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Issue no. 9, 2005 Published: Mar 25, 2005
EU rejects Microsoft's trustee plan
Europe gets green light for internet .eu extension
Google falls to the French
Inkjet prints human cells
First membrane-free alkaline fuel cell built
Drop sensor provides laptop motion control
Automated web-crawler harvests resume info
Bad e-mail habits sustains spam
Einstein on CD

EU rejects Microsoft's trustee plan
Microsoft has been told that its proposal to limit the powers of a nonpartisan trustee to monitor its compliance with EU-imposed sanctions is unacceptable, the European Commission said Wednesday. The Commission imposed remedies on Microsoft one year ago, along with a record fine of €497m, after it found that the company had abused its dominant market position and competed unfairly against rivals. Microsoft was supposed to nominate a 'monitoring trustee' as part of this decision. 'We have officially informed Microsoft that their proposal on the monitoring trustee is not acceptable,' a Commission spokesman said. 'Essentially, they wished to have a veto on what issues the monitoring trustee could examine.' Microsoft has 10 business days to respond. After that, the Commission is ready to impose its own terms in a formal decision that could come as soon as the end of April, an official said.
ZDNet / Reuters Mar 23, 2005	back to top

Europe gets green light for internet .eu extension
Europe will be able to launch its own .eu internet extension in early 2006. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved Monday the .eu extension which will be used by businesses and individuals that want to give their activities a European dimension. ICANN has been authorized to sign an accord with EURid, the Belgium-based registrar of European domain names. The idea of an .eu extension was first discussed in 1997, and by April 2002, the European Commission, which saw it as a way of developing e-commerce in Europe, decided to pursue the project. In October, the commission gave EURid permission to set up the rules of attribution for .eu. The ICANN green light opens the way for the launch of a technical service for the extension, which is expected to be activated in about 10 days. In May or June EURid will publish the list of offices authorised to register names at the .eu extension. It expects at least one million registrations in the first year.
EUBusiness / AFP Mar 23, 2005	back to top

Google falls to the French
Google is being sued for $17.5m by Agence France Presse (AFP) for posting copyrighted articles and photos, allegedly without paying royalties. AFP has brought the case in response to the Google News search page, which lists stories from media around the world. In a suit filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, AFP asked for Google to stop linking to its subscription-only content from the free search page. A similar case against Google is currently ongoing, brought by pornography distributor Perfect 10. This lawsuit claims that Google is displaying Perfect 10's adult images on its search engine result pages, allowing people to view them without paying. Both cases will highlight a 2002 ruling which stipulated that websites could show thumbnail versions of copyrighted photographs but not the full-sized images.
VNUnet UK Mar 22, 2005	back to top

Inkjet prints human cells
One of the key tools used in research aimed at growing replacement organs and tissues is the everyday inkjet printer. The printers have been used to make scaffolds for growing tissue and to spray cells in nutrient-rich liquids onto surfaces. But how to put the right cells in the right places and ensure that the cells survive the rough ride? Researchers from the University of Manchester, UK, have devised a method that delivers human cells unharmed to chosen locations within polymer scaffolds. The scaffold is designed to degrade in the body and be absorbed over a timescale of months and while this occurs, the cells multiply and generate tissue to replace the scaffold. The cells are forced at high pressure through a 30-micron wide nozzle. The researchers showed that human cells printed into wells containing nutrients could multiply, spread out and form attachments to the surface during a six day incubation period. The researchers used printer driving voltages of 30 and 60 in order to ensure that the velocity was low enough to avoid harming the cells. The researchers also used an inkjet printer to form a tissue scaffold and to seed the scaffold with cells.
Technology Research News Mar 23, 2005	back to top

