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'Meat intake cut' on cancer fears

2008-11-27T10:55:00.002+05:00

One in 10 people has tried to cut down on processed meats such as bacon in the wake of a report linking them to cancer, a survey suggests.

Older people among the 2,124 questioned were most likely to have done this.

A World Cancer Research Fund report last year said those eating two rashers of bacon and two sausages a day faced a 63% higher risk of bowel cancer.

A bowel cancer charity said other factors, including smoking and alcohol, were also key.

The cancer prevention report highlighted the evidence for the potential dangers of processed meat, but also pointed to other elements of diet and lifestyle which could either reduce or increase cancer risk.

A quarter of those questioned in the online survey said they had tried to eat more fruits and vegetables as a result of media coverage of the report, while 18% of people said they were making more effort to watch their weight, after the report described evidence linking excess weight to six forms of cancer.

Heavy consumption of red meat has already been linked to bowel cancer, and 11% of those asked said they had been trying to cut down.

Gut chemicals

However, scientists believe that chemicals created during the curing or processing of meat pose an additional threat to the cells lining the gut.

Among the over-55s, 37% said they had tried to reduce their intake of processed meat.

Younger people were less motivated, with only 6% of them doing this.

Richard Evans, the head of communications for the World Cancer Research Fund, said: "This survey shows that if people are told how they can reduce their risk of cancer then many of them will make changes.

"However, recent market research has shown that despite the wall-to-wall media coverage of our report, many people are still unaware of how things like diet and physical activity affect cancer risk."

The survey also found nearly two in five people were trying to be more physically active, and 9% were trying to cut down on alcohol in response to health messages.

A spokesman for Bowel Cancer UK said: "There is increasing evidence that lifestyle issues such as poor diet, obesity and lack of exercise are directly linked to an increased risk of the disease.

"We recommend that people who eat a diet high in processed meats cut down and eat more fruit and vegetables, but it is also important to remember to not focus on this alone.

"There are many other factors that might contribute to an increased risk of bowel cancer, such as smoking and an excess of alcohol, which should not be ignored."

More use Facebook, but not for long

2008-11-27T10:47:00.001+05:00

The Facebook website has opened a huge lead in Australia in the number of users it attracts against social networking rivals including News Corp's MySpace.

Six months ago Facebook and MySpace were close to even in user numbers. Facebook was just 30,000 ahead. But the latest figures from Nielsen Online show Facebook's popularity has soared, topping 3.5 million users in September, more than 1 million ahead of MySpace, which has declined marginally since being pipped by the upstart for the top ranking in April.

But in the 12 months to September MySpace has lost 400,000 users. Facebook in the US says its worldwide user base has more than doubled since January from 50 million to 120 million two weeks ago.

Facebook does have some growth challenges. In Australia it has been hit by a slump in the amount of time Australian users spend on its site, a measurement increasingly seen by online publishers and advertisers as a critical indicator for attracting advertising.

Australian users spent about 34 minutes per session in April but that fell to 19 minutes in June. Time spent on others such as MySpace and Bebo are unchanged. The rapid fall in usage times for Facebook began in May and levelled off in June and has consistently ranked lower than its three main social networking rivals: MySpace (27 minutes), Bebo (25 minutes) and Friendster (20 minutes).

Alan Long, the Asia-Pacific research director for Hitwise, which measures online audience trends, said a year-long view of session times across all four networking sites showed Facebook had a dramatic rise in the length of time users were spending on the site starting in February, but this had settled back to usage times it was experiencing late last year. Mr Long could not explain the sudden rise and fall of session times.

Other social networking observers, however, said research was detecting "early but real" public concerns about privacy issues on social networking sites and that people could be reducing their involvement.

"People are starting to slowly but surely become fully aware of what the consequences may be of putting your life out there for public scrutiny and how it might be used by others in a context that's inappropriate," Saatchi & Saatchi's planning director, Bram Williams, said. "We are pioneering new ground with respect to the way we manage our public persona. There is obviously a lot of attraction for these things but the ethical issues are not necessarily thought through at the outset."

A Facebook spokeswoman in the United States could not explain to the Herald the dramatic fall in usage times but suggested something similar had occurred in Japan this year. She said it might be linked to a new Facebook chat service which required people earlier this year to spend more time on the site learning how it worked.

The spokeswoman acknowledged privacy concerns were on the rise and there was a need to raise awareness of some of Facebook's new privacy options, which included the option to exclude anyone on a friend list.

"You can, for example, upload your family vacation photo album and share it only with your mum and dad or only your family friend list. Alternatively, you can restrict them from seeing a photo album that may not be so family-friendly by allowing your friends except these people on this list to see it."

Ban on calling old patients love

2008-11-26T10:38:00.002+05:00

Calling older patients "dearie" or "love" is set to be ruled out as offensive by new guidelines from the Nursing and Midwifery Council.

Nurses should speak "courteously and respectfully" and use patients' preferred names, the NMC recommends.

But terms of endearment can be used in some areas if they are part of everyday speech - it may appear unusual if they are omitted, the draft guidance says.

The recommendations focus on the issues which matter most to elderly patients.

Guidance for the Care of Older People, which is awaiting approval from NMC Council members next week, advises against behaviour that could be deemed patronising, Nursing Standard magazine reveals.

Dignity drive

It says effective communication is one of the most essential skills that a nurse can have.

Poor communication can have serious consequences and can damage the relationship between a nurse and an older person.

The guidelines, constructed around the views of older people, fit with the government's drive for dignity in care.

They say nurses should communicate with older people not only by talking to them, but also by listening.

Nurses and midwives must also "make the care of people your first concern, treating them as individuals and respecting their dignity".

Although most nurses know that they should be doing this, the NMC said it was aware that nurses do not always do it.

Benchmark

An NMC spokeswoman said: "The guidance sets out what older people should expect when receiving care and therefore provides a framework to help nurses and midwives focus on the issues which matter most to them."

She said the guidance could be used to challenge poor standards of care and judge staff performance against.

