The myth of the Sony ‘kill switch’ – “In Japan, a surprising number of consumers really do claim to believe that Sony products are programmed to break as soon as the warranty expires…”

Report: Fifty Apple Tablets Detected Online – “Flurry Analytics said Monday that their monitoring software has detected what the company claims are evidence of 50 Apple tablets at Apple’s Cupertino campus, testing up to 200 apps that could run on the new device…”

White House Decides to Outsource NASA Work – “The White House has decided to begin funding private companies to carry NASA astronauts into space, but the proposal faces major political and budget hurdles, according to people familiar with the matter…”

Superconductivity in iron compound – “A surprising discovery of electronic liquid crystal states in an iron-based, high-temperature superconductor is another step toward understanding superconductivity and using it in such applications as power transmission.”

MP3 pioneers launch ‘deluxe’ file – “A new music file format has been unveiled by some of the key figures behind the development of the MP3. The new file, MusicDNA, can include things like lyrics, videos, artwork and blog posts, which will continually be updated, as well as the music…”

Huge UFO Spheres near the sun (this will be filed with crop circles and psychics):

Movie made by chimpanzees to be broadcast on television – “The world’s first film shot entirely by chimpanzees is to be broadcast by the BBC as part of a natural history documentary. The apes created the movie using a specially designed chimp-proof camera given to them by primatologists…”

“Was the Universe Created By A Big Bang?” -Several of the World’s Leading Cosmologists Say “No” – “Several of the worlds leading astrophysicists believe there was no Big Bang that brought the universe and time into existence. Before the Big Bang, the standard theory assumes, there was no space, just nothing. Einstein merged the universe into a single entity: not space, not time, but spacetime…”

Leaf-like sea slug feeds on light – “A green sea slug found off North America’s east coast not only looks like a leaf, but can also make food out of sunlight, just like a plant…”

To beat spam, turn its own weapons against it – “SPAMMERS’ own trickery has been used to develop an “effectively perfect” method for blocking the most common kind of spam, a team of computer scientists claims…”

Our 1 Billionth Spam Message – “On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT) Project Honey Pot received its billionth email spam message. The message, a picture of which is displayed below, was a United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) phishing scam. The spam email was sent by a bot running on a compromised machine in India (122.167.68.1)…”

Seventh-grade North Syracuse student suspended, 25 others disciplined for Facebook page about teacher – ” A seventh-grader was suspended from school for creating a Facebook group page that libeled one of her Roxboro Road Middle School teachers in the North Syracuse school district, principal Steve Wolf said. Twenty-five other Roxboro Road students are paying a price for becoming fans of the group by posting their profile pictures and their real names on the site, Wolf said. They were ordered to go to after-school detention last Thursday, as well as today and Tuesday, Wolf said. Some of the students posted derogatory comments on the Facebook page, while others did not, he said…”

Why Can’t the I.R.S. Help Fill in the Blanks? – “Requiring taxpayers to file returns without being told what the government already knows makes as much sense “as if Visa sent customers a blank piece of paper, requiring that they assemble their receipts, list their purchases — and pay a fine if they forget one,” said Joseph Bankman, a professor at the Stanford Law School…”

Full-body scanner blind to bomb parts – “Most of the uproar over full-body scanners has focused on privacy concerns. There’s one larger question, however, that hasn’t received much scrutiny by the chattering classes: do the things work?”

Bad at video games? Your brain structure may be at fault – “New neurological research, published in—and made freely available by—the journal Cerebral Cortex has found a correlation between the size of a trio of structures in the human brain and their owner’s ability to learn and play video games. Animal studies had focused the authors’ attention on three distinct structures deep within the brain: the caudate nucleus and the putamen in the dorsal striatum, and the nucleus accumbens in the ventral striatum. It was known that the striatum was used in habit forming and skill acquisition, so a role in video games skills makes sense…”

Metabolic pathways

Levitating magnet brings space physics to fusion – “Tests on an experimental machine that mimics a planet’s magnetic field show that it may offer an ‘alternative path’ to taming nuclear fusion for power generation…” See also: MIT Experiment Envisions a New Way to Harness Fusion Power (With a 1,000-Pound Magnet)

if it’s catchy, why bother with the science? – “The initial seven vaccines of the late 1970s have been doubled in the last 30 years but their actual antigen load has been lowered from 3,000 to just about 150, only 5% of what the people making this argument were exposed to in their childhoods. For the too many too soon argument to be true, we’d need to see the same kinds of pediatric problems a generation ago and with far greater frequency than we do today. If we weren’t overwhelming immune systems back then, how could we possibly be doing it today with a twentieth of the antigens? And yet, this is the argument being made by the alt med and anti-vaccine crowd…”

Radiation Offers New Cures, and Ways to Do Harm – “As Scott Jerome-Parks lay dying, he clung to this wish: that his fatal radiation overdose — which left him deaf, struggling to see, unable to swallow, burned, with his teeth falling out, with ulcers in his mouth and throat, nauseated, in severe pain and finally unable to breathe — be studied and talked about publicly so that others might not have to live his nightmare…”

What Could You Live Without? – “Mr. Salwen and his wife, Joan, had always assumed that their kids would be better off in a bigger house. But after they downsized, there was much less space to retreat to, so the family members spent more time around each other. A smaller house unexpectedly turned out to be a more family-friendly house…”

Consumer Power: What the radical Supreme Court ruling means to you – “Can you afford to hire an award-winning Madison Avenue firm to produce your ad campaign and then pay the major networks to run that commercial over and over again? If you can’t, how is your voice or my voice equal to that of corporations when they can outspend us billions to one?”

Trapped father survives with help of phone app – “Alone in the darkness beneath layers of rubble, Dan Woolley felt blood streaming from his head and leg. Then he remembered — he had an app for that…”

‘Avatar’ passes ‘Titanic’s’ overseas record – “After six rounds on the foreign circuit, “Avatar” on the weekend became the biggest-grossing offshore title in movie history…”

Paging James Cameron: Pentagon Wants 3-D Surveillance – “Think Avatar, for military spies. Pentagon far-out research arm Darpa wants to turn surveillance into a 3D experience for troops. They’ve launched the Fine Detail Optical Surveillance (FDOS) Program, and are requesting proposals for prototypes of optical imaging systems that would use “advanced high-resolution 3D imaging technology.” Darpa wants two kinds of surveillance systems: portable units for active battle, and drone-ready systems for unmanned planes…”

[[[Jump to - Interesting Reading #402 – killer robots, racist cameras, fake Blu-ray players, Self-Aware Mercedes and much more…]]]