Late last week, a Los Angeles federal court jury convicted Lori Drew of three misdemeanor counts of accessing a computer without authorization while rejecting a more serious felony charge of accessing a computer without authorization to inflict emotional distress. Drew gained infamy over the course of the last year when it came to light that she and her daughter had created a fictitious MySpace profile for a teenage boy used to harass a mentally unstable young woman who then committed suicide.[1]

 According to Xu Zhiwei, Deputy Director of the Institute of Computing Technology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences will debut its 65 nm Longxin 龙芯III (also known as Loongson or Godson), 4-core (10W) 1.2 GHz microprocessor at the end of the year, and an 8-core (20W) version in 2009. The chip uses MIPS64 cores with 200+ additional instructions for X86 binary translation and media acceleration.

For several years scientists have been studying how geckos manage to climb up and remain on very sheer surfaces. Recently scientists at the University of Dayton have created an adhesive inspired by the gecko's remarkable ability.

Nanopore sequencing is considered to be a next generation sequencing candidate enabling 'single molecule' sequencing using individual DNA fragments without amplification and the risk of introducing errors.

Six of China’s top ten supercomputers are not dedicated to scientific, military, or commercial applications, but to gaming, which some have dubbed the nation's ninth mode of art.

 The release of China’s latest supercomputer, the Dawning 5000A, reflects both the growing strengths and weaknesses of the country’s computing research. Running at 160 teraflops, the Dawning 5000A would be the world’s seventh fastest supercomputer, had it not missed the TOP500 listing by a week. The supercomputer uses 6,600 AMD K10 quad-core Opterons at 700 kilowatts per hour. The 200 million yuan (29 million USD) unit, designed by Dr.

Scientists have found a tree fungus "in the Patagonian rainforest, [which] naturally produces a mixture of chemicals that is remarkably similar to diesel."

After the recent FCC ruling regarding P2P file sharing Comcast began on October 1, 2008 rate limiting their residential customers to 250 gigabytes of bandwidth per month.  Given the likely confusing initial implementation by Comcast of the bandwidth limits, initial consumer concern, and potential for exempting their services from these limits this initial effort in the US to impose bandwidth caps is worth tracking.  

The last month has seen a fundamental economic downturn in the United States with a lengthy recession or economic depression likely.    All agree that the primary cause for the economic calamity is the over-extension of credit and related sub-prime mortgage crisis.  However, what few people are talking about is the extent to which information technology shares a burden of the blame.

Given our current economic predicament a number of technologists are beginning to ask what the ripple effect will be for Web 2.0 companies?  Many of these entities, much like their .com dead pool brethren from 2001, are offering non-essential services with hard to articulate business models.  What are the likely outcomes?
 

 India plans to launch a lunar satellite in late October 2008. According to New Scientist,

ISRO is set to launch an uncrewed spacecraft to map the Moon in more detail than ever before – a far cry from ISRO's beginnings in the 1960s, with a church in Kerala as their first office.

Researchers working on microelectronics have long sought to capture the property that some molecules have of assembling themselves without human intervention — a feat that would allow the manufacture of key device structures. This week’s Nature (www.nature.com) reports the successful application of such a 'bottom-up' approach in creating an organic integrated circuit.

Data mining programs that automatically search across personal and private sector data have been sold by proponents as being a necessary evil in the war against terror, but are they effective?  A new study conducted by the National Research Council on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security concludes unequivocally no and argues that not only will the technology not work but the inevitable mistakes made by such an effort are inherently un-American and an unnecessary risk in the war on terror.

The U.S. Presidential election is less then 30 days away and new technologies look poised to have a demonstrable impact on young voter registration and also how many citizens turn out to the polls.  

In a startling move, China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has terminated all but two coal liquefaction projects. According to Zhou Dadi, former director of the Energy Research Institute of the NDRC, development of the technology had proven too risky an investment as domestic expertise and equipment was simply inadequate. With an investment of 120 billion yuan (US$17.55 billion)，the combined output capacity of the existing and the planned coal-to-liquid (CTL) projects was to be about 16 million tons.

Taken from a blog post by Anthony Townsend, IFTF researcher. Not only do I agree that this lack of transparency and debate presents a potentially significant problem for R&D in China, but it is possible that smaller, moer highly networked scientific communites will meet or exceed the R&D output of China. Here's his post:

Jack Louis and Robert Lee, from Outpost24 (http://www.outpost24.com/), are scheduled to give a talk at the T2'08 Information Security Conference in Finland later this month giving details on a new, and dangerous, denial of service attack that uses TCP state table manipulation. The attack is unique in that it is cross platform and requires very little bandwidth to be executed.[1] This attack also has a prolonged impact on the hardware that lasts beyond the denial of service.

China’s successful launch of the Shenzhou VII and subsequent spacewalk further reflect how the nation’s space program has risen on the bootstraps of Russian technology. Although the Chinese press has touted the supposedly home-grown Feitian space suit, the mission still relies on Russian advisors, who in addition to technical support provided Russian Orlan space suits. The Long March 2F rocket was also optimized with Russian assistance.

GlaxoSmithKline, the world’s second-biggest pharmaceutical company and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) recently (in July, 2008) announced a five-year, $25 million-plus collaborative agreement.