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May 2, 2003
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Can fish really feel pain after all?
Fish really do feel pain, according to a study conducted by a team of scientists from the Roslin Institute and Edinburgh University, published on Wednesday by the Royal Society.
The findings by the institute - famous for producing Dolly the sheep, the first cloned adult mammal - instantly renewed controversy about the morality of angling in a long-running debate in Britain.
Lynne Sneddon, formerly at the Roslin Institute and now in Liverpool, found in a study undertaken with Victoria Braithwaite and Michael Gentle that rainbow trout have nociceptors - nerve receptors that respond preferentially to tissue damaging stimuli.
"We found 58 receptors located on the face and head of the rainbow trout," Sneddon said.
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Robots Get Their Own Hall of Fame
'R2D2, meet NavLab, the truck that steers itself.'
That could be the scene at the induction ceremonies at the new Robot Hall of Fame.
Created by Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science and Robotics Institute in collaboration with the Carnegie Science Center and the Pennsylvania state tourism and economic development departments, the hall will honour noteworthy robots, both real and fictional, with interactive exhibits.
Pittsburgh, already touted as the Detroit of robotics, thus could become the field's Cooperstown as well.
The hall will induct its first honorees this fall and initially will be housed at the university. But it may be included, along with a large robotics exhibit and arena, in a proposed expansion of the Carnegie Science Center, said James Morris, dean of Carnegie Mellon's computer science school.
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World Health Organization experts arrive to deal with SARS
Two World Health Organization (WHO) experts arrived in Taipei last night to help with Taiwan's outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, according government and WHO officials.
WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said in a telephone interview late last night that experts with the communicable disease section of the WHO were in Taiwan to do a "preliminary assessment" of the SARS outbreak.
The experts are scheduled to stay in Taiwan for "a few days, or maybe a week" for their work, which was being done out of humanitarian concern, Thompson said.
The WHO will then decide whether it will dispatch more personnel to Taiwan, he said.
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Station crew lands safely in Soyuz
Two American astronauts joined their Russian crewmate in a Soyuz capsule on Saturday for transport from the space station back to Earth -- the first time the U.S. space program has tasked the Russians for a ride back from orbit.
Commander Ken Bowersox and science officer Don Pettit had trained to fly in the Soyuz, but only in an emergency.
The capsule the men flew home in had spent the last six months serving as the station's emergency escape system. A new crew flew to the outpost a week ago in another Soyuz that will remain berthed at the outpost.
Bowersox, Pettit and cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin landed at 10:07 p.m. ET in Kazakhstan. Four helicopters beelined to the landing site to help the men out. The capsule, however, landed about 30 kilometers away from its intended target and the rescue teams were still looking for the capsule more than 35 minutes after touchdown, according to NASA spokesman Kyle Herring in Moscow.
"We have a successful landing," a NASA flight controller told the new station crew.
"Very good, " replied astronaut Ed Lu. "That's great news."
Lu will spend the next six months in space with just one crewmate, commander Yuri Malenchenko. It is the first time the International Space Station is being left in the hands of just two people. NASA and its partners decided to cut one person from the crew in an effort to save water, food and other supplies until the shuttle fleet returns to service, as most of the station's gear is transported by the space shuttles.
Malenchenko formally took over command of the station in a ceremony Saturday morning.
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Mouse Stem Cells Grow Into Eggs
Mouse embryonic stem cells turned spontaneously into eggs in an experiment that may point toward a new source of eggs for therapeutic cloning and perhaps remove a major obstacle from using stem cells to treat disease.
Without using any special chemicals or growth stimulants, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania said stem cells from mouse embryos will transform into oocytes, or eggs, and then into primitive embryos.
"Most scientists have thought it impossible to grow gametes from stem cells outside the body," said Hans R. Scholer of the school of veterinary medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He said his team found that not only can the stem cells transform into eggs, but those cells then form embryos.
Scholer said the spontaneous embryos could not be used to reproduce mice because they contain an incomplete set of chromosomes, but the eggs probably could be used for cloning.
Embryonic stem cells can grow into virtually any cell in the body. Some researchers have suggested they could be used to grow new heart, liver, brain or pancreas cells which then could be used to revive or repair ailing organs.
To make these new organ cells compatible with a patient, researchers say they would have to clone an embryo using the nucleus from a cell of the patient. At an early stage of development, the new stem cells would be removed and then grown into the target cells.
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AMD to break even in second quarter - Ruiz
The Board of Directors of AMD held its annual shareholder meeting yesterday with CEO Dr Hector Ruiz claiming the firm is on track to break even in the second quarter of this year.
He also said that seventy per cent of AMD's revenues came from outside the USA.
He said that China is a top priority for the firm and AMD has created an organisational structure aimed at exploiting that market. It had already sold "record" numbers of processors and memory into China, and the joint educational venture it started last year was performing well.