They cover issues including respecting privacy and providing fundamental care like adequate fluids assistance with eating and personal hygiene when required.

Dr Peter Carter, chief executive and general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said: "We completely support these guidelines. Everyone has the right to be treated with dignity and respect and that doesn't change when it comes to healthcare.

"For a long time we've been saying that nurses should ask patients how they would like to be addressed.

"The RCN Dignity campaign is about making sure that every nurse can take steps to make patients feel comfortable in potentially difficult circumstances. Addressing patients properly is one small step that staff can and have taken to improve care."

A spokeswoman from Age Concern said: "How hospital staff talk to older people is a small, but important part of considering their needs and wishes."

In a recent poll of more than 2,000, eight out of 10 nurses said they had left work distressed because they had been unable to treat patients with the dignity they deserved.

Police hire private spies to snoop online

2008-11-26T10:29:00.002+05:00

The internet communications and websites of anti-war campaigners, environmentalists, animal rights activists and other protest groups are being secretly monitored by state and federal agencies.

A Melbourne private intelligence firm specialising in "open-source intelligence" has been engaged by Victoria Police, the Australian Federal Police and the federal Attorney-General's Department to monitor and report on the protest movements' use of the internet.

The monitoring, which has been secretly conducted for at least five years, includes exploring websites, online chat rooms, social networking sites, email lists and bulletin boards to gather information on planned demonstrations and other activities. Many of those monitored have not broken any laws, but it is believed information about their participation in online activities is conveyed to government agencies that also deal with terrorism.

Private email and telephone communications are not monitored by the company, which has requested not to be identified due to fears its staff could be targeted by more extreme activists.

But the revelation of internet monitoring is likely to raise fresh civil liberties concerns, especially after a covert Victoria Police operation targeting community and activist groups was revealed by The Age last month.

Other information provided to police in "threat assessments" or "intelligence reports" from the company include material derived from academic journals, speeches, media reports and publicly accessible company data.

As well as focusing on domestic activist groups, the company monitors news, government and security-related websites around the world for indicators on threats or potential threats to Australia and Australian interests abroad — including travellers — from acts of terrorism and civil unrest.

A Victoria Police spokeswoman said the information its Security Intelligence Group received from the company was all publicly available and accessed lawfully.

She said the company did not conduct any physical or electronic surveillance of individuals or groups. Nor did it trace online transactions.

"There is a substantial amount of information on the internet that assists Victoria Police in the preparation of threat assessments and strategic intelligence reports.

"Outsourcing this work is an efficient and effective way of collecting relevant information. Prior to this arrangement, the analysts and investigators spent a considerable amount of their time 'surfing the net'. This takes our members away from the more important aspects of their duties."

The federal Attorney-General's Department confirmed it had contracted the company to provide information to its Protective Security Co-ordination Centre , the body charged with managing Australia's response to terrorist activity. A spokesman for the department said the company had been engaged since December 2002 to "monitor issues relating to criminal acts or threats concerning radical activism or unlawful behaviour, and to provide protest/security alerts on upcoming events".

Much of the PSCC's work involves protecting Australian politicians, foreign diplomats and visiting dignitaries. It also works closely with ASIO and state police on covert operations.

Last week, the PSCC warned federal MPs to expect pre-Christmas protests at their electorate offices by environmentalists wanting greater action on climate change. A month earlier, green groups had discussed at a forum in Sydney staging non-violent "sit-ins" at MPs' offices to protest against climate-change policies. It is not known how the PSCC became aware of the planned demonstrations.

But one contract, seen by The Age, between the PSCC and the Melbourne intelligence firm shows it is required to "provide independent advice on demonstrations and other activities overseas and within Australia". Another involved "surveillance" and "monitoring" for the PSCC's 24-hour watch office. The federal police have had an agreement with the firm since 2003. The agreement stipulates information can be collected only from publicly available sources.

Bad bosses may damage your heart

2008-11-25T10:37:00.002+05:00

Inconsiderate bosses not only make work stressful, they may also increase the risk of heart disease for their employees, experts believe.

A Swedish team found a strong link between poor leadership and the risk of serious heart disease and heart attacks among more than 3,000 employed men.

And the effect may be cumulative - the risk went up the longer an employee worked for the same company.

The study is published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Stressful environment

Experts said that feeling undervalued and unsupported at work can cause stress, which often fosters unhealthy behaviours, such as smoking, that can lead to heart disease.

Previous work has shown that unfair bosses can drive up their employees' blood pressure, and persistent high blood pressure can increase heart disease risk.

For the latest study, researchers from the Karolinska Institute and Stockholm University tracked the heart health of the male employees, aged between 19 and 70 and working in the Stockholm area, over a period of nearly a decade.

During this time 74 cases of fatal and non-fatal heart attack or acute angina, or death from ischaemic heart disease, occurred.

All the participants were asked to rate the leadership style of their senior managers on competencies such as how clearly they set out goals for their staff and how good they were at communicating and giving feedback.

The staff who deemed their senior managers to be the least competent had a 25% higher risk of a serious heart problem.

And those working for what was classed as a long time - four years or more - had a 64% higher risk.

The findings held true, regardless of educational attainment, social class, income, workload, lifestyle factors, such as smoking and exercise, and other risk factors for heart disease, such as high blood pressure and diabetes.

The researchers, which included experts from University College London in the UK and the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, said that if a direct cause and effect was confirmed, then managers' behaviour should be targeted in a bid to stave off serious heart disease among less senior employees.

They said managers should give employees clear work objectives and sufficient power in relation to their responsibilities.

Cathy Ross, cardiac nurse for the British Heart Foundation, said: "This limited, male-only study suggests that a good, clear working relationship with your manager may help to protect against heart disease.

"Feeling undervalued and unsupported can cause stress, which often leads to unhealthy behaviours such as smoking, eating a poor diet, drinking too much alcohol and not getting enough exercise - adding to your risk of developing heart problems.

