed speaker; this should be a lot of fun for everyone involved.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Judge blocks North Carolina attempt to get Amazon sales data
Like many states, North Carolina collects a “use tax” on its residents' out-of-state purchases; it's essentially a sales tax, and is charged at the same rate. As Internet commerce took off in 1999 and more money went out of state, North Carolina moved the use tax from a separate form and put it right in the middle of an individual's tax return. To be extra helpful, the state also provided a table that filers could use to estimate how much tax they owe. After all, who has a handy list of every item they ordered through a catalog or over the Internet for a given year? In 2009, the tax was expanded to cover digital purchases of music, movies, and books. The state estimates that each resident owes 0.0675 percent of taxable income to cover the tax (those who don't want to accept this estimate are free to enter their own number, but lying about the amount opens you to an audit). This is pretty low—with $45,000 of taxable income, the use tax is $30—but it can still be hard to get people to pay up when most residents consider out-of-state purchases to be tax-free.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
New tech may bring near-gigabit speeds to DSL... someday
In the US at least, if you don't already have fiber to your home, it looks like you're very unlikely to get it any time soon, since the telcos are shying away from the cost of installing that infrastructure. Unfortunately, that leaves these same companies at risk of falling behind cable ISPs, which are starting to push speeds that only fiber can currently match. There may be a bit of good news for telcos that are uninterested in replacing their copper infrastructure, however, as a number of technologies are now being demonstrated that can push DSL speeds to well beyond the 100Mbps mark, with most of the announcements being timed for this week's Broadband World Forum.To understand the challenge of getting that bandwidth out of a pair of copper wires, it helps to have a basic understanding of DSL, which uses the paired copper wires that were deployed for standard phone service. A signal can be sent transmitted as a difference between the two wires. Standard phone service uses one frequency band to transmit its signals, but that leaves many other frequencies free to act as potential carriers of data signals. The primary limit of DSL is distance, as the problems inherent to DSL degrade the signal slightly with each meter.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Despite lack of gaming vision, Jobs angered when Microsoft bought Bungie
Microsoft scored a huge victory when the company bought the then-Mac-centric developer Bungie in 2000 and put it to work creating new games for its upcoming Xbox platform. According to Microsoft's Ed Fries, that purchase angered Steve Jobs, who knew he was losing one of the platform's best developers. Even as Microsoft worked quickly to calm the situation, Jobs seemed to understand he lost something, although he might not have known how important Bungie would become.The truth is, Apple has historically been unfriendly to gamers and gaming, resulting in many great lost opportunities to lead in the gaming space. Losing Bungie is one example, but Jobs' indifference to gaming also helped create one of the largest gaming publishers in the world.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Expedia, Travelocity say Google has crossed the "creepy line"
Google's proposed buyout of airline fare search company ITA for $700 million sparked plenty of controversy when it was announced earlier this year, but now opponents of the deal have made their dislike official by forming the group FairSearch. The backers are travel technology companies like Travelocity, Kayak, Hotwire, and Expedia, all of whom worry that Google could freeze them out of important ITA technology or could alter its search results to keep traffic away from sites that don't pay up. ITA licenses its technology to many of the biggest players in the airline industry, including major airlines like United and Southwest. It's perhaps best known for its ticket matrix that finds and displays fare options in an easy-to-read grid.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Office 2011 for Mac arrives with Outlook, online collaboration
Microsoft announced Tuesday that Office 2011 for Mac is now available. The update to the ubiquitous productivity suite includes a number of major additions, including the return of Visual Basic scripting, the replacement of Entourage with a Mac version of Outlook, and integration with Microsoft's online collaboration tools.In addition to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint—essentially the standards for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations in the business world—Office 2011 also includes a brand new version of Outlook, the combination e-mail, calendar, and contact management application. Outlook 2011 is engineered to connect with Microsoft's Exchange enterprise e-mail servers, so Mac users in corporate environments will most appreciate the change.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
PS3's The Shoot with PlayStation Move: $40 well spent
Did Sony really just release a light gun game that you can play with your kids? The Shoot has a fun premise: you're on a movie set, firing at cardboard cut-outs of bad guys. If you hit an innocent bystander, the director gets angry. If he gets too annoyed, the set is shut down. The graphics are nice and detailed, filled with little touches that add character to each scene and remind you that you're in what are essentially fake surroundings.
