WASHINGTON—The CIA once maintained a facility to hold high-value terrorism suspects at the Defense Department’s prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but the location is not currently in use, according to officials with knowledge of the highly classified operations.
From Newsday
Books from some of the world’s largest academic libraries are to be scanned and made instantly searchable by Google.
The internet search engine has revealed plans to scan the whole of Michigan and Stanford University libraries, along with some archives at Harvard University and the New York Public Library, all in the US, as well as archives at Oxford University library in the UK.
Google has developed its own technology for scanning books rapidly and in a way that will not physically harm fragile old texts. Details have not been disclosed but Google spokesman Fabio Selmoni describes it as “a combination of digital and mechanical technology”.
The latest version of Honda’s humanoid robot Asimo can perform several new tricks thanks to a hardware overhaul. In a demonstration in Japan, the robot impressed onlookers by showing off the ability to run for the
first time.
A short video released by the Japanese car manufacturer shows Asimov jogging along. Its gait is rather comical and resembles that of a person trying to creep up quietly.
NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts has sponsored some pretty interesting stuff in the past – perhaps most famously the first detailed, realistic design for a space elevator. The latest round of funding support includes a new study on using superconducting magnets to shield space vehicles from the space radiation environment. The lead scientist is MIT professor and former astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman, who has done science on 5 space shuttle missions, and was the first to log over 1000 hours space shuttle flight time.
A new breed of wearable robotic vehicles that envelop drivers are being developed by Japanese car giant Toyota.
The company’s vision for the single passenger in the 21st Century involves the driver cruising by in a four-wheeled leaf-like device or strolling along encased in an egg-shaped cocoon that walks upright on two feet.
The construction of what will be the world’s tallest building is set to begin in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The building contract was awarded to a consortium led by the South Korean Samsung Corporation on Thursday.
The Burj Dubai tower will stand 800 metres tall – just 5 metres shy of half a mile – once completed in 2008. That will be nearly 300 metres taller than the tallest floored building in the world today, the Taipei Tower in Taiwan.
Last year in Toronto, as an outgrowth of their PhD research into biofeedback, cyborgs James Fung and Corey Manders used EEG (brainwave) technology to give a concert in which audience members collectively and unconsciously created music with their minds. Called “DECONcert: Regenerative Music in the Key of EEG,” the result was an experimental and jazz-like form of music that placed human beings into the feedback loop of a computational artistic process.
By Tony Smith
Published Tuesday 14th December 2004 11:17 GMT
The Motion Picture Ass. of America (MPAA) will today launch a legal attack on BitTorrent users in a bid to prevent ripped DVDs being shared across the network.
The lawsuit will target BitTorrent server operators, Reuters reports rather than downloaders, indicating this is less an assault on the technology and more on the people misusing it.
BitTorrent, developed in 2001 by Bram Cohen, speeds file transfers by segmenting the content and downloading parts from multiple users according to who offers the fattest pipes to your machine. As you receive a file, so other BitTorrent users are able to grab it from you in the same way. The idea is to ensure a more even sharing of bandwidth between participants.
From The Register
Apocalyptic fantasy is the heritage it seems of everyone growing up in a monotheistic culture, and no one of us has avoided the stomach turning terror of wondering if the next turn around the corner might lead to disaster. We titillate our fears with movies like The Day After Tomorrow. Hal Lindsay made a fortune preying on that fear. History is full of ridiculous stories of whole communities standing outside awaiting the end of the world on the word of some deranged bookworm’s interpretation of holy scripture.
Liber AL vel Legis
sub figura CCXX
as delivered by XCIII = 418 to DCLXVI
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
The study of this Book is forbidden. It is wise to destroy this copy after the first reading.
Whosoever disregards this does so at his own risk and peril. These are most dire.
Those who discuss the contents of this Book are to be shunned by all, as centres of pestilence.
All questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings, each for himself.
There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.
Love is the law, love under will.
The priest of the princes,
Ankh-f-n-khonsu
America’s misreading of the Arab world?and our current misadventure in Iraq?may have really begun in 1950. That was the year a young University of London historian named Bernard Lewis visited Turkey for the first time. Lewis, who is today an imposing, white-haired sage known as the ?doyen of Middle Eastern studies? in America (as a New York Times reviewer once called him), was then on a sabbatical. Granted access to the Imperial Ottoman archives?the first Westerner allowed in?Lewis recalled that he felt ?rather like a child turned loose in a toy shop, or like an intruder in Ali Baba’s cave.? But what Lewis saw happening outside his study window was just as exciting, he later wrote. There in Istanbul, in the heart of what once was a Muslim empire, a Western-style democracy was being born.
By ALEX VEIGA, AP Business Writer
LOS ANGELES – Bram Cohen didn’t set out to upset Hollywood movie studios. But his innovative online file-sharing software, BitTorrent, has grown into a piracy problem the film industry is struggling to handle.
As its name suggests, the software lets computer users share large chunks of data. But unlike other popular file-sharing programs, the more people swap data on BitTorrent, the quicker it flows ? and that includes such large files as feature films and computer games.
From Yahoo News
The chicken has joined an exclusive but rapidly growing club with the publication of its complete genome sequence by an international consortium on Wednesday. The newcomer is the closest relative of mammals sequenced so far, and should provide a crucial point of comparison in studies of mammalian evolution.
Given the wealth of evidence that smoking damages your health, you would have to be stupid not to kick the habit. Now a study suggests this could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because smoking reduces your IQ.
Lawrence Whalley at the University of Aberdeen and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, both in the UK, looked at how the cognitive ability of 465 individuals, approximately half of whom were smokers, changed over their lifetime and whether this related to their smoking habits.
From a Immunitor press release: Immunitor USA Inc., announces that its licensed vaccine candidate V-1 Immunitor (V1) has shown promising results in Phase II, placebo-controlled, clinical trial involving 47 HIV-infected individuals. The study was published in the special December issue of the Journal of Clinical Virology – the official journal of The Pan American Society for Clinical Virology and The European Society for Clinical Virology. The abstract of the paper is now available on PubMed – the website of the National Library of Medicine.