"Being fit and active can give you the double benefit of busting work stress and boosting your heart health at the same time."

Cyber crims prefer surgical strikes

2008-11-25T10:33:00.002+05:00

Internet criminals have been getting more "professional" for years, trying to run their businesses like Big Business to get better and more profitable at selling stolen data online.

Now the bad guys of the cyber-underworld are exhibiting other unexpected traits: remarkable patience and restraint in stalking their victims.

A new report by antivirus software vendor Symantec details a startling trend that highlights the inventive ways criminals are figuring out ways to make money online.

Hackers are sometimes breaking into online businesses and not stealing anything. Gone are the bull-in-the-China-shop days of plundering everything in sight once they've found a sliver of a security hole.

Instead of swiping all the customer data they can get their hands on, a small subset of hackers have concerned themselves with stealing only a very specific thing from the vendors they breach - they want access to the compromised companies' payment-processing systems, and nothing else, according to the "Symantec Report on the Underground Economy," slated for release on Monday.

Those systems allow the bad guys to check whether credit card numbers being hawked on underground chat rooms are valid, the same way the store verifies whether to accept a card payment or not.

It's a service the crooks sell to other fraudsters who don't trust that the stolen card numbers they're buying from someone else will actually work, and it's good business.

The bad guys hardly touch anything. The customer data for that store's clientele remains intact. They don't install malicious software that turns the compromised machines into spam-spewing robots.

Think of it like taking a used car to a mechanic for an inspection before buying. Only in this case the mechanic's a squatter who's holed up illegally in some other guy's shop and using his tools when no one's around at night. And he cleans up spotlessly once he's done.

"They treat these things fairly pristinely so they can maintain access," Alfred Huger, vice president for Symantec Security Response, said in an interview.

According to Symantec, in the company's yearlong look at 135 so-called "underground economy servers" - all public servers hosting mostly legitimate chat channels, with a few bad ones catering to cyber crooks - researchers determined that criminals have latched on to this tactic as a way to make money and self-police the underground.

Symantec said it didn't find out which vendors had been compromised. The company says it didn't get inside the compromised servers that carry even more secretive back-channel conversations, because doing so would have broken the law.

The Cupertino-based company's researchers were only able to determine the trend is happening by looking at thousands of credit card numbers being checked every day - and either accepted or rejected - by shadowy groups online promoting that service and charging a fee.

That fee is about $US10 per card checked. Considering they're typically checked in batches of 10 or more, the revenue can add up fast.

Researchers said that the high number of cards the groups were checking each day suggests that they either had long-term access to a few compromised vendors, or had a lot of compromised vendors under their control and would shift the credit-card-checking chores to different ones to avoid being detected.

Huger said the reason the criminals don't raid the victim companies' databases is it's much lower risk to just check the card numbers on someone else's computers, rather than to start taking stuff out, which gets noticed.

Plenty of bad guys are still looting everything in sight, according to Symantec's study. Researchers spotted $US7 billion worth of stolen credit cards and bank accounts being sold during the yearlong project. That figure assumes the cards and accounts were completely drained by the crooks.

The actual price for those cards and accounts could command on the black market was far less, however, because of the risk the buyer takes on in trying to extract money or make fraudulent purchases. Symantec estimated that the total value of the goods advertised for sale was more than $US276 million during the time they were watching the servers from July 2007 to June 2008.

The report mostly underscores the trend that online criminals are adding more touches of professionalism to their businesses, like bundling packages of exploits together and selling them, or offering up programmers - like a company would hire a consultant - to write malicious code for other people.

Huger said the report just touched on the "low end" of the underground economy. The report emphasized that the potential bounty for hackers on the underground economy will only go up as "matures and operates more like a traditional business model."

Down's births rise despite tests

2008-11-24T10:48:00.002+05:00

More Down's syndrome babies are being born than before pre-natal screening became widespread, figures show.

The UK saw 749 Down's births in 2006, up from 717 in 1989 when tests came in.

The Down's Syndrome Association surveyed 1,000 parents to find out why they had pressed ahead with a pregnancy despite a positive test result.

A fifth said they had known somebody with Down's, a third cited religious or anti-abortion beliefs and 30% felt life had improved for people with Down's.

Almost one in five said they simply did not believe the results of the test.

Most respondents said they felt supported by their family and friends and considered that the future was far better today for those with Down's syndrome.

They pointed to integrated education in particular and a greater acceptance of what it means to be different.

Nobody is perfect

One respondent said: "I don't subscribe to the notion of the 'perfect human being' and found the idea of selecting one child in preference to another abhorrent."

Another said: "I already felt a strong sense of responsibility for my unborn child and knew that I would love it and want it regardless of any additional needs it might have. I knew I could count on friends and family for support."

The survey was compiled to coincide with the BBC Radio 4 documentary Born With Down's.

Carol Boys, chief executive of the Down's Syndrome Association, said the survey shows how much changes in society were influencing people.

She said: "When I and others had our babies it was a very different world - those with Down's syndrome were treated very differently.

"Now there is much greater inclusion and acceptance, with mainstream education having a huge role.

"We think this plays a part in the decisions parents make - there's even been a baby with Down's syndrome on EastEnders."

Following the widespread introduction of pre-natal testing for the syndrome, the number of babies born with Down's fell from 717 in 1989 to 594 at the start of this decade.

But during the current decade the birth rate has increased, reaching 749 births of children with Downs Syndrome in 2006, the latest year for which figures are available.

Figures from the National Down's Syndrome Cytogenetic Register suggest Down's births have risen by approximately 15% as a proportion of all live births in 2000.

Quality of life

Frances Dine was 12 weeks pregnant when a scan revealed the condition but she and her husband, Paul, gave little thought to termination.

She said: "Things have moved on and babies with Down's syndrome can have a great quality of life.

"At the back of our minds we did keep alive the possibility that she might not have Down's syndrome but we knew that we would be able to cope if she did - there's so much out there for her.

"Schools are integrated and there are even actors with Down's syndrome.