Each section is fun, but you can blast through each one in a half an hour or so, meaning you can see everything the game has to offer in a few hours. Don't let that faze you though, as you can then play with a friend in the Score Attack mode, or continue to play the level for more points. If you find all the pieces of a movie poster in each scene, you unlock a bonus minigame that adds a little more value. There are also sections that add some neat motion controls, such as a quick-draw contest, and the ability to lean back and forth to dodge incoming projectiles.
It's all much more fun than expected, but the pointer on the screen can be a little laggier than I was comfortable with—although I got used to it very quickly. The game is full of neat little jokes and fun moments, and you can tell the designers had a ton of fun throwing ideas at the game. It might be short, but you'll want to come back and keep playing each of the five movies, and the $40 price tag sure doesn't hurt.
Also: be sure to pick up Sony's gun attachment. Boy does it help with this game.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Giant virus found in tiny predator
A few years back, a giant virus made news because it blurred the boundaries between what we consider living cells and viruses. The Mimivirus, which infected a freshwater amoeba, had a genome that contained over a million base pairs of DNA, and carried a set of genes that were previously only found in living cells. In a PNAS paper that will be released later this week, researchers describe the genome of an oceanic mimivirus cousin that has the second largest viral genome ever seen. It was apparently discovered off the coast of Texas; you can insert your own jokes here. The virus was found in a single-celled host that preys on the bacteria and plankton at the base of the food chain. The new find, Cafeteria roenbergensis virus (CroV), has a genome that's over 700,000 base pairs long (700 kilobases, or kb). It's linear, and the ends are filled with repetitive DNA, which the authors speculate acts a bit like telomeres do in human cells, protecting the important DNA. The gene-containing region is about 630kb, and encodes about 550 proteins, along with a handful of transfer RNAs (part of the protein production machinery).
The virus also carries some molecular parasites called inteins. These pieces of DNA insert into the middle of genes and encode a sequence that ends up in the middle of its host's protein once the gene is translated. This doesn't actually disrupt the host's protein, though—amazingly, the intein protein sequence can cut itself out of the surrounding host protein and link its two ends together as if the intein were never there. The excised intein protein then helps ensure that the DNA sequence that made it gets inherited and spreads.
About half of the virus' genes are similar to those of something from either other giant viruses or living cells, with pieces from all three domains of life (eukaryotes, bacteria, and archaea). But the majority of genes have no known function, so it's hard to know what to make of them. Some of the ones that are present, however, are pretty sophisticated. The virus has its own DNA repair system, and can hijack a system its host uses to destroy unwanted proteins; it uses this to get rid of the host's defense proteins. It also seems to have picked up 38kb from a bacteria (potentially, one of the meals of its host) that encodes for a pathway that attaches sugars to proteins.
When mimivirus was first identified, some of its discoverers looked at its large size and distinct genome and decided that viruses like that may have participated in the origin of life. CroV, the new virus, is actually the mimivirus' closest known relative, but the two viruses only share about a third of their genes, and many of the critical ones have come from completely different species. Thus, the viruses seem to have been built from a small, ancient core that has undergone a lot of horizontal gene transfers that provided them with genes from living cells.
This doesn't rule out a possible ancient existence for this group of viruses, but it does suggest that the ancient versions probably looked very little like the modern ones. Which probably means that the argument over their role in the origin of life is going to be very difficult to settle, and may go on for years.
PNAS, 2010. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1007615107 (About DOIs).
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Is "Kewl Breeze" a superkid, a sneaker, or a commercial?
How commercialized do we want our children's television to be? That thorny question has reared itself again, as the Federal Communications Commission ponders whether to accept the Skechers USA sponsored Zevo-3 cartoon series as legitimate fare for children on pay TV. The show premiered on October 11 on the Nicktoons network but, even before then, the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood petitioned the FCC to take it off the air.Zevo-3's teenage characters "Kewl Breeze," "Elastika," and "Z-Strap" began their careers not as fictional superheroes, but as sneakers made and marketed by Skechers, CCFC notes.
