Graphene helps create artificial muscle that acts like the real thing
One of the problems facing the development of more realistic/natural acting robots is the ability to create artificial muscles that mimic all aspects of the real thing. Research currently being carried out at Nankai University has just taken a big step closer to achieving that. Read more...
Girls expelled for Facebook ‘Hit List’
The American Civil Liberties Union is fighting the expulsion of three Northwest Indiana girls for a Facebook conversation resembling a school "hit list."
The ACLU filed a lawsuit against Griffith Public Schools saying the conversation was "clearly meant to be humorous, as evidenced by their repeated use of emoticons such as 
…"
The organization said the expulsion violated the eight graders' freedom of speech. The girls insist it was all a bad joke."It was just very dumb, and I wish I could take it back," said 14-year-old Sabrina Munsie."We were just joking around," said 14-year-old Kennedy Fortier. Read more...
New Obama campaign video unveils ‘Forward’ slogan, mostly ignores Romney
Mitt Romney has just one brief, silent cameo in the Obama campaign's new seven-minute ad. The presumptive Republican nominee gets about as much screen time as former President George W. Bush and less than tea party demonstrators or top congressional Republican leaders like House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
"Instead of working together to lift America up, Republicans were waging a campaign to tear the president down," the narrator intones, as conservative firebrands Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity appear in archival footage. Then comes Romney's big moment: More than three minutes into the video, we finally get a glimpse of a photograph of him standing at what appears to be a Republican presidential debate with Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Read more...
Kids TV networks take a hit as youngsters fall in love with Netflix
Do you have a Netflix account? It seems like answering "no" to that question puts you in a smaller and smaller group by the day, and according to some new statistics, kids are quickly jumping on the bandwagon, too. Analytics firm Bernstein Research used TiVo viewing data to compare the TV habits of families with Netflix to those without, and found that in homes with Netflix programming available, childrens' TV networks took a major hit. Read more...
Yahoo to double Olympics presence in London
Yahoo plans to double its Olympics presence this summer, aiming to be the top website for the fourth straight Games.
Yahoo is sending 25 people from around the world to cover the Summer Games in London — about "twice as big" as it had in the Winter Games — including U.S. gold medal winners Shannon Miller and Dan O'Brien and many of its sports columnists and reporters. It also plans to cover the games in dozens of languages.
The move is an effort to outshine competitors. Despite not paying for exclusive rights to cover the games, Yahoo says it has been the No. 1 global destination for Olympics coverage for the past three games. Read more...
B&N, Microsoft team up on Nook, college businesses
An infusion of money from Microsoft Corp. sent Barnes & Noble Inc.'s stock zooming Monday, as the software giant established a way to get back into the e-books business.
The two companies are teaming up to create a subsidiary for Barnes & Noble's e-book and college textbook businesses, with Microsoft paying $300 million for a minority stake.
Shares of Barnes & Noble jumped $10.41, or 76 percent, to $24.09 in morning trading. The opening price of $26 was a three-year high. Microsoft's stock rose 2 cents to $32. Read more...
Mozilla to kill Firefox 3.6 by auto-upgrading old browser
Mozilla will give Firefox 3.6 the coup de grace next month by automatically upgrading users of that 2010 browser to Firefox 12.
The move isn't a first for the open-source developer: A year ago, it gave Firefox 3.5 the same auto-upgrade death blow.
According to Alex Keybl, Firefox's release manager, the automatic upgrade of Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 12 will take place in early May, although a date has not yet been set. Read more...
Does the iPad cannibalize Apple’s laptops?
Is Apple cutting the MacBook's throat with the iPad?
The question -- whether the company's tablet cannibalizes sales of its own portable computing line -- is ultimately impossible to answer, or at least quantify: One can't look into a counter-factual crystal ball to view an alternate universe without the iPad.
But Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, believes that the iPad does block sales of at least some Apple personal computers.
"I think there was some cannibalization from iPad," Cook acknowledged earlier this week during his company's quarterly earnings call with Wall Street. Read more...
Snow Leopard users most prone to Flashback infection
Of the Macs that have been infected by the Flashback malware, nearly two-thirds are running OS X 10.6, better known as Snow Leopard, a Russian antivirus company said Friday.
