Science & TechnologyS


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A Family Feud Over Mendel's Manuscript on the Laws of Heredity

Nicholas Wade
New York Times
Mon, 31 May 2010 05:00 UTC
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© Getty ImagesGregor Mendel, above, laid the foundations of modern genetics with his experiments on pea plants.
A long lost manuscript, one of the most important in the history of modern biology, has resurfaced as part of a dispute over its ownership.

The manuscript is the account by Gregor Mendel of the pea-breeding experiments from which he deduced the laws of heredity and laid the foundations of modern genetics.

Mendel read his paper in 1865 at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brünn. He was then an Augustinian monk, later the abbot, in the Abbey of St. Thomas in Brünn, now Brno in the Czech Republic.

The paper was published the next year in the Brünn Natural History Society's journal, but Mendel's work was largely ignored during his lifetime. It was only in 1900, 16 years after his death, that other researchers rediscovered Mendel's laws and realized that he had anticipated them.
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Laptop

'Clickjacking' worm hits hundreds of thousands on Facebook

Dan Goodin
The Register
Tue, 01 Jun 2010 03:16 UTC
'This girl gets OWNED.' And you can too

A vulnerability on Facebook forced hundreds of thousands of users to endorse a series of webpages over the holiday weekend, making the social networking site the latest venue for an attack known as clickjacking.

The exploit works by presenting people with friend profiles that recommend - or "Like," in Facebook parlance - links with titles including "LOL This girl gets OWNED after a POLICE OFFICER reads her STATUS MESSAGE." Those who click on the link see a page that's blank except for the words "Click here to continue." Clicking anywhere on the page automatically forces the person to add the link to his list of Likes.
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Mass Market Web Scams Raking in Billions

Phil Muncaster
V3 UK
Tue, 01 Jun 2010 03:12 UTC
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© V3.co.ukUK citizens lose an estimated £3.5bn every year to mass market fraud
Serious Organised Crime Agency launches global day of action to raise awareness

The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) has warned that mass market fraud campaigns are robbing UK internet users of billions of pounds a year.

Organisations in the UK, including Soca, the National Fraud Authority, the Office of Fair Trading and the Metropolitan Police, have today joined forces with others worldwide in an attempt to raise public awareness about the scams and the cyber criminals behind them.
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Quit Facebook Day flops

John Leyden
The Register
Tue, 01 Jun 2010 02:54 UTC
Breaking the habit ain't easy

Monday's Quit Facebook Day turned out to be something of a damp squib.

Just 34,100 of Facebook's more than 450 million members pledged to quit over privacy concerns. The low number is probably more a reflection of how hard it is to break the Facebook habit, rather than signifying acceptance of the simplified privacy controls introduced by the social network last week after much criticism, as quitfacebook.com explains

Quitting Facebook isn't easy," the group said. "Facebook is engaging, enjoyable and quite frankly, addictive. Quitting something like Facebook is like quitting smoking. It's hard to stay on the wagon long enough to actually change your habits.
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Laptop

iPhone Security Flaw - Using a PIN Won't Protect Your Data

Sarah Jacobsson
NetworkWorld
Fri, 28 May 2010 02:27 UTC
A newly discovered flaw in iPhone security could mean trouble for business users

Using a four-digit PIN to lock your iPhone doesn't really protect your data, security and IT blogger Bernd Marienfeldt has discovered. In an article describing the iPhone's business security framework, Marienfeldt has found a "data protection vulnerability" in Apple's iPhone 3GS.
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Info

Tools Show Ancient Human Diet


Science Alert
Wed, 02 Jun 2010 01:22 UTC
Leaping Carp
© iStockphoto Aquatic foods such as fish may have had
an important role in the evolution of the
human brain.
Almost two million years ago, early humans began eating food such as crocodiles, turtles and fish - a diet that could have played an important role in the evolution of human brains and our footsteps out of Africa, according to new research.

In what is the first evidence of consistent amounts of aquatic foods in the human diet, an international team of researchers has discovered early stone tools and cut marked animal remains in northern Kenya. The work has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).

"This site in Africa is the first evidence that early humans were eating an extremely broad diet," says Dr Andy Herries from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), the only researcher from Australia to have worked with the team. The project represents a collaborative effort with the National Museums of Kenya and is led by David Braun of the University of Cape Town in South Africa and Jack Harris of Rutgers University in the US.
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Google phasing out use of Windows over security concerns


Raw Story
Tue, 01 Jun 2010 19:19 UTC
windows

Web search group Google Inc is phasing out internal use of rival Microsoft Corp's Windows operating system because of security concerns following a Chinese hacking incident, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.

Citing several Google employees, the FT said the decision to move to other operating systems including Apple Inc's Mac OS and open-source Linux began in earnest in January after Google's Chinese operations were hacked.

Internet security firm McAfee Inc said at the time the cyber attacks on Google and other businesses had exploited a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, which was vulnerable on all recent versions of Windows.
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Tripura relics spark rethink on history

Sekhar Datta
The Telegram
Tue, 01 Jun 2010 18:52 UTC
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© TelegraphRuins at the Boxanagar site.
Agartala: Archaeological excavations at Boxanagar in Sonamura subdivision of West Tripura have unearthed a large Buddhist complex, including relics of a stupa, teaching centre, a bronze image of Buddha and seals in Brahmi script, triggering a controversy over the history of the state.

The excavation commenced in 2003 under the supervision of Archaeological Survey of India's (ASI) Guwahati circle.

In the second phase under archaeologists Bimal Sinha and B.K. Pande, remains of walls and burnt bricks were recovered.
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13,000-year-old clay figure found


The Asahi Shimbun
Tue, 01 Jun 2010 18:43 UTC
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© The Asahi ShimbunA clay figure found in Higashiomi, Shiga Prefecture
Otsu--A clay figure believed to be 13,000 years old and one of the oldest in the country, was found in an archaeological site in Higashiomi, Shiga Prefecture, the Shiga Prefectural Association for Cultural Heritage said.
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Telescope

Planetary scientists solve 40-year-old mysteries of Mars' northern ice cap

Daniel Stolte
University of Arizona
Tue, 01 Jun 2010 18:35 UTC
Image
© NASAThe northern ice cap is a stack of ice and dust layers up to two miles deep, covering an area slightly larger than Texas.
Researchers have reconstructed the formation of two curious features in the northern ice cap of Mars: a chasm larger than the Grand Canyon and a series of spiral troughs.

A team of planetary scientists has used radar and a high-resolution camera to reveal the subsurface geology of Mars' northern ice cap.

The findings - based on data from SHARAD (the surface-penetrating radar) and HiRISE (the high-resolution camera) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter - were published May 27 in two papers in the journal Nature.
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