He said that 2002 saw some profound changes in the industry, which he described as "more than just a cyclical decline, but as a sea change in the semiconductor business". He said few companies have what it takes to stay in this industry. AMD had addressed reducing stock levels, its capital spending was to be cut by $150 million this year, and it had reduced its headcount.
"We remain on track to achieve $800 million breakeven in the second quarter," he said.
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William Gibson Talks Blogs
Is there an art to blogging?
I think there is and I don't think I've necessarily mastered it yet! I have got that feeling of when you're working in a new form and you start to feel the edges of it and it's really intuitive. However, if I'm ever going to write another book, I'm going to have to quit doing my blog as I have a hunch it interferes with the ecology of being a novelist.
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Dell 'looking closely' at AMD's Opteron - again
The old 'Dell to offer AMD-based systems' chestnut has been pulled from the roasting tray again following comments made by various senior Dell executives to the effect that the company is taking a very close look at AMD's Opteron chip.
So we have Dell COO Kevin Rollins telling a Merrill Lynch conference that the PC giant is looking at the new 64-bit CPU "very closely". And in a Fortune article on AMD's new baby, Rollins says: "We are looking very closely at AMD's products right now."
The same article notes a comment made by Michael Dell himself at the World Economic Forum, held in Davos, Switzerland earlier this year. "We're open to whatever our customers want," he said at the end of a discussion about Dell using AMD's chips.
Now there's no doubt AMD would very much like to have Dell on board, as would the company's many fans. Apart from IBM, AMD has no top-tier server vendor support for Opteron, and if it's to build credibility with business buyers, that's exactly what it needs. AMD may have a good reputation in the consumer PC space, it has relatively little standing in the business computing arena, particular in the server segment.
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Shuttle's Worms Found Thriving in Debris
As NASA begins closing down its primary shuttle debris collection sites, a surprising and symbolic find has heartened the team tasked with the grim and challenging chore of piecing together the wreckage: worms, packed aboard the shuttle as an experiment, not only survived Columbia's breakup and free-fall, but thrived.
"It's really wonderful," said Terri Lomax, director of NASA's fundamental space biology program at the agency's Washington, D.C. headquarters. "We never expected this."
Lomax's research team at Ames Research Center in California received the first samples on Wednesday — pencil-tip sized nematodes that had flown in Petri dishes to test a new synthetic nutrient solution designed to extend the critters' lives.
Evidently it works. The worms, known by their scientific nomenclature as C. elegans, were in their fourth or fifth regeneration since being packed aboard the shuttle for launch on Jan. 16.
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Intel to counter Athlon 3200+ with 3.2GHz P4
AMD will launch its anticipated 400MHz frontside bus Athlon XP processor later this month ahead of the official debut of further 800MHz FSB Pentium 4 parts from Intel.
The AMD's 400MHz FSB chip is based on the company's Barton core. AMD has yet to announce the part, but as we've reported before, company staffers have alluded to and mobo companies have effectively pre-announced.
Some roadmaps detailed by Japanese Web site PC Watch suggested back in March that the 400MHz FSB Athlon would ship in a late-April to mid-May timeframe, and recent reports from CNET and DigiTimes cite sources confirming the latter date.
The initial roadmap report pointed at a 400MHz FSB Athlon XP 3200+. Later reports confirm that rating, and claim that AMD will release a 3000+ version too. The current Athlon XP 3000+, which supports a 333MHz FSB, is priced at $325, so we'd expect the new parts to come in at that price-point or just above it. They are unlikely to be more expensive than the $690 Opteron 242. We'd estimate a price of around $600 for the 3200+.
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Columbia was beyond help
US space agency (Nasa) officials say there was probably nothing that could have been done to save the crew of Columbia, even if mission control had fully realised the jeopardy the astronauts were in.
A report to be handed to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board next week will say the crew were almost certainly doomed from the moment a chunk of foam from the external fuel tank struck the left wing shortly after launch.
Damage to the wing's leading edge that resulted in a "thermal breach" is the most likely candidate for the cause of the shuttle disaster.
Plans for carrying out in-orbit repairs to the shuttles during future flights are now being developed.
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Windows Server 2003 doesn't work with some dual processors
BELIEVE IT or believe it not, there are still some Pentium Pro microprocessors and Pentium IIs in use out there in the real world. Probably quite a lot of them.
What fabulous chips they were.
But the sad fact is that Microsoft and Intel have announced that Windows Server 2003, the latest and greatest Voleware, won't use the massive computing power of the Pentium Pro nor will it support multiple CPUs of the equally fabulous Pentium II.
At install, if you have such systems, you will get a message saying that your multiprocessor configuration is unsupported.