"There's a worker at our local supermarket who has Down's syndrome and we think that it doesn't need to hold you back."

Born with Down's will be transmitted on Radio 4 at 2000 GMT on Monday 24 November.

Online fraudsters 'steal £3.3bn'

2008-11-24T10:46:00.001+05:00

Hi-tech thieves who specialise in card fraud have a credit line in excess of $5bn (£3.35bn), research suggests.

Symantec calculated the figure to quantify the scale of fraud it found during a year-long look at the internet's underground economy.

Credit card numbers were the most popular item on sale and made up 31% of all the goods on offer.

Coming in second were bank details which made up 20% of the items being offered on criminal chat channels.

The $5.3bn figure was reached by multiplying the average amount of fraud perpetrated on a stolen card, $350 (£234), by the many millions Symantec observed being offered for sale.

Similarly, the report said, if hi-tech thieves plundered all the bank accounts it saw being offered for sale they could net up to $1.7bn.

Closed accounts

Symantec said it was likely that many of the cards offered for sale were invalid or cancelled and bank accounts closed but it added: "These figures are indicative of the value of the underground economy and the potential worth of the market."

Credit card numbers were proving so popular among hi-tech thieves because they were easy to obtain and use for fraudulent purposes.

Many of the methods favoured by cyber criminals, such as phishing schemes, database attacks and magnetic strip skimmers, are designed to steal credit card information.

The existence of a ready market for any stolen data and the growing use of credit cards also helped maintain their popularity, it said.

"High frequency use and the range of available methods for capturing credit card data would generate more opportunities for theft and compromise and, thus, lead to an increased supply on underground economy servers," said the report.

Criminal alliances

The year-long look at the underground economy confirmed to Symantec how serious and organised cyber thieves have become.

Via the covert chat channels and invitation-only discussion forums hi-tech thieves form loose alliances, contact those who specialise in one technique or find individuals who can extract cash from particular credit cards or financial institutions.

Russian and Eastern European gangs seem to be among the most well-organised and, said the report, have the ability to mass-produce credit and debit cards. By contrast thieves in the US are much more loosely aligned.

But, it said, all the criminals were happy to work together to steal money from credit cards and bank accounts.

"Symantec research indicates that there is a certain amount of collaboration and organisation occurring on these forums, especially at the administrative level," it said.

"Moreover, considerable evidence exists that organised crime is involved in many cases."

Early Treatment for HIV Babies Saves Lives

2008-11-23T10:18:00.002+05:00

Earlier this year, Health News published an article concerning HIV testing during pregnancy to reduce the incidence of babies born HIV positive. The testing was encouraged to allow for the proper antiviral treatment of mothers during pregnancy to reduce babies being born with HIV. Almost exclusively mothers who are HIV positive give birth to children with the infection or pass it to their infants while breastfeeding. There were an estimated 500,000 HIV infected infants born in 2006.

Untreated HIV produces infants with AIDS and a decade ago doctors were in despair in the treatment of these patients. Infants do not have the same immune systems as adults or even children and with AIDS weakened immune systems they are more susceptible to other illnesses and even death if they are not diagnosed and treated. A 2007 study has indicated that early diagnoses of infants with HIV are crucial if they are to be effectively treated. Early treatment produces more effective results and the progression of the disease is greatly limited.

The lead researcher in the study was Dr. Avy Violari, from the Comprehensive International Program of Research on AIDS. The study involved 377 HIV positive South African babies. Antiretroviral drugs were given to 252 of the infants immediately while the others were given medications only when symptoms occurred. In those given early medication mortality was reduced by 76 percent and HIV progression by 75 percent. Babies given treatment early had less developmental problems than the other babies because the treatment also helped protect their brains from the effects of HIV.

Edward Handelsman, a pediatrician at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease in Bethesda, MD, “I think it’s a landmark trial. It’s the first large, randomized clinical trial which absolutely, positively establishes this benefit to early treatment. And it provides a path—as far as I’m concerned a mandate—to start improving our methods of identifying [HIV positive] infants early.”
According to Dr. Violari “When these early data were analyzed, it became clear that treating all infants at the earliest opportunity after diagnosis was the best course of action.” As a result of the study the World Health Organization changed its guidelines which had recommended delaying treatment until symptoms appeared.

The findings were released in July 2007 and in the Nov. 20 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine another study, confirming those findings was published. The South African study was discontinued in 2007 because the results were so apparent that early treatment was the most effective for the patients. Babies who had been deferred from treatment until symptoms appeared were put on early treatment as a result of the study.

Developing countries have and will continue to have a high rate of HIV infected babies until their counties can sustain peace and guarantee good medical practices. Babies born of HIV infected mothers in this country should not face the same challenges. With proper pre-birth testing during pregnancy and immediate therapy there could be a time when no infant in this country has to suffer the devastation of the disease.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Health of the Western Cape and Gauteng, South Africa, and by GlaxoSmithKline.

YouTube stars gather in real time

2008-11-23T10:15:00.001+05:00

YouTube has hosted the first official "YouTube Live" at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, where the site's popular bedroom vlogging stars shared the stage with the likes of Akon and Will.i.am.

Though YouTubers have been gathering informally for years, the event is the first one sanctioned by the Google-owned video site.

The two-hour event was streamed live (a first for the site) at http://youtube.com/live.

Much as popular amateur videos play on YouTube alongside professionally created ones, YouTube Live featured a melange of Internet sensations.

Besides Akon and Will.i.am (whose Yes We Can video has been watched by more than 20 million people on the site), Soulja Boy Tell 'em, Katy Perry and Discovery Channel's MythBusters were also be on hand.

Among the purely YouTube-bred stars were Canon Rock guitar virtuoso Funtwo and the Vlog Squad, a group of prominent YouTube community leaders including LisaNova and Tay Zonday (famous for his Chocolate Rain video).

"Major productions are very top down," said Chris DiCesare, head of marketing at YouTube. "YouTube itself is very bottoms up."

