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Monday, August 15, 2011

Electric speed team 'will try again'

15 August 2011 Last updated at 02:51 ET

Sir Malcolm Campbell's grandson has vowed to return to the beach where his own son failed to smash the UK land speed record for an electric car.

Joe Wales was trying to break the 137mph record held by his father Don when Bluebird Electric hit a pothole at Pendine Sands in Carmarthenshire.

The car was damaged but the 19-year-old driver escaped with mild whiplash.

His father Don said: "The important thing is Joe is fine... I don't know if I could have done any better."

Joe Wales was aiming to become the fourth generation of his family to break a world speed record.

"Start Quote

He's broken his dad's car - how does any son cope with breaking his dad's car?"

End Quote Don Wales Record-breaking driver

His great-grandfather Sir Malcolm Campbell and great-uncle Donald Campbell held world speed records on land and water, while great-great-grandfather Malcolm made his first record attempt on Pendine Sands in 1924.

Joe's father Don Wales, 50, from Addlestone, Surrey, was also attempting to break his own record, set in 2000.

But his own record bid had to be aborted after the car's suspension was damaged during Joe's run.

Don Wales was able to joke about the incident saying: "He's broken his dad's car - how does any son cope with breaking his dad's car?

"We're bitterly disappointed but the important thing is that Joe is fine," he added.

'Learn from it'

"Visibility on the course in a low car is actually quite bad - despite it being a really sunny day when you're in a low car for some reason it becomes almost impossible to see where you're going properly."

"This is Joe's first go on Pendine and I think in hindsight maybe I should have gone first.

"But the team decided Joe should go first to get his first record.

"I'm afraid that with the vibrations on the sand and the poor visibility, he just lost his way.

"I'm not going to blame Joe in anyway whatsoever. We need to learn from it and get some bigger markerposts, and if you have any doubts about running on the beach, not do it.

"I would like to come back to Pendine - it's a fabulous place. But I've always said it's a place you need to treat with respect."

"We've tried our best - we've come up short but we're here to live another day."

Friday, August 12, 2011

China finds 22 fake Apple stores

12 August 2011 Last updated at 06:21 ET

A total of 22 fake Apple stores have been uncovered in one Chinese city.

Authorities in Kunming began searching out the copycats after pictures of one convincing replica were circulated on the web.

An early search found five fake stores, two of which were shut down for trading without a licence.

Now, according to Chinese trade officials, 22 have been found unlawfully using Apple's brand and logo.

The investigation into unauthorised Apple stores in Kunming was brought about when an American living in the city published a blog post describing a visit to one such shop.

Describing it as a "beautiful ripoff", BirdAbroad revealed how far the owners had gone to copy the decor and ambience of a real Apple store.

Staff also wore the same colour T-shirts as real Apple staffers, and sported lanyards of the same design.

The blog post was widely shared around the world and prompted Chinese trade officials in Kunming to take action.

The Administration for Industry and Commerce in Kunming said its investigation had unveiled a slew of stores violating Apple's registered trademarks.

The shops have been told to stop using the logos as Chinese laws prohibit copying the "look and feel" of another company without permission.

It is not clear whether the shops being reprimanded were selling legitimate Apple products or those bought on the grey market.

The Kunming retail watchdog said it would step up its monitoring efforts and set up a hotline through which the public can report unauthorised Apple shops they find.

Hypersonic test aircraft 'lost'

11 August 2011 Last updated at 18:06 ET

The US military lost contact with an unmanned hypersonic test aircraft shortly after its launch, defence officials have said.

The Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) - capable of reaching any target in the world in less than an hour - began a test flight from atop a rocket on Thursday.

Contact was also lost with a similar craft during the first mission.

The HTV-2 is designed to travel at 13,000mph (21,000km/h).

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which is funding the HTV-2 programme and overseeing the tests, said the small craft was capable of reaching speeds of Mach 20.

The aircraft took off using a Minotaur IV rocket from Vanderberg Air Force Base in California early on Thursday.

Engineers programmed the HTV-2 to launch from the edge of space, separate from its rocket and crash into the ocean.

No information was available on whether the goals of the mission were achieved.

Re-entering Earth's atmosphere

Darpa said the HTV-2 would be subject to temperatures in excess of 3,500F (2,000C) if it reached its intended speed during its test flight.

The agency had previously said the craft would re-enter the earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean.