This will no doubt puzzle you until you root around in the Vole's technical burrow, otherwise known as the knowledge base, where you will find this statement, eventually.
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E-voting fails to stir the public in the UK
Electronic voting has failed to make much of an impact on turnout in the local elections.
Turnout nationally was marginally up on the 32% of last year to 37%, with areas offering low-tech postal voting showing the most promising signs of increasing voter interest.
A total of 17 local authorities offered e-voting facilities to up to 1.9 million voters, via internet kiosks, home computers, text message and digital TV.
Vale Royal and Shrewsbury saw significant increases in voter turnout as a result of e-voting but in the other areas the impact was negligible.
E-voting is part of a UK Government effort to get more people to using the ballot box, especially the young who traditionally shun local polls.
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Amazon patent bid targets used goods
Amazon.com has applied for a patent on a system to offer used material, with the bid coming not long after the e-tailer rebutted publishers who thought that its sale of used books would hurt them financially.
The patent application, filed in May 2002, but made public on Thursday, would cover a system that allows people to preorder a used item from an unspecified seller when that item isn't yet offered by anyone else on the site.
The application's timing is interesting because it was filed just two weeks after Amazon came under fire from The Authors Guild, which criticized the company's then year-old system for selling used books, saying it would hurt publishing industry profits. The guild, which is the largest organization representing published authors, asked its members to remove links to Amazon's site.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos responded to the criticism by sending a letter to members of the guild, urging them to support his company's sale of used books because, among other things, it would expand the market for authors.
Amazon spokesman Bill Curry wouldn't elaborate on the patent application except to say that it was unrelated to the spat with the publishers. "They're separate events," Curry said.
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Intel's mobile future: It's in the chips
Intel is quietly manufacturing a new Celeron processor that could determine the direction of its notebook processor line.
The chipmaker is providing Sony with a new custom mobile Celeron chip, dubbed the Ultra Low Voltage 600MHz Celeron processor A, an Intel representative said. Sony is using the chip in a Vaio mini-notebook, sold only in Japan.
Intel is treating the new Celeron as a one-off. The chipmaker manufactures special-edition processors for individual manufacturers frequently. It created another special-edition chip, a 1.6GHz Celeron, for Sony's Vaio W desktop PC. And the company recently launched a new 1.26GHz mobile Celeron chip, based on customer requests.
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Bloggers unite to fight
Web log writers around the world are joining forces to protest against the detention of a fellow blogger.
Iranian Sina Motallebi has been held by the authorities on, so far, unspecified charges and now fellow web users are banding together to press for his release.
An online petition has been set up calling for the release of Mr Motallebi and for a halt to harassment of journalists by the Iranian Government.
The cause has been picked up by other bloggers, who are also calling for his release.
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One line of HTML cripples MS Internet Explorer
Bored of creating buffer overflow possibilities and security gaps an electronic elephant could walk through, Microsoft's Internet Explorer development team has turned its attention to good old HTML. Thankfully, this bug just crashes IE. Embarrassingly for the Vole, it's done with just one malformed line of HTML.
The bug is listed on BugTraq as requiring five lines of HTML but, after a small amount of experimentation, you'll find that it can be done with just one line of HTML. The offending line?
<input type crash>
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Disaster industry finds silver lining
Computer systems backup providers haven't seen the spike in business they might have expected from the Iraq conflict or the SARS outbreak--but that doesn't mean the disaster recovery industry is faltering.
Disaster recovery companies--which prepare clients to restore data and systems after fires, terrorist attacks and other crises--are enjoying other boosts. These include government efforts to better safeguard data in the financial services and healthcare fields, as well as corporations' desire to improve their recovery speeds.
Several years ago, businesses often planned to be able to bounce back from disruptions in 48 hours, said Brian Fowler, director of global business continuity services at Hewlett-Packard. But with so many companies relying on Web sites to take orders and to connect with customers, a 24-hour window is becoming a more common demand.
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Microsoft admits older software insecure and unreliable
The constant complaint from the Microsoft's detractors is that its software is full of bugs. And it's pretty hard to ignore the almost daily security warnings. So it's quite nice to hear the Vole of Redmond finally start admitting that its software is insecure and unreliable.
According to a story on CNN, Microsoft vice president S. Somasegar said Windows Server 2003 "took a much longer time because we did the right thing on security and reliability." That seems like a tacit admission that previous Microsoft operating systems were duff if ever there was one. That operating system was held back by a year because of bug fixing and security improvements. It's nice to know that Microsoft finally admits that the rest of its operating systems could have done with that extra year too.
It all came about because of the Vole's "Trustworthy Computing" scheme. It's not quite certain who is supposed to be trusted in the scheme but we're fairly certain it's not the customer. As part of the scheme, Microsoft spent 10 weeks last year teaching its employees all about planning and thinking about "quality."
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