First membrane-free alkaline fuel cell built
The first membraneless alkaline fuel cell has been built by exploiting the way liquids do not mix in ultra-narrow channels. It could offer cheaper and more efficient fuel cells. Doing away with membranes not only simplifies a fuel cell's design, it has also enabled the first alkaline fuel cells to be built. These could potentially be 40 per cent more efficient than the acidic units used today, says Paul Kenis of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Illinois, US, who has developed the system. His system exploits a phenomenon known as 'laminar flow', where tiny streams of liquid become so viscous they do not mix when squeezed past one another. Kenis has patented the concept of his membraneless fuel cell system and presented a demonstration of the first membraneless alkaline fuel cell at the American Physical Society meeting in Los Angeles on Tuesday. The cell is a cuboid of 3cm by 1mm by 1mm and produces 0.25 watts of power.
New Scientist Mar 22, 2005	back to top

Drop sensor provides laptop motion control
The latest Apple Powerbook laptops can now be controlled with a gentle shake, thanks to a clever software trick. The new model of the notebook includes a motion sensor that locks the head of the hard drive in one position if the machine is suddenly dropped, to prevent damage as well as loss of data. The sensor is able to tell when the computer is moved up and down or rolled forwards or to the side. But now software engineer Amit Singh has found a way to turn the sensor into a novel means of controlling the system. As the sensor can be accessed using through the computer's operating system, Singh came up with some simple code to let him control things on the screen using movement. Using the technique it is possible to manoeuvre open windows by shaking or shimmying the machine. Using another program Singh created, called the Orientation Visualizer, it is even possible to display a 3D image that appears to hang in space as the PowerBook is moved around it.
New Scientist Mar 22, 2005	back to top

Automated web-crawler harvests resume info
A new search engine focused on people can automatically identify online information on individuals and weave it into detailed summaries. Just like Google and Yahoo, ZoomInfo.com crawls and indexes the web. But instead of serving up the pages in response to a query, it attempts to identify and extract specific information on people. After entering a name into the search box, a user is presented with a list of matching individuals. Clicking through to their resume-like summaries, can reveal their job title, company name, past jobs and universities attended. InfoZoom deploys algorithms that pick out verbs and proper nouns to home in on names. The algorithms also infer context to weed out phrases that appear to be real people, such as Penny Lane and Harry Potter. Potential new information is compared to databases of known names, job titles, degrees and universities. Inferring context also enables ZoomInfo to aggregate information found in several places that applies to the same person, and to separate out different people who share the same name.
New Scientist Mar 21, 2005	back to top

Bad e-mail habits sustains spam
The 'bad behaviour' of e-mail users is helping to sustain the spam industry, a new study has found. According to a survey conducted by security firm Mirapoint and market research company the Radicati Group, nearly a third of e-mail users have clicked on links in spam messages. One in ten users have bought products advertised in junk mail. The fact that one in ten e-mail users are buying things advertised in spam continues to make it an attractive business, especially given that sending out huge amounts of spam costs very little, the report concludes. 'This preliminary data is surprising and somewhat shocking to us,' said Marcel Nienhuis, market analyst at the Radicati Group. 'It explains why e-mail security threats including spam, viruses and phishing scams continue to proliferate,' he said, accusing users of 'bad e-mail behaviour'.
BBC News Mar 23, 2005	back to top

Einstein on CD
Albert Einstein became famous before the advent of the mass media so there are very few recordings of him. However, as part of the celebrations of Einstein's famous discoveries in 1905 the British Library has released a CD containing various speeches and radio broadcasts by the great physicist. Although the CD starts with a 57 second explanation of E=mc2, most of the material concerns Einstein's interest in international affairs and the fate of the Jewish people. The centrepiece of the CD is a 25 minute eulogy to Einstein by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw recorded at a dinner in support of two Jewish charitable organisations at the Savoy Hotel in London on 28 October 1930. The strangest item on the CD is a radio interview with Einstein after he had been made an American citizen in 1940. Recorded after the start of the Second World War, but before the US joined the war, Einstein reflects on democratic freedom and the responsibilities of science in time of war.
Physicsweb Mar 22, 2005	back to top