DiCesare called it a "very egalitarian" environment that differed from most concert experiences in one notable way.

"Obviously, there are no signs posted 'no filming allowed' in the venue," said DiCesare, laughing, in a phone interview Thursday.

The audience was largely made up of partners and prominent members of YouTube, and videos chronicling the journey to YouTube Live were posted up prior to the event.

Man sues McDonald's over nude photos

2008-11-23T10:08:00.002+05:00

A man is suing McDonald's after he left his mobile phone at one of the chain's restaurants and nude photos of his wife ended up online.

The suit was filed on Friday against the chain, the franchise owner, and the store manager, and seeks a jury trial and $US3 million in damages for suffering, embarrassment and the cost of having to move to a new home.

The suit says that Phillip Sherman left the phone in the Fayetteville, Arkansas store in July and that employees promised to secure it until he returned.

Manager Aaron Brummley declined to comment and other company officials didn't return messages.

Light-wave implant hope for deaf

2008-11-22T11:02:00.002+05:00

An implant which works by firing infrared light into the inner ear is being investigated by US researchers.

Nerves in the ear can be stimulated by light as well as sound and the team from Northwestern University, Illinois, is aiming to harness this.

Infrared light shone onto guinea pig nerve cells produced better results than standard cochlear implants, a report in New Scientist magazine said.

But UK charity RNID said a device for human use might take years to develop.

For some profoundly deaf patients, the development of cochlear implants in recent years has been an important change.

The system works by placing approximately 20 electrodes to directly stimulate the nerves in the inner ear, but it has its limitations, with users finding it hard to appreciate music or communicate in a noisy environment.

This is because there are as many as 3,000 "hair cells" in a healthy ear, contributing to a far more detailed interpretation of sound than the implant can provide.

Frequency maps

Dr Claus-Peter Richter from Northwestern believes that an effect discovered by chance could hold the key to a better implant.

Surgeons who used lasers to perform a surgical procedure in the ear discovered that they were able to stimulate the nerve cells there to send an electrical message back to the brain.

Exactly why this happens is unclear, although Dr Richter believes that the heat that accompanies the light may be responsible.

However, the narrow beam possible using light rather than an electrode offers the possibility of a far more precise targeting of these neurons.

He shone infrared light into the neurons of deaf guinea pigs, while measuring electrical activity in a nerve "relay" between the inner ear and the brain.

The frequency "maps" produced this way are a good indication of the quality of information reaching the brain.

Sharp sound

While the "maps" produced by cochlear implants were less detailed, those produced after infrared stimulation were as sharp as those produced by sound in hearing guinea pigs.

Dr Richter is now working on ways to produce fibre optic devices which could target light within the inner ear.

A spokesman for the UK charity RNID said that cochlear implants had "transformed the lives" of many people and, in theory, this research might offer a way to improve the technology.

"One of the things that is really interesting - if it does work - is that the specificity from a laser is really quite exciting. One of the big problems with cochlear implants is their lack of specificity.

"This could be a major breakthrough, but we have to remember that even if that true, the time between demonstrating this and developing a device will be quite significant, perhaps as much as 10 years."

Police get Microsoft on crime

2008-11-22T10:54:00.001+05:00

In what is claimed to be a world-first initiative, the Australian Federal Police has sent a senior officer to Microsoft's global headquarters for six months to bolster its tech credentials and trade tips on online safety.

No arrests have come out of Mick Kelsey's secondment, but the agent assisted in the progress of the Child Exploitation Tracking System, an intelligence portal Microsoft launched earlier this year "to enable the AFP to work with law enforcement agencies throughout Australia and around the world to share and track information relating to online child exploitation and abuse".

With help from the CETS - which links millions of files on child abusers - in March the AFP played a key role in smashing an international pedophile internet network. More than 22 people were arrested in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia.

Superintendent Kelsey arrived at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington campus five months ago and will head home on December 20. The AFP said it was in talks with Microsoft over sending another federal agent next year.

"No other law enforcement agency in the world has placed a senior member into such a role," the AFP's Assistant Commissioner, Andrew Colvin, said in the latest issue of the AFP journal Platypus.

Superintendent Kelsey was too busy for a phone interview, instead replying to a select few questions in bullet point form by email.

In addition to milking Microsoft's knowledge of emerging technology-related crime trends and providing the software giant with a "law enforcement perspective on internet safety and security", Superintendent Kelsey said he was also studying Microsoft's business practices and leadership challenges.

"Microsoft's market share, expertise and knowledge make them a critical partner to law enforcement," he said.

In March the AFP created a new department, High Tech Crime Operations (HTCO), dedicated to investigating technology-related crimes, particularly online child exploitation, online banking scams and the use of malware, worms and trojans.

The Australian High Tech Crime Centre and the AFP's online child sex exploitation and cyber safety teams were folded into the new unit, which is headed by Assistant Commissioner Colvin.

Inside the HTCO is a new team dedicated to covert online investigations and staying on top of the new tools internet criminals use to commit their crimes.

A key focus is weeding out child sex offenders through the use of fake identities in online chat rooms.

This methodology led to an Australian man being charged with child pornography offences in July. And the AFP said it had referred more than 100 offenders to law enforcement agencies around the world in the past year.

Rapid care 'cuts baby's HIV risk'

2008-11-20T11:16:00.001+05:00

Rapid drug treatment of babies with HIV dramatically cuts their risk of death and debilitating disease, international research shows.

The study prompted the World Health Organization to change its guidelines, which had recommended delaying therapy until symptoms became apparent.

It found giving antiretroviral therapy (ART) straight after diagnosis cut the risk of death from Aids by 76%.

The study appears in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study, of 377 HIV-positive South African babies, found that babies given treatment immediately after they were diagnosed with HIV cut their risk of dying from the infection to just 4%.

In comparison, the risk of death for those whose treatment was delayed until their levels of key immune system CD4 cells began to fall, or other symptoms emerged, was 16%.

