Old star sheds light on early universe
George W. Preston, an astronomer and retired director of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif., said the next step will be finding more members of what he jokingly called “The Class of 13 Billion B.C.” “Finding this star confirms in a general way one of the expectations of the Big Bang theory, but finding one is hardly useful for making far-reaching conclusions,” he said.
In British Columbia, a cancer agency has been forced to stop breast cancer screening because a US company holds a patent on of the two gene sequences used. The patents cover the actual sequence of genes in the human body, rather than any specific application of this knowledge. According to the article nearly 10,000 patents relating to the human body have been filed worldwide.
In Standard of truth Disenchanted suggests that Google is the spiritual descendant of the ancient Library of Alexandria, leading to a discussion of the role of authority in the perception of truth in matters of fact.
Porn Publisher Pushes Blue Cell Phones in UK
With the new offering, dubbed “Private Stars,” customers pay six pounds ($9.32) to receive a series of steamy SMS text messages beamed to their phone courtesy of one of the Nasdaq-listed production company’s adult film stars.
Sigh. Is this why I’ve spent 25 years developing test equipment for the mobile wireless industry?
Some stuff that’s a few days old now, but I’ve been too busy to blog:
Debate on Intellectual Property in the NY Times (free registration required), points out the irony of the US-lead push for strong intellectual property rights in developing countries, when the US became an industial power in part by appropriating intellectual property from the Old World.
GNUWin II is a compilation of free (as in “speech” as well as “beer”) software for Windows. It includes development, utilities, games, office, science, engineering and educational software.
Death Of A Meta Tag Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch.com says that the keyword meta tag is dead, as only one major search engine (Inktomi) still uses it to catagorise web pages. So just don’t bother.
The Parable of the Languages by BurningBird.
If programming languages could speak, really speak, not just crunch bytes and stream bits, they would have much to say that is both wise and profound.
Star orbit nails black hole The discovery of a star orbiting the centre of our Galaxy confirms the presence of an immense black hole there.
Earth ‘depends on creepy-crawlies’ Two leading British scientists are calling for a switch of research effort towards some of the Earth’s smallest creatures.
arguably it’s the little things that run the world, things like soil microbes. They’re the least-known species of all - scientists like something sexier to work on. We are losing species before we know they exist . . . “We don’t know, possibly to a factor of 10, how many species there are on Earth. But if the better-known ones are reasonably typical, we’re looking at an extinction rate a thousand times faster than in the fossil record - and it’s accelerating.