July 12, 2002 - A New Code for Anonymous Web Use - By Noah Shachtman, WiredNews, NEW YORK -- Peer-to-peer networks such as Morpheus and Audiogalaxy have enabled millions to trade music, movies and software freely. A group of veteran hackers is about to unveil a new peer-to-peer protocol that may eventually let millions more surf, chat and e-mail free from prying eyes...

July 08, 2002 - Web authors pledge allegiance to IE - By Paul Festa, Special to ZDNet News, When he co-founded Netscape Communications in 1994, Jim Clark introduced a Web browser that promised computer users a way around the Microsoft juggernaut. Now online photo print shop Shutterfly, another Clark-founded venture, has a succinct warning for visitors who come to the site using the latest versions of Netscape: Beware. Versions 6 and higher of the browser are "unsupported," meaning people who use them cannot take advantage of several site features and may run into glitches not found with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, according to a browser error message being published on the site as of last Wednesday...

 July 10, 2002 - Skull sparks an evolution revolution - By Alan Boyle, MSNBC, Fossil found in Chad is earliest-known member of human family tree, researchers say. The cranium of the newly described hominid, nicknamed Toumai, has the flat face and brow ridge associated with the ancestors of humans. The discovery of a fossil skull in a remote Chadian desert could rewrite the scientific saga of human origins, researchers said Wednesday. The skull and other fossil remains have been dated at 6 million to 7 million years old — which would make them the oldest-known relatives of modern humans. If confirmed, the find would dramatically change scientists’ conception of where and when our ancestors arose...

 July 12, 2002 - Hmmm, About That Skull Find... - Reuters, 8:55 a.m. July 12, 2002 PDT, Wired News, PARIS -- A prehistoric skull touted as the oldest human remains ever found is probably not the head of the earliest member of the human family but of an ancient female gorilla, a French scientist said on Friday. Brigitte Senut of the Natural History Museum in Paris said certain aspects of the skull, whose discovery in Chad was announced on Wednesday, were actually sexual characteristics of female gorillas rather than indications of a human character...

 July 12, 2002 - The Night the Lights went Out in New York City - By Joe Rao, Special to SPACE.com, A great meandering milky swath of stars that can never be seen from under bright city lights is readily visible overhead on summer nights from distant suburbs and rural locations. Once, years ago, residents of New York City had an opportunity to see this remarkable Milky Way, our galaxy's central concentration of stars. July 13 marked the 25th anniversary of a night I will always remember. At about 9:30 p.m., lightning from a severe thunderstorm struck a power plant at Indian Point, New York. A sudden power failure plunged all of New York City into darkness...

July, 2002 - Into the Abyss - Building A Deepwater Live-work Lab - Wired Mag, Marine scientist Richard Cooper hates his commute. Just reaching Veatch Canyon - a deep-sea rift 80 miles off Nantucket - means arranging a crew and a vessel, hauling a submersible craft, and packing enough food and support equipment to last at least seven days. So in 1996, Cooper, a University of Connecticut professor, decided he would design an undersea lab where he and other scientists could hang out indefinitely. "To really understand what goes on down there," he says, "had to live and work at depth..."

July 01, 2002 - One billion PCs shipped since the Altair - By Michael Kanellos, Special to ZDNet News, The PC just turned 1 billion. Approximately 1 billion PCs have been shipped worldwide since the mid-'70s, according to a study released Sunday by consulting firm Gartner. Seventy-five percent of these machines have gone into professional, or work-related, environments, while the other 25 percent have been for personal, or home, use. Approximately 81.5 percent of PCs shipped have been desktops...

 July 10, 2002 - Pirates Sail the Seven Seas - Wired News Report, Global software piracy increased for the second straight year in 2001 due to lax laws and the growing availability of bootlegged software on the Internet, watchdog group Business Software Alliance said. Some telling statistics, it said, were a loss of nearly $11 billion in 2001 and that 40 percent of all new software installed by businesses last year was obtained on the black market, up from 37 percent in 2000...

 July 25, 2002 - Green light for Red Planet - By Helen Briggs, BBC News Online science reporter, In May next year, Europe will embark on its first mission to explore the Red Planet. The stakes are high - Mars Express aims to detect water under the Martian soil and look for signs of life, living or dead. With a 167m euro price tag, for the space craft alone, scientists cannot afford to make mistakes...

 July 02, 2002 - Staggering AIDS Report From U.N. - By Jordan Lite, WiredNews, NEW YORK -- The global AIDS epidemic has only just begun, reaching proportions once considered impossible in the world's most affected countries, the United Nations says in a devastating report released Tuesday. HIV is spreading at alarming rates in Eastern Europe and Asia and "now outstrips even the worst-case scenarios" projected by epidemiologists tracking the deadliest disease in human history, the report says...

 July 07, 2002 - NASA Takes a Flyer on Hydrinos - By Erik Baard, WiredNews, If one of NASA's newest rocket concepts works, it wouldn't just get humans farther out into the universe, it would redefine the place. The space agency is funding a study of an engine based on a novel conception of the structure of hydrogen, the central idea behind a maverick New Jersey researcher's Grand Unified Theory. This theory has been derided as a "crackpot idea" and "voodoo science" by respected experts in physics...