Immediate treatment also cut the chance of disease progressing measurably by 75%, from 26% to 6%.

The findings were so conclusive that treatment for all babies was re-assessed at the preliminary stage of the trial.

Unexpected findings

Professor Diana Gibb, from the Medical Research Council clinical trials unit worked on the study.

She said: "We did not expect to see differences so soon between the infants receiving early treatment and those in the group where treatment started only when immunity was falling or symptoms developed."

Lead researcher Dr Avy Violari, from the Comprehensive International Program of Research on Aids (CIPRA-SA) said: "Our results reinforce the view that there are no reliable predictors for small infants as to how their disease is progressing.

"CD4 counts do not tell us with enough accuracy if babies under a year of age are becoming sick.

"What was alarming was the speed of disease progression; some infants could seem fine in the morning and get sick and die by nightfall. Some did not even make it to the hospital.

"When these early data were analysed, it became clear that treating all infants at the earliest opportunity after diagnosis was the best course of action."

Saving lives

Her CIPRA-SA colleague Professor Mark Cotton, who also played a key role in the study, said he was delighted that the study had led to changes in the WHO guidelines.

He said: "It is to be hoped that this will save countless babies across the world, especially in low-income countries where mother-to-child transmission is still common.

"However, in order to start ART early, it is important to undertake HIV viral diagnosis very early in life which does require a programme with both manpower and resources."

Professor Gibb also stressed that avoiding mother-to-child transmission in the first place was the top priority.

She said: "These drug regimens are no picnic for these babies and even with improved outcomes in early life, there is still no cure for Aids."

The WHO issued a statement in which it confirmed the study had been instrumental in its decision to revise its guidelines.

Heat rises over UK's web map of fascists

2008-11-20T11:13:00.002+05:00

Right-wing extremists across Britain are bracing for violent repercussions after the British National Party's entire membership list was leaked on the internet.

And tech-savvy web users plotted members' addresses in red on a Google Map.

BNP leader Nick Griffin says the leak was an act of treachery by a disgruntled former BNP official, who may face jail time.

Ironically, the BNP is relying on Britain's Human Rights Act, which it opposes, to protect the privacy of its members.

The list, which is freely available on BitTorrent sites such as thepiratebay.org despite a court injunction, includes names, phone numbers, ages and home and email addresses of more than 10,000 BNP members, including children.

It also contains hobbies and occupations, leading to the identification of a number of police, school teachers, clergymen and government employees who secretly supported the organisation. Their names were marked with "discretion requested".

Party officials have said that hundreds of members were now receiving abusive calls and death threats, which could plunge the party into a membership crisis.

It is not illegal to join the BNP but the group, which only accepts whites as members, is frowned upon due to its hardline, racist views.

Some public service workers such as police officers are forbidden from joining the party.

UK police forces and the prison service are scouring the list for serving officers, vowing to sack any they find, the Guardian reported.

Web geeks quickly mashed up the data with Google Maps and published it on the web, with pins showing the number of members in each postcode.

Ben Charlton, who created the first map, quickly removed it after people complained that markers on the map could incorrectly imply a property contained a BNP member.

By then the cat was out of the bag and someone else had created bnpnearme.co.uk - a heat map showing all British BNP members by post code.

Seeing the humorous side of the whole debacle, other online troublemakers created a new site, LOLGriffin, which puts a BNP twist on the LOLCats phenomenon, whereby poorly spelled, childish text is placed on top of pictures of cats.

But in the process of naming and shaming the fascists, who generally shun non-whites and believe foreigners should be sent home, the list also outed a number of former members and even those who may have expressed interest in joining the party but did not sign up.

The Guardian spoke to several of those included on the list who claimed to have no interest in the BNP at all.

"The fact that we have teachers and doctors and women that knit, it's a fantastic event politically for us," Griffin told the Associated Press.

The BNP holds no parliamentary seats but now has about 50 of England's 22,000 local council seats.

Dead teen's mother testifies in cyber-bullying trial

2008-11-20T11:12:00.001+05:00

The grieving mother of a girl told a US jury on Wednesday how her daughter hanged herself with a belt after receiving cruel messages on her MySpace account, some of which were from a boy whose identity was later revealed to have been invented by a neighbour.

Prosecutors said it's the nation's first cyber-bullying trial and its results could set a legal precedent for dealing with the issue of online harassment.

Tina Meier recounted how "Josh Evans" interacted online with her 13-year-old daughter, Megan, during the first day of the trial against Lori Drew, who is accused of taking part in the internet hoax that prosecutors say led to Megan's suicide.

Meier said after a name-calling exchange between Megan, "Josh" and two other girls in October 2006, she told a sobbing Megan, who was being treated for attention deficit disorder and depression, that she wasn't supposed to be online and shouldn't have gotten into the argument.

"The last words she said to me were 'You are supposed to be my mom, you are supposed to be on my side'," Meier said as she tried to hold back tears.

Meier said she ran later upstairs and found Megan hanging in the closet with a belt around her neck. She died the next day.

Drew, 49, has pleaded not guilty to one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing computers without authorisation. Each count carries a potential sentence of five years in prison.

In his opening statement to jurors, lawyer Thomas O'Brien said Drew helped create "Josh's" false identity on MySpace to learn if Megan was spreading malicious rumours on MySpace about Sarah Drew, the defendant's then 13-year-old daughter.

O'Brien said the evidence will show Drew opened the MySpace account and "fully intended to hurt and prey on Megan's psyche".

For the first time, O'Brien disclosed what Megan wrote after allegedly receiving a message the day she killed herself that said the world would be better off without her. Megan sent a response saying, "'You are the kind of boy a girl would kill herself over'," O'Brien said.

Defence lawyer Dean Steward told jurors Drew did not violate the Computer Use and Fraud Act - used in the past to address computer hacking - and reminded them she was not facing charges dealing with the suicide.

"This is not a homicide case," Steward said.