The first test flight of a HTV-2 ended with the craft crashing into the Pacific after the military lost contact with the glider nine minutes into the flight.

But the first glider's flight still managed to return 139 seconds of aerodynamic data at speeds between 17 and 22 times the speed of sound, DARPA said.

The HTV-2 programme "informs policy, acquisition, and operations decisions for future Department of Defense Conventional Prompt Global Strike programmes", Darpa said on its website.

At HTV-2 speeds, flight time between New York City and Los Angeles, which are roughly 2,500 miles (4,000 km) apart, would be less than 12 minutes.

The Atlantis shuttle, launched in July, travelled around Earth's orbit at a similar speed of about 17,500mph (28,000kp/h).

Tattoo hope in patient monitoring

11 August 2011 Last updated at 14:01 ET By James Gallagher Health reporter, BBC News

An "electronic tattoo" could herald a revolution in the way patients are monitored and provide a breakthrough in computer gaming, say US scientists.

They used the device, which is thinner than a human hair, to monitor the heart and brain, according to a study in the journal Science.

The sensor attaches to human skin just like a temporary tattoo and can move, wrinkle and stretch without breaking.

Researchers hope it could replace bulky equipment currently used in hospitals.

A mass of cables, wires, gel-coated sticky pads and monitors are currently needed to keep track of a patient's vital signs.

Scientists say this can be "distressing", such as when a patient with heart problems has to wear a bulky monitor for a month "in order to capture abnormal but rare cardiac events".

Solar cells

With the tattoo, all the electronic parts are built out of wavy, snake-like components, which mean they can cope with being stretched and squeezed.

There are also tiny solar cells which can generate power or get energy from electromagnetic radiation.

The device is small, less than 50 micrometres thick - less than the diameter of a human hair.

The sensor is mounted on to a water-soluble sheet of plastic, so is attached to the body by brushing with water, just like a temporary tattoo.

It sticks on due to weak forces of attraction between the skin and a polyester layer at the base of the sensor, which is the same force which sticks geckos to walls.

In the study, the tattoo was used to measure electrical activity in the leg, heart and brain. It found that the "measurements agree remarkably well" with those taken by traditional methods.

Researchers believe the technology could be used to replace traditional wires and cables.

Smaller, less invasive, sensors could be especially useful for monitoring premature babies or for studying patients with sleep apnoea without them wearing wires through the night, researchers say.

Prof Todd Coleman, from the University of Illinois, said: "If we want to understand brain function in a natural environment, that's completely incompatible with studies in a laboratory.

"The best way to do this is to record neural signals in natural settings, with devices that are invisible to the user."

The device was worn for up to 24 hours without loss of function or skin irritation.

However, there are problems with longer-term use, as the skin constantly produces new cells, while those at the surface die and are brushed off, meaning a new sensor would need to be attached at least every fortnight.

'Electronic skin'

When the tattoo was attached to the throat, it was able to detect differences in words such as up, down, left, right, go and stop.

The researchers managed to use this to control a simple computer game.

John Rogers, professor in material science and engineering at the University of Illinois, said: "Our goal was to develop an electronic technology that could integrate with the skin in a way that is invisible to the user.

"It's a technology that blurs the distinction between electronics and biology."

Prof Zhenqiang Ma, an electrical and computer engineer at the University of Wisconsin, argued that the technology could overcome issues with bulky sensors.

"An electronic skin will help solve these problems and allow monitoring to be simpler, more reliable and uninterrupted.

"It has proved to be viable and low-cost in this demonstration which will greatly facilitate the practical clinical use of the electronic skin."

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Riots prompt social media review

11 August 2011 Last updated at 09:57 ET

The government is exploring whether to turn off social networks or stop people texting during times of social unrest.

David Cameron said the intelligence services and the police were exploring whether it was "right and possible" to cut off those plotting violence.

Texting and Blackberry Messenger are said to have been used by some during this week's riots.

Rights groups said such a measure would be abused and hit the civil liberties of people who have done nothing wrong.

The prime minister told MPs the government was exploring the turn-off in a statement made to the House of Commons during an emergency recall of Parliament.

Mr Cameron said anyone watching the riots would be "struck by how they were organised via social media".

He said the government, using input from the police, intelligence services and industry, was looking at whether there should, or could, be limits on social media if it was being used to spread disorder.

Under social media, Mr Cameron includes Facebook, Twitter and specific technologies such as text messaging. The semi-private BBM messaging system on the Blackberry is said to have been widely used during the riots.

