Week in science: water of the past and lighting of the future
Astronomers find largest water reservoir ever, 12 billion years in the past: Astronomers have found the largest reservoir of water ever discovered in the Universe orbiting a distant black hole.
The future of lighting: walls of light, LEDs, and glowing trees: Innovation has come to the humble lightbulb, and the future belongs to color-changing LEDs, walls of glowing OLED panels, and... bioluminescent trees? Here's what's next in lighting tech.
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MPEG LA: 12 companies own patents essential to Google's VP8 codec
MPEG LA, the self-styled one stop shop for motion video patent licenses, says that 12 different companies have come forward with patents "essential" to the VP8 algorithm championed by Google as a royalty-free compression standard. The organization met with these companies in June to discuss the formation of a patent pool, though there has not yet been a decision to determine whether a pool should be formed, or what its terms and conditions might be.
The organization started the search for VP8 patents in February, with the initial call for companies to come forward ending in March. That deadline came and went without comment from the company, so streamingmedia.com interviewed a spokesman by e-mail to find out what the current situation was. MPEG LA did not disclose which 12 companies held patents it felt to be essential to VP8, nor did it say how many patents there were in total. The group also did not say how many patents had been submitted for evaluation only to be deemed inessential.
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Appeals Court overrules lower court, upholds breast cancer gene test
A bit over two years ago, a large collection of interested parties joined together with the ACLU to challenge a practice that had become business as usual: the patenting of human genes. The group filed a suit that targeted a specific set of patents: those used by Myriad Genetics to control the market for tests of the BRCA breast cancer genes. In a surprise result, the judge overseeing the case issued a sweeping ruling that not only voided Myriad's patents, but seemed to put all gene patents at risk. Now that decision has been reversed, as an Appeals Court has upheld the patents in question.
The initial ruling that voided Myriad's patents relied on a novel interpretation of what was being patented. Patents on natural substances are allowed if the process of obtaining them is transformative, meaning the end result differs significantly from the original, natural state. In order to do genetic testing, the judge reasoned, it didn't matter which particular DNA molecule was obtained or in what manner—what you needed was the information conveyed by the gene, in terms of its protein sequence, not a specific piece of DNA. And that information is a natural product, which can't be patented unless it was transformed in some way. Since the genetic test doesn't involve any transformations, then the patents were invalid. Since many other gene-focused patents relied on this sort of information, rather than the actual DNA, this decision seemed to place many of them at risk.
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Apple, Samsung top smartphone sales as feature phones decline
The touchscreen smartphone revolution continues to shake up the mobile phone industry, with Apple displacing Nokia as the top smartphone vendor in the world. In fact, Apple has also displaced longtime mobile industry players like Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and RIM to become the number four mobile phone vendor globally. But Apple's rival Samsung, holding the number two spot in both mobile and smartphone market share, is poised to take both crowns if its massive sales growth can be maintained.
The overall mobile phone market grew just over 11 percent year over year for the second quarter of 2011, for a total of 365 million units, according to market research firm IDC. Growth has been slower than expected, perhaps due to a 4 percent drop in feature phone shipments. That's the first decline in feature phone sales since the third quarter of 2009.
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Post-PC TV: how and where we watch Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube
Not so long ago, it was pretty hard to watch online streaming video on anything but a personal computer. It was a big deal that Apple’s iPhone came packed with an integrated app for YouTube. Last year, the walls came down, as video services and device makers rolled out new native applications for one machine after another, from phones and tablets to smart TVs and set-top boxes.
I love this kind of gadget news. I lived off it writing for Gadget Lab last fall. But shiny apps and feature wars are one thing—whether viewers actually use these services and how they interact with them is very different. Bit by bit, the data is starting to come in.
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Feathered dino find leaves status of Archaeopteryx up in the air
Yet another feathered dinosaur has joined the throng of those discovered in recent years, but this one bears some bad news for the beloved Archaeopteryx, which may not occupy a pivotal location in the transition from theropod dinosaurs to birds after all.
Archaeopteryx, for those without a replica hanging on their wall, is an iconic feathered dinosaur which caused quite a stir when it was discovered in 1861 in Germany. It was especially remarkable because it arrived just two years after Charles Darwin finally published On the Origin of Species. Archaeopteryx was immediately seen as a transitional fossil that supported Darwin’s theory. In the fourth edition of his book, Darwin wrote, “Hardly any recent discovery shows more forcibly than this how little we as yet know of the former inhabitants of the world.”
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"Linking is not a crime": Czech Pirate Party declares war on Big Content
Outraged at the decision to sue a Czech high school student for €5 million for running a site linking to pirated material, the Czech Pirate Party has launched Tipnafilm.cz, a linking site of its very own. With the new site, "we unequivocally declare open war on the Anti-Piracy Union," said Czech Pirate Party Vice President Mikuláš Ferjencik.
The new site links to, but does not host, pirated films, just as the student-operated site did. However, Ferjencik is claiming at least one difference: the new site has ten times more links. The site is operating under the slogan "linking is not a crime"; the Czech Pirate Party believes that mere linking to infringing content is not a crime under Czech law, though this claim is yet to be tested in the Czech courts.
The Czech Anti-Piracy Union sued the 16-year-old student from Liberec claiming his links to pirated films had caused economic harm worth millions of Euros. Ferjencik claims that the Union has called the student the "greatest pirate in the country," a description he calls "absurd." By creating a new linking site operated on a scale far grander than the student's site, he hopes that the Union will "stop bullying the under-aged," and instead "aim its preposterous claims at the Pirate Party."
Ferjencik also hinted that this may merely be the first step in its campaign against the Anti-Piracy Union; the Czech Pirate Party issued no official statement about the site, to "avoid revealing its strategy going forward."
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AT&T to begin throttling heaviest data users on October 1 (Updated)
Move over, Verizon: AT&T may begin throttling the data speeds of its heaviest wireless users as soon as October of this year. The move remains unconfirmed as of yet, but sources speaking to 9to5Mac claim that AT&T will begin implementing a network congestion plan similar to other carriers in order to battle the 80x increase in data traffic it has seen since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.
According to the site's sources, AT&T's throttling plan will mirror that of Verizon's, which was implemented in February just before the introduction of the Verizon iPhone. Under that system, Verizon reduces the data throughput speeds for the five percent of customers who "use an extraordinary amount of data." The throttling typically lasts through the remainder of the current billing cycle and returns to normal at the beginning of the next one, though under some circumstances, it's possible for the reduced speeds to spill over into the next billing cycle as well.
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