Photonbelt

From the file marked “Evidently, many scientists have never seen even one scary sci-fi movie”: The Defense Department is funding research into battlefield robots that power themselves by eating human corpses. What could possibly go wrong?
Since they apparently don’t own TVs or DVD players, researchers at Robotic Technology say the robots will collect organic matter, which [...]

Some researchers believe that the solar cycle influences global climate changes.  They attribute recent warming trends to cyclic variation.  Skeptics, though, argue that there’s little hard evidence of a solar hand in recent climate changes.
Now, a new research report from a surprising source may help to lay this skepticism to rest.  A study from NASA’s [...]

Sometimes, even a great firewall isn’t enough. China has apparently ordered PC makers to bundle access control software—ostensibly to protect its citizens from porn—that may allow it to remotely update a blacklist of sites.
Late last month, China quietly ordered PC manufacturers to bundle Internet access control software with all computers sold in the country. The [...]

Even by the standards of the Pentagon fringe science arm, this project sounds far-out: “” that can be ordered to “self-assemble or alter their shape, perform a function and then disassemble themselves.” But researchers back by Darpa are actually making progress on this incredible goal, Henry Kenyon at Signal magazine reports.
One day, that could lead [...]

The European Commission wants the US to dissolve all government links with the body that ‘governs’ the internet, replacing it with an international forum for discussing internet governance and online security.
The rules and decisions on key internet governance issues, such as the creation of top level domains (such as .com and .eu) and managing the [...]

The other week saw people climbing the walls of the “twittersphere” with some claiming that Twitter—the brief blogging platform—makes us immoral.
The controversy was a good example of the danger of popculture references when explaining science. You’ve got to make sure it’s accurate in these days of Susan-Boyle-instant-stories.
The research in question, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of [...]

There are some factors that suggest the swine flu killing people in Mexico may be a biological weapon, but obviously no such conclusion can be drawn at this time. The World Health Organization and the U.S. government have been quick to deny such claims.
The swine flu virus is described as a completely new strain, an [...]

Hackers have crossed into new frontiers by devising sophisticated ways to steal large amounts of personal identification numbers, or PINs, protecting credit and debit cards, says an investigator.  The attacks involve both unencrypted PINs and encrypted PINs that attackers have found a way to crack, according to an investigator behind a new report looking at [...]

The Swedish Pirate Party – a group of online radicals who back free downloading of music and films from the internet – is taking advantage of a series of high profile anti-piracy cases to stage a pan-European electoral assault for 2009’s European elections.
“The battle over our privacy and the hunt on filesharers is fought down [...]

A court in Sweden has jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay (TPB), the world’s most high-profile file-sharing website, in a landmark case.
Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail.
They were also ordered to pay 30m kronor (£2.4m) [...]