Irate
Japanese Car Drivers Hit By GPS Bug - "A steady
stream of irate customers called Japanese car navigation makers
Sunday after their automotive directional devices failed due to a
computer flaw. The screens on some car navigation systems went blank
while others froze up as a computer bug struck Global Positioning
System (GPS) devices, electronics company Pioneer Electronic Corp
said. Pioneer, one of several car navigation system makers battling
the bug, had received several hundred phone calls since the problem
started at 9 a.m., a spokeswoman said..."
Windows
95, Windows 98 and Windows NT Year 2000 e-mail hoax -
There is a hoax email in circulation on the Internet concerning the
Y2K compliance of Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT. There are
various versions of this mail which resemble the text...
2.7M
Americans May Have Hepatitis C - At least 2.7 million
Americans carry the hepatitis C virus, making it the most common
blood-borne infection in the United States, a study found. The
study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta
represents the first look at the prevalence of hepatitis C in the
United States. The estimate was published in Thursday's New England
Journal of Medicine...
Education
expo features `classroom of tomorrow' - "Four
years ago, it took Thuan Nguyen nearly a year to persuade his
ninth-grade teacher to let him turn in an interactive, multimedia
presentation on the Vietnam War instead of the required 10-page
double-spaced, typed research paper..."
FIRST
GLOBAL 3-D VIEW OF MARS REVEALS DEEP BASIN AND PATHWAYS FOR WATER
FLOW - An impact basin deep enough to swallow Mount
Everest and surprising slopes in Valles Marineris highlight a global
map of Mars that will influence scientific understanding of the red
planet for years...
The
Techno-Millennium - The 20th century has been marked by
unprecedented technological change. During the last hundred years
human beings took to the air and sent sound and images around the
world. People walked on the moon, exploded nuclear weapons and began
decoding their own chromosomes. Everything from music to financial
records to neighborhood gossip was turned into pulses of
electricity...
Study
of Pig Virus Eases One Worry - The most rigorous study
ever on the safety of transplanting animal parts into humans found
no evidence that people caught a worrisome pig virus. The reassuring
finding could spur experiments using pigs and other animals as organ
donors. At issue is ``xenotransplantation,'' transplanting
organs or cells from one species into another. Doctors hope this
still highly experimental field could one day save thousands of
lives by easing a worldwide shortage of donated organs...
Army
Enlists Hollywood's Help - "The Army is enlisting
Hollywood and its special effects wizardry to create computerized
training simulations so real that soldiers will start to
sweat. On Wednesday, the Army signed a deal with the
University of Southern California to have the school's movie,
special-effects and other technology experts help with troop
training..."
Software
that writes Software - "Genetic programming is the
new frontier: A human creates the environment, and a computer hacks
the code..."
A
second life for old computers - You've bought a new
computer. What will you do with your old one? Tossing out an
outmoded, but fully functional machine isn't always the best idea,
from either a societal or environmental perspective. Luckily,
numerous nonprofit groups can help out. As the number of computers
in the world increases, so do opportunities to breathe new life into
your old machine - in schools, among community groups, or even on
distant continents...
Cassini
Probe To Swing by Earth - Worrying anti-nuclear
activists, a plutonium-powered NASA spacecraft hurtled toward a
close encounter with Earth on Tuesday in order to use the planet's
gravity to sling it toward Saturn...
Scientists
Create `Super Batteries' - "A new generation of
batteries that could run that pink bunny ragged may be on the
horizon: They last 50 percent longer than today's batteries, thanks
to a ``super-iron'' component that promises to be easy and
affordable to manufacture. They're still under development, so
don't look for them in local stores soon..."
(Real
Audio Enabled)
Mini-camera
on a chip - Miniaturization is one of the marvels of
the 20th century: tape-cassette players no bigger than a tape
cassette, thumb-sized cell phones, an all-in-one communicator - Web
surfer, stock-price checker, sports-score checker, e-mail - in a
gizmo that fits in the palm...
The
Age of Spiritual Machines - by Raymond Kurzweil - AMID
THE RECENT SPATE of books anticipating our possible technological
futures, Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines stands out
both for its enthusiasm and for its odd and unsettling vision of the
future. If Kurzweil is right, when we finally take to the stars, we
will more closely resemble the Borg Collective than the United
Federation of Planets — and we will have embraced this fate of
"assimilation" simply in the course of trying to keep up
with our own technology...
Sony
sees big market for robot dogs - Sony Corp said
Wednesday it saw a hungry market for "entertainment
robots" after its robot pet dog -- which cost a whopping $2,500
dollars each -- sold out rapidly in both Japan and the United
States...
Meet
Ralph the Wearable Computer - It's not much on fashion,
but its wearers can surf the Internet, play games and write papers,
all while walking down the hall or sitting in class. It's
called Ralph, and during a recent computer convention in New York
City the high school-student designed device wowed Microsoft
executives...
Life
expectancy at 76.5 years - "Americans' life
expectancy was 76.5 years in 1997, up from 76.1 the year before as
death rates from HIV, heart disease, cancer, stroke and homicide
declined..."
U.S.
Buys Back Supercomputer - The Energy Department's
Sandia National Laboratory last week bought back a supercomputer it
had sold as surplus to Korber Jiang, a Chinese citizen who is the
principle of EHI Group USA and exports American goods to his home
country. Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., called Friday for
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson's resignation, saying that the
computer could have been used ``to design nuclear weapons...''
Flood
Cooled Atmosphere in Ice Age - "Sometimes global
warming can result in cold weather. Scientists say that as the
glaciers melted at the end of the Ice Age, so much cold fresh water
gushed into the North Atlantic 8,200 years ago that it cooled the
atmosphere for hundreds of years. The cold spell has been well
known to researchers, but its cause was a mystery..."
The
Primacy of Culture - Progress has become puzzling. When
history was thought to be cyclical, progress seemed impossible.
However, a few centuries ago there was an outbreak of cheerfulness:
progress seemed not only possible but inevitable...
Hawking
Awaits Unified Theory Proof - "The world's
best-known physicist, who was attending a conference on string
theory, revised his prediction in the 1980s that there was a 50-50
chance the theory would be proven in 20 years..."
Earth
View
A fascinating, real-time look at our home from
above...
Moon
View
A beautiful real-time look at our nearest planetary
neighbor...