Before the Missouri trial began, Steward tried to get US District Judge George Wu to forbid mention of the suicide. Wu rejected the request but instructed jurors the case is about whether Drew violated MySpace's terms of service, not about whether she caused Megan's suicide.

After jurors were dismissed for the day, Steward unsuccessfully requested a mistrial, saying the emotional testimony was "totally improper in a computer fraud case".

Prosecutors said Drew conspired with her daughter and Drew's then 18-year-old assistant, Ashley Grills, to invent "an attractive male teenager" on MySpace to find out what was being said about Sarah.

Steward countered it was Grills who set up the MySpace account and his client was driving home when the message about the world being a better place without Megan was sent. Grills has been granted immunity to testify.

The case is being prosecuted in Los Angeles because MySpace computer servers are based in the area.

Windpipe transplant breakthrough

2008-11-19T10:48:00.002+05:00

Scientists in Spain have carried out the world's first tissue-engineered whole organ transplant - a windpipe - made with a patient's own stem cells.

The groundbreaking technology also means for the first time tissue transplants can be carried out without the need for anti-rejection drugs.

Five months on the patient is in perfect health, The Lancet reports.

Tailor-made organs like this could become the norm, the European team of experts believe.

The patient, 30-year-old mother of two Claudia Castillo, needed the surgery to save a lung following damage to her airways by tuberculosis.

"Own grown" organ

To make the new airway, the doctors took a donor windpipe, or trachea, from a patient who had recently died.

Then they used strong chemicals and enzymes to wash away all of the cells from the donor trachea, leaving only a tissue scaffold made of the fibrous protein collagen.

This gave them a structure to repopulate with cells from Ms Castillo herself, which could then be used in an operation to repair her damaged left bronchus - a branch of the windpipe.

By using Ms Castillo's own cells the doctors were able to trick her body into thinking the donated trachea was part of it, thus avoiding rejection.

Advanced science

Two types of cell were taken from Ms Castillo: cells lining her windpipe, and adult stem cells - very immature cells from the bone marrow - which could be encouraged to grow into the cells that normally surround the windpipe.

After four days of growth in the lab in a special bioreactor, the newly-coated donor windpipe was ready to be transplanted into Ms Castillo.

Her surgeon, Professor Paolo Macchiarini of the Hospital Clínic of Barcelona, Spain, carried out the operation in June

He said: "I was very much afraid. Before this, we had been doing this work only on pigs.

"But as soon as the donor trachea came out of the bioreactor it was a very positive surprise."

He said it looked and behaved identically to a normal human donor trachea.

The operation was a great success and just four days after transplantation the hybrid windpipe was almost indistinguishable from adjacent normal airways.

After a month, a biopsy of the site proved that the transplant had developed its own blood supply.

And with no signs of rejection four months on, Professor Macchiarini says the future chance of rejection is practically zero.

"We are terribly excited by these results," he said.

"She is enjoying a normal life, which for us clinicians is the most beautiful gift."

Today Ms Castillo is living an active, normal life, and once again able to look after her children Johan, 15, and Isabella, four. She can walk up two flights of stairs without getting breathless.

Professor Martin Birchall, professor of surgery at the University of Bristol who helped grow the cells for the transplant, said: "This will represent a huge step change in surgery.

"Surgeons can now start to see and understand the potential for adult stem cells and tissue engineering to radically improve their ability to treat patients with serious diseases."

He said that in 20 years time, virtually any transplant organ could be made in this way.

US scientists have already successfully implanted bladder patches grown in the laboratory from patients' own cells into people with bladder disease.

The European research team, which also includes experts from the University of Padua and the Polytechnic of Milan in Italy, is applying for funding to do windpipe and voice box transplants in cancer patients.

Clinical trials could begin five years from now, they said.

Between 50,000 and 60,000 people are diagnosed with cancer of the larynx each year in Europe, and scientists say about half them may be suitable candidates for tissue engineering transplants.

New plant tackles our electronic leftovers

2008-11-19T10:44:00.002+05:00

Environmentalists and the Federal Opposition have accused the Federal Government of dragging its feet on a national response to Australia's e-waste epidemic, following the opening of the southern hemisphere's first automated e-waste recycling plant in Sydney today.

Australians dump an estimated 140,000 tonnes of hazardous e-waste - including computers, TV sets, monitors and mobiles - into landfill every year and the new plant, opened in Villawood today by the Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, is expected to recycle 20,000 tonnes of that waste when at full capacity.

But Planet Ark founder Jon Dee, one of Australia's foremost environmental crusaders, said the plant would hardly be used because the Government had not introduced a national scheme that would make it easy for people to recycle their old electronics.

The electronics industry has also called for such a scheme. It is estimated that up to 2 million TV sets and 1.6 million computers will end up in landfill this year as people upgrade to bigger and better gadgets.

"A plant is not much good unless you have a constant supply of computers going into it ... every time my local council has one of their hard rubbish pick up days, all I see down my street are computer monitors and old computers, all heading for landfill," Dee said.

Garrett recently announced he was working with his state counterparts to develop a national waste policy but has yet to announce a concrete plan.

Today, Garrett said his policy would be "informed by a comprehensive report on waste". Dee said this amounted to "more talk, more reports and more research", but little action.

The Opposition environment spokesman, Greg Hunt, said: "The plans for a national e-waste policy have essentially collapsed under Mr Garrett. We made enormous progress, we were ready to sign things off with the states - I can't understand why this progress has stopped."

Computer manufacturers such as Dell and HP, councils and the mobile industry through its Mobile Muster program offer e-waste recycling services, but Dee said these were all ad hoc, hidden and hardly used.

Many of the council recycling days were one-off events when what was needed was a simple, year-round approach and a total ban on electronics going into landfill.

Environmentalists want a recycling levy of about $30 put on every computer sold or imported at the time of purchase, and the big electronics brands have supported such an approach.

The levy would be backed up by a process through which people could take their e-waste to be recycled.

Dee suggested a plan whereby people could go to their local post office and send their old electronics off for recycling free of charge.