Home Secretary Theresa May is believed to be meeting representatives from Facebook, Twitter and RIM (maker of the Blackberry) to talk about their obligations during times of unrest.

Civil liberty implications

In the statement, Mr Cameron said law enforcement was considering "whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality".

"Start Quote

The only realistic answer is the courts must judge"

End Quote Jim Killock Open Rights Group

Questions about the technical feasibility and civil liberty implications of cutting off networks have been raised within the coalition, with many expressing scepticism about the proposal's workability.

Rights campaigners also criticised the idea. Jim Killock, director of the Open Rights Group, said events like the UK riots were often used to attack civil liberties.

He questioned who was going to decide whether texts or tweets were an incitement to disorder.

"How do people 'know' when someone is planning to riot? Who makes that judgement?" he asked.

"The only realistic answer is the courts must judge. If court procedures are not used, then we will quickly see abuses by private companies and police."

Any government policy to shut down networks deprived citizens of a right to secure communication and undermined the privacy required by a society that valued free speech, he said.

"David Cameron must be careful not to attack these fundamental needs because of concerns about the actions of a small minority," he said.

John Bassett, a former senior official at GCHQ and now a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, told Reuters that the government should resist a clampdown.

"The use of social media in the unrest looks like a game-changer," he said. "But any attempt to exert state control over social media looks likely to fail."

Far better, he said, would be to encourage community groups and individuals to report when they see disorder brewing online and ensure police have the tools to extract intelligence from social media.

LHC in call for Higgs hunt help

11 August 2011 Last updated at 05:50 ET

The Large Hadron Collider team will be tapping into the collective computing power of the public to help it simulate particle physics experiments.

Among other pursuits, the effort could help uncover the Higgs boson.

The effort, dubbed LHC@home 2.0, is a vastly updated version of a 2004 effort to enlist the public's computers to simulate beams of protons.

Advances in home computers now allow simulations of the enormously more complex particle collisions themselves.

The LHC facility is the world's most powerful "atom smasher", occupying an underground, 27km ring beneath the Swiss-French border.

"Volunteers can now actively help physicists in the search for new fundamental particles that will provide insights into the origin of our Universe, by contributing spare computing power from their personal computers and laptops," read a statement from Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research which runs the LHC.

'Fundamental principles'

Along with the grandeur of the accelerator itself came an unprecedented computing infrastructure to handle the 15 million gigabytes of data produced at the LHC each year.

The Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid is a 100m-euro network designed to handle the flood of data and distribute it to scientists worldwide.

The LHC@home project will complement this network by splitting up the gargantuan task of simulating the collisions, feeding those computer simulations back to the scientists for comparison.

"By looking for discrepancies between the simulations and the data, we are searching for any sign of disagreement between the current theories and the physical Universe," says the LHC@home 2.0 website.

"Ultimately, such a disagreement could lead us to the discovery of new phenomena, which may be associated with new fundamental principles of nature."

The project is just the latest in an increasingly long line of "citizen science" projects in which the power of the public's home computers is put to use in solving scientific problems; the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and the fabulously complex process of protein folding are both subjects of such distributed computing projects.

Hack attack hits Hong Kong shares

11 August 2011 Last updated at 06:05 ET

Trading in seven stocks listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange was suspended on Wednesday after a hacking attack.

The attack was aimed at a website run by the exchange used to tell traders about company announcements.

The site was shut and trading in seven firms due to make announcements via the website was suspended for half a day.

Shares in HSBC, Cathay Pacific, China Power International and the Hong Kong exchange itself were among those suspended.

"Our current assessment (is) that this is a result of a malicious attack by outside hacking," said Charles Li, head of Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing (HKEC), in a statement. HKEC runs the Hang Seng exchange.

Mr Li said the company was looking into the motive for the attack and what hackers sought to gain from it. The incident has been referred to the police as well as the Securities and Futures Commission.

The attack on the site made it temporarily unavailable. It is not yet clear whether the attack overwhelmed the site with data, making it unreachable, or whether hackers gained unauthorised access to it.

HKEC was investigating the attack and said if the site remained unstable on Thursday, announcements would be made via the Hang Seng's bulletin board. Additionally, the suspension of the seven shares would be lifted.

Price sensitive information due to be announced included HSBC announcing the sale of its US credit card arm and Cathy Pacific unveiling half year results. The suspended stocks are among the biggest on the Hang Seng index.