"Skechers created these characters to promote specific lines of shoes to children and have used them extensively in marketing campaigns aimed at children," the group's filing continues. "For children, the characters Z-Strap, Elastika, and Kewl Breeze embody the shoe lines they represent, so much so that retailers report that kids often refer to the shoes by character name rather than by the shoe model."
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Galaxy Zoo shows how well crowdsourced citizen science works
The Internet has enabled the public to participate in science in a way that was never possible before. Starting with SETI@home and a growing number of other projects that use the BOINC infrastructure, home computer users could contribute processing time to actual science projects and, in return, get a glimpse of some of the analysis that was being performed on their computers. But these projects left the public as passive participants, watching as their computers did all the heavy lifting. There are many problems where humans are actually better than computers, and a new set of projects is using the Internet to harness the abilities of non-scientists to contribute towards a scientific goal. The best known project of this sort may be the highly successful FoldIt project, which turned protein energy minimizations into a game, enabling home users to help solve protein structures that could sometimes trip up a computer. But a number of other citizen science projects are being hosted on the Zooniverse site, named after one of its most successful projects, the Galaxy Zoo. Robert Simpson, a post-doc at Oxford, described the Galaxy Zoo experience at a recent Science Online meeting, and generously shared the slides from his talk.
Galaxy Zoo has been an attempt to get citizen science to classify all the galaxies present in various data sets, such as the Sloan and Hubble surveys, as elliptical, spiral, etc. in order to give astronomers a better sense of just what's out there. In the process, however, the citizens have also proven adept at identifying some unusual things that appear in these images and, in doing so, have contributed to the publication of at least five astronomy papers.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Self-appointed guardians of TV decency fall on hard times
It appears that the decency group that targets dirty tweeters, naughty Android apps, and anything else that gets between its Victorian cross hairs is having a rough patch. The New York Times reports that the Parents Television Council's salad days are over. The recession has caught up with the PTC, as have internal troubles and the fact that things just aren't going the Southern California nonprofit's way in the federal courts.Among The Times findings:
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Vatican to rich countries: stop "excessive zeal" for IP rights
On September 21, the Vatican observer at the UN, Mons. Silvano Maria Tomasi, addressed the 48th general assembly of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva (English translation). He let the group know that the Vatican supports intellectual property rights (IPR) because such protection "recognizes the dignity of man and his work" and because it contributes to "the growth of the individual personality and to the common good."But Tomasi then went on to make a point we've harped on repeatedly here at Ars: supporting IP rights in general does not always mean supporting tougher patent and copyright rules; "better" does not always mean "stronger."
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
French three strikes agency getting 25,000 complaints a day
Nobody knows how many file sharers are getting warnings from France's new P2P infringement authority, but Billboard.biz says that French labels are sending 25,000 complaints a day to Hadopi, the agency enforcing that country's "three strikes" law. The figure comes from David El Sayegh, the head of France's music label trade association, who insists that he doesn't know how many warnings have gone out as a consequence of the stream of complaints. "It is too early," Sayegh told Billboard, but also says that he expects to have an assessment of the impact Hadopi is having on digital sales by early next year.
We're presuming that rights holders hope that legal digital sales will go up, and alleged infringements will go down. Maybe so, but a study released just after the law's passage last year suggested an uptick in areas the legislation doesn't cover, like one-click downloading sites such as Rapidshare.
France's tough online infringement law allows Hadopi to, following a complaint, track down the user in question, initiate a warning process, and ultimately boot the consumer off his or her ISP if the subscriber doesn't comply with instructions to behave.
"Insiders," Billboard reports, say HADOPI is moving cautiously in response to the complaints: "There were fears that their hotline would be overloaded by people calling after having received a warning, or by people protesting at the HADOPI system. Billboard.biz understands the hotline remained much quieter than initially feared."
