Science / Technology News

Saturn's moon Enceladus. Areas that are greenish in appearance are believed to represent deposits of coarser-grained ice and solid boulders that are too small to be seen at this scale ...

Many of us remember that first day of kindergarten or a trip we took as a toddler but new research shows that the human brain, while able to accurately recall trivial details from the past, can also be remarkably fragile and even inventive.

Ever wonder just what the exploited, er, I mean, well-paid worker who built your expensive iPhone looks like? Well, accidental photos have turned up on iPhones before, but this set of pics was intentionally taken. And much as I hate to admit it, this worker's kinda cute.

Well, I mentioned the words "class action" previously, and although this lawsuit hasn't been granted class action status yet, I believe it will, eventually. Alabama resident Jessica Alena Smith filed the complaint Tuesday against Apple.

Aug 20 - American Airlines' new inflight, broadband service has launched. For 12-dollars and 95-cents per flight, passengers can surf the net, check email and instant message.

Japan will start an aggressive push to market abroad its mobile technology, especially the nation's popular "wallet phone," a government official said Tuesday.

What famous inventor, born on this day in 1871, will forever be famous for something he did for only 12 seconds? Think you know…?

Self-recognition, it has been argued, is a hallmark of advanced cognitive abilities in animals. It was previously thought that only the usual suspects of higher cognition—some great apes, dolphins, and elephants—were able to recognize their own bodies in a mirror. In a PLoS Biology article, psychologist Helmut Prior and colleagues show evidence of self-recognition in magpies — a species with a brain structure very different from mammals.

According to 2007 U.S. Census Bureau data, there are approximately 20 million children below the age of five in the United States, the age range of greatest susceptibility to the harmful affects of lead poisoning. Gabriel M. Filippelli, Ph.D., professor of earth sciences and department chair at Indiana University, says that about 2 percent of these children (approximately 400,000) have lead poisoning, many in epidemic proportions.

Private browsing means browsing the web without leaving "tracks," such as cookies, history, cache data, etc., etc. This has been popularly called "porn mode." Only Safari currently supports this feature; it was pulled from Firefox 3 (there is, however, an add-on called Stealther some use).

Let's hope Steve Jobs isn't making promises he can't keep. Earlier I wrote that, in one of the short, brief emails that sometimes respond to questions made directly to Jobs, the 3G connection problems many have been seeing were acknowledged, and a fix was promised.

We are working on some bugs which affect around 2% of the iPhones shipped, and hope to have a software update soon. Steve

Now, according to further reports, a similar promise was made with regards to the crashing bug which has hit the 2.0 software; many non-default apps crash almost immediately and return to the home screen.

Tetra-Amido Macrocyclic Ligands (TAMLs) are environmentally friendly catalysts with a host of applications for reducing and cleaning up pollutants, and a prime example of "green chemistry."

After losing out in the battle to define the high-definition successor of the DVD, Toshiba Corp. has turned its attention to the next best thing: the DVD.

And no, they didn't mean make it faster with faster hardware. I wrote earlier about Microsoft's new Windows 7 blog, and in their second blog post, Microsoft (specifically, Steve Sinofsky) wrote about the myriad of comments and suggestions for Windows 7 they've received since the blog went live. And what caught their eye?

A newly discovered " minor planet " with an elongated orbit around the Sun may help explain the origin of comets, researchers said on Monday.

It's been a bad few weeks for Apple. MobileMe issues, iPhone 3G connectivity problems, and on Tuesday Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) reported that two new reports of minor fires due to suspected iPod nano battery overheating occurred in Tokyo this month.

Let the battle commence.

Round two of the summer's smartphone war was joined this past Saturday when the first Blackberry Bolds went on sale in the U.K.

Turning conventional neuroscience on its head, new research suggests the human visual system processes sound and helps us see.

Is this it? Is this it? Today Apple quietly released an upgrade for the iPhone, 2.0.2. Typical of such releases, there's no discussion of what's really been fixed, aside from a vague reference to "bug fixes."

Biological clocks are the body's complex network of internal oscillators that regulate daily activity/rest cycles and other important aspects of physiology, including body temperature, heart rate and food intake. Besides sleep disorders, research in this field may eventually help treat the negative effects of shift work, aging and jet lag.