None of the other systems operated by Hong Kong Exchanges was hit in the attack and its securities and derivatives markets ran as normal.

The Hong Kong exchange is one of many stock markets that have been hit by hackers. The Zimbabwe stock exchange was attacked in early August and in February, the US Nasdaq revealed that cyber criminals had planted malicious code on its "Directors Desk" web application.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Hackers hit Blackberry over riots

10 August 2011 Last updated at 09:39 ET

A hacker group has attacked Blackberry's website after the company said it would assist police investigating riots in the UK.

Team Poison defaced the official Blackberry blog, posting a message that threatened the firm with retaliation if it handed user data to authorities.

Blackberry's instant messaging service is believed to have been used by some looters to plan their movements.

The firm has promised to co-operate with police and the Home Office.

In its statement, Team Poison said that it did not condone innocent people or small businesses being attacked in the riots.

However, it added: "We are all for the rioters that are engaging in attacks on the police and government."

The group argued that if Blackberry gave subscriber information to police, it could lead to the wrong people being targeted.

"Innocent members of the public who were at the wrong place at the wrong time and owned a Blackberry will get charged for no reason at all," said Team Poison's statement.

It threatened to release employee information, including names, addresses and phone numbers of Blackberry staff.

UK laws mean police can request data from individuals' mobile phones when that information relates to criminal activity.

The procedure is governed by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

Facebook aims to replace texting

10 August 2011 Last updated at 06:09 ET

Facebook has launched an instant messaging service for mobile phones, similar to BlackBerry Messenger.

The dedicated app, for iPhones and Android devices, allows users to contact individual friends or groups of people.

Its release comes a month before Apple is due to unveil a similar product.

Attention has been focused on mobile messaging recently because some of the London rioters were known to have used it to co-ordinate their movements.

So far Facebook's mobile messenger is only available in the United States, but it is expected to eventually roll out in other countries.

The social network's 750 million users already have the ability to send messages through the website, and on Facebook's original smartphone app.

Its new application adds the option to send directly to a mobile phone via SMS, and also to include location information.

Bad timing?

Facebook's timing has raised a few eyebrows within the industry, given the debate around BlackBerry Messenger's role in the recent UK rioting.

"Start Quote

The big question you have to ask is how long will it be before Google+ has a messaging service built in"

End Quote Stuart Miles Pocket-lint.com

However, it is likely that its decision to launch in the US now was influenced by the impending Arrival of Apple's iOS 5 and its integrated messenger.

Stuart Miles, the founder of Pocket-lint.com, told BBC News that Facebook might be able to make mileage out of its compatibility with more than one phone system.

"Apple will be iPhone to iPhone, like Facetime. The same as BBM which is Blackberry to Blackberry. [Facebook] will be Android to iPhone, so theoretically it can only benefit from the platform," said Mr Miles.

"The big question you have to ask is how long will it be before Google+ has a messaging service built-in."

Apple prevents Galaxy sales in EU

9 August 2011 Last updated at 19:22 ET

Apple has been granted a temporary injunction preventing Samsung Electronics from selling iPad tablet computer rival Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the European Union, except the Netherlands.

An Apple spokeswoman confirmed the ruling had been made by a court in Germany, after Apple argued the Korean firm had infringed its patents.

It is the latest setback for Samsung's launch of the Galaxy.

The Galaxy's Australian release has been delayed due to a similar lawsuit.

Apple is also seeking a court order to temporarily block sales of the tablet computer in the US until patent claims are resolved.

Legal dispute

Apple argues that Samsung has "slavishly" copied the technology of both the iPad and the iPhone.

Samsung has countersued Apple in South Korea, Japan, the US and Germany.

In a statement, Samsung spokesman Kim Titus said the German court had made its order "without any hearing or presentation of evidence from Samsung."

The company would "act immediately to defend our intellectual property rights," he added.

World News | Latest News

Monday, August 15, 2011

Electric speed team 'will try again'

"Start Quote

Friday, August 12, 2011

China finds 22 fake Apple stores

Hypersonic test aircraft 'lost'

Tattoo hope in patient monitoring

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Riots prompt social media review

"Start Quote

LHC in call for Higgs hunt help

Hack attack hits Hong Kong shares

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Hackers hit Blackberry over riots

Facebook aims to replace texting

"Start Quote

Apple prevents Galaxy sales in EU

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