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
No base station required: peer-to-peer WiFi Direct is go
The Wi-Fi Alliance on Monday announced that its direct peer-to-peer networking version of WiFi, called WiFi Direct, is now available on several new WiFi devices. The Alliance is also announcing that it has begun the process of certifying devices for WiFi Direct compatibility.The organization has already certified a handful of WiFi cards from Atheros, Broadcom, Intel, Ralink, Realtek, and Cisco, as well as the Cisco Aironet 1240 Series access points. These devices will also be used in the test suite to certify that future devices are compatible with the protocol. Any device passing the tests will be designated "Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Wi-Fi Direct."
"We designed Wi-Fi Direct to unleash a wide variety of applications which require device connections, but do not need the internet or even a traditional network," said Edgar Figueroa, CEO of the Wi-Fi Alliance, in a statement. The certification program will ensure compatibility with the standard across a range of devices. WiFi Direct devices can also connect to older "Wi-Fi CERTIFIED" devices for backward compatibility, so chances are your current equipment will work with newer devices using the protocol.
The new protocol allows compatible devices to connect in a peer-to-peer fashion, either one-to-one or in a group, to share data with each other. The Alliance noted that many users carry a lot of data with them on portable devices like smartphones; WiFi Direct will enable users to connect these devices with each other to share that data without the need for a local WiFi network.
Though ad-hoc WiFi and Bluetooth protocols serve similar purposes, WiFi direct offers the longest range and fastest throughput, and includes enterprise-class management and security features.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Magnetic monopoles outed, powerless to help grand unified theory
In the last year, the scientific community has seen an uptick in papers about magnetic monopoles, an elementary particle that could allow scientists to move forward on their grand unification theories. Last week, a group of researchers published a paper in Nature Physics that detailed their real-space observations of magnetic monopoles in a material called "spin ice." But since the monopoles are limited to this system, it's debatable whether these are really the monopoles that theorists are looking for.Magnetic monopoles were first posited as part of a quantum theory by Paul Dirac in 1931, who thought of them as a magnetic analog to an electron or proton. Instead of carrying a single type of electric charge, a magnetic monopole would have, as the name suggests, only one pole, north or south. This sounded logical, but reality hasn't been cooperative—while it's possible to chop a molecule into electron and proton pieces, chopping up a magnetically dipoled object just creates lots of dipole pieces.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Blizzcon 2010: Diablo 3 demon hunters, PvP, and Protoss iron chefs
Another Blizzcon has come and gone and, as per usual, the annual convention of all things Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft featured quite a bit of interesting news. Diablo III is getting some new features and a new class, while Starcraft II is getting Blizzard-developed mods. Here's a rundown of the biggest news to come out of Blizzcon 2010.Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Porn pros hope to squelch online piracy by 2012
The film and music businesses couldn't stop file-sharing, but the porn industry has a plan to drive piracy into the shadows in 15 months or less. Can DogFart, Lords of Porn, and Naughty Bank succeed where others have failed?They certainly hope so. To that end, a company called Pink Visual rounded up a huge collection of porn studios and lawyers for a "content protection retreat" (CPR) in Tucson last week, one designed to get the industry working together on an anti-P2P strategy. CPR was designed to "revive" the business, and backers hope hope they can "significantly reduce digital piracy of adult content and to effectively drive those who engage in adult content piracy completely underground by January 2012."
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Ashes to ashes, Devo to dust: RIP Sony Walkman
When I was a youngster, albums were most often heard in order. 8-track tapes were the only technology that could jump from channel to channel; LPs and cassette tapes were strictly sequential-listening affairs. But one electronic device made the cassette tape a must-have for any young music fan. It was the Sony Walkman, and today we gather to memorialize its passing as Sony has decided to cease sales of the cassette player in the land of its birth, Japan.It's 1981. I've got a stereo system in my suburban Denver bedroom. I'm rocking a turntable, AM/FM receiver, and cassette player/recorder. As a young music fan, my vinyl library includes the likes of Devo's Freedom of Choice, Genesis' Abacab, Blondie's Eat to the Beat, and Rush's Moving Pictures. On each album there were songs I loved, such as Devo's "Girl U Want" and "Whip It," and songs I would rather not hear, like "Ton o' Luv" from the same album. My cassette player gave me the ability to cherry pick favorites from different albums, creating proto-playlists in a predigital era. We didn't even call them mixtapes back then—they were just collections of my favorite songs.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
No comments:
Post a Comment