Doctor Web, which earlier this month was the first to report the largest-ever malware attack against Apple Macs, mined data it's intercepted from compromised computers to come up with its findings.
The company, along with other security vendors, has been "sinkholing" select command-and-control (C&C) domains used by the Flashback botnet -- hijacking them before the hackers could use the domains to issue orders or update their attack code -- to both estimate the botnet's size and disrupt its operation. Read more...
Australia to Apple, Adobe and Microsoft: Why do we pay more for digital downloads than other countries?
Australian politicians and have ordered an inquiry that seeks to determine why consumers are forced to pay more for software, music and game downloads from companies including Apple, Microsoft and Adobe, than their overseas counterparts.
Each company will be asked to explain to Parliament why Australians are paying more for digital downloads, hoping that the publicity around the hearings will force prices to be lowered.
The Minister for Communications, Stephen Conroy, led calls for the investigation, writing a letter to Sydney MP Ed Husic stating: ”There is evidence to suggest that the innovative use of technology is not always matched with innovative new business models in the case of products and services distributed online.” Read more...
5 tips for surviving a cloud outage
"Everything fails, all the time," so says Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels.
Amazon Web Services itself experienced a much publicized four-day service disruption last April, another outage in August and it had plenty of company from other cloud service companies last year. Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform in February had downtime problems due after the company failed to account for Leap Day, and despite improvements by cloud providers to minimize future outages, more outages will inevitably happen this year and beyond.
Here are steps experts say enterprise IT shops should take to avoid cloud outages from knocking them out:
1) With AWS, use multiple availability zones.
Amazon Web Services offers "availability zones" (AZ) in each of its regions and for each of its services. The company describes AZs as each running on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure. "They are physically separate, such that even extremely uncommon disasters such as fires, tornados or flooding would only affect a single Availability Zone." During last year's outage, about 45 percent of customers who used only a single AZ for the Relational Database Services were impacted, compared to less than 3 percent of customers who used a multi-AZ approach, AWS said in a post mortem report. After last year's outage the company made it easier for customers to use a multi-AZ approach by allowing common design and APIs to distribute instances across AZs. Read more...
Three incredible new smartphone accessories that are under $30
There is so much that can be done with our smartphones now that we basically never put them down. If we’re not checking in to something or watching a video, we’re surfing the web and/or making phone calls. So in between all that hard work we do with them, why not have a little fun as well? Welcome to the wonderful world of smartphone toys.
We’ve already spent hundreds of dollars on these devices after all, so I went in search of some things under $30 that are cool for just about any phone. Read more...
Steve Jobs was planning to create a real-life Willy Wonka tour of the Apple facilities
The new biography Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success contains a lot of interesting new facts about computer pioneer Steve Jobs. Sure, you may already know that the FBI had a massive file on the Apple CEO detailing his sub-par college grades and past use of LSD. But we're willing to guess you didn't know this (though perhaps by virtue of the LSD use, you could have inferred it): Steve Jobs was planning on giving away a Willy Wonka-style tour of the Apple facilities to whomever found a golden ticket inside the 1,000,000th iMac sold. Read more...
Man wants to attend an Apple event so bad he’s willing to change his name to do it
Have a ticket to Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) this June 11 that you're just not going to be able to use? Well, there's a man in San Francisco who wants to take that ticket off your hands — a man so desperate to attend the event that he'll undergo a legal name change just to be able to use your ticket. Read more...
Smartphones fuel Samsung profit to record
A surge in Galaxy smartphone sales fueled earnings at Samsung Electronics to a record high in the first quarter, usually a tough season for the global consumer electronics industry, outshining handset rivals such as Nokia Corp.
Samsung sold more smartphones in the first three months of the year than Apple Inc. and raked in more than 70 percent of its operating profit from mobile businesses. Shares of Samsung Electronics Co. shot up nearly 3 percent.
Net profit nearly doubled from a year earlier to a record 5.05 trillion won ($4.46 billion) for the fiscal quarter ended March 31.
Operating profit also logged a record high: 5.85 trillion won, which was in line with the company's guidance provided earlier this month. Sales rose 22 percent from a year earlier to 45.3 trillion won. Read more...