"Every community in Australia should have guaranteed access to recycle their e-waste. At the moment we are nowhere near that position ... it's been far too hard for the average person to take part," Dee said.

Jeremy Sutcliffe, executive director of Sims Recycling Solutions, which built the new plant in Villawood, also called for the Government to act now on compulsory legislation around the recycling of e-waste.

He said dumping e-waste in landfill meant toxic heavy metals such as lead, mercury and cadmium made their way into soil and groundwater.

"E-recycling rates in Australia have been very poor, with less than 4 per cent of the e-waste generated being processed," Sutcliffe said.

"Compare this to countries that have introduced stewardship programmes and e-recycling legislation, including all countries in the EU, some states in the US, Japan and Korea, which now have e-waste recycling rates in excess of 80 per cent.

"Even non-OECD countries like the Philippines have e-waste recycling programmes."

Cheating husband's iPhone excuse nuts

2008-11-19T10:39:00.003+05:00

A US woman has discovered her husband using his iPhone to send raunchy pictures of his genitals to a lover, which he tried to explain was caused by an Apple bug.

The embarrassing high-tech domestic dispute quickly became public after the woman, Susan, made a post on Apple's discussion board for iPhone technical support.

She was desperate to determine whether her husband's excuse was legitimate, holding out hope despite claiming she had already caught him making late night phone calls and messages to other women.

"Please help! I took my husband's i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account)," Susan wrote.

"When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone.

"He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent."

Susan then pleaded with the Apple experts on the discussion board to tell her if they had ever heard of the bug, saying "the future of my marriage depends on this answer".

Susan did not leave any contact details so it is not possible to contact her to verify the story. Her account on the Apple site says she is located in New Jersey.

Most of the initial responses informed Susan that it was not possible for images to be attached to emails automatically.

Curiously, two newly registered users then posted responses saying they had experienced the glitch several times but didn't know how to fix it.

They were quickly shot down by regulars of the discussion board who queried whether the posts were made by Susan's husband or online miscreants.

Susan did not publish the photograph online but described it in G-rated language for the benefit of the morbidly curious onlookers.

"It was a close-up shot of him pleasuring himself taken at the exact moment of maximum pleasure ... It's such a good shot that one must wonder if he actually practiced it a few times before getting it right," she wrote.

Susan thanked the discussion board users for their assistance but not before declaring that her lawyer was "working on the divorce complaint".

Drug-resistant ward bug concern

2008-11-18T10:41:00.002+05:00

Hospitals need to be vigilant against an emerging drug-resistant bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii, infection control experts have warned.

Like MRSA and Clostridium difficile, the bacterium poses the greatest risk to seriously ill patients.

Rates of resistance to antibiotics that halt the bug currently stand at 30%, Lancet Infectious Diseases reports.

The journal report authors said the infection was a growing public health worry across the world.

Measures in the UK to control MRSA and other "hospital-acquired infections" should also bring down Acinetobacter rates, experts said.

Acinetobacter shares many of the "superbug" properties of MRSA and Clostridium difficile, such as survival on surfaces and resistance to disinfectants. This makes it difficult to eradicate from wards once it is there, experts say.

Typically, the bacterium causes bloodstream infections, pneumonia or infection of a wound.

It can be carried on the skin of healthy people and can be passed to patients by poor hand hygiene.

It also survives in dust and on objects such as bedding for months, making rigorous cleaning of wards essential to control its spread.

The strains of Acinetobacter that are resistant to standard treatments can be treated with other antibiotics, however, and the bug does not usually pose a threat to healthy people.

Vigilance

Strict hygiene compliance and more thorough research into drug choice, especially those for multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, are vital to prevent major outbreaks, say the report authors Professor Matthew Falagas and Dr Drosos Karageorgopoulos, of the Alfa Institute of Biomedical Sciences in Athens, Greece.

But the HPA says this increase could be due to increased awareness and reporting rather than a true rise in infection rates.

A spokeswoman for the Health Protection Agency said: "Acinetobacter can cause problems in those who are already seriously ill with weakened immune systems.

"Although we do see some outbreaks of this infection in the UK, numbers of cases are fortunately small.

"Transmission of this infection can be reduced by careful attention to infection control procedures such as cohort nursing groups, hand hygiene and environmental cleaning. It is important that trusts remain vigilant in their treatment of this and all healthcare associated infections."

She said the HPA had no plans to make the reporting of cases mandatory, largely because it is not deemed to be as great a threat as the notifiable hospital-acquired infections such as MRSA and C.difficile.

Professor Richard James, director of the Centre for Healthcare Associated Infections at Nottingham University, said: "If we could overnight solve the problems of hospital infections caused by C.difficile and MRSA then there are other potential superbugs like Acinetobacter baumannii lying in wait.

"Hospitals are full of sick patients and very fit bacteria that will spread from patient to patient unless infection control measures are up to the challenge.

"Acinetobacter baumannii, multidrug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and extremely drug resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) are examples of new threats to public health that are already causing serious problems in other countries."

Dr Andrew Berrington, a consultant microbiologist at Sunderland Royal Hospital, said there was little evidence to suggest outbreaks of Acinetobacter were becoming more common in the UK.

"We mustn't be complacent but currently its impact can be geographically constrained - some hospitals struggle to control outbreaks, others see very little of it."

Uproar as Dell claims half-price offer a mistake

2008-11-18T10:39:00.001+05:00

Dell is under fire after it twice advertised a computer for sale at less than half the usual price last week but then abruptly pulled the offers, refusing to honour any orders.

Customers are crying foul, saying Dell deliberately advertised at an impossibly low price as a marketing ploy, knowing it could pull out at any time and claim the offer was an error.

Bargain hunter websites, such as OzBargain, and PC user forums, including Whirlpool and Overclockers Australia, lit up on Friday with word that Dell was offering a $799 Vostro 220ST computer on its website for $240.

The desktop computer included an Intel dual-core processor, 2GB of internal memory, 160GB of hard-drive space and a 20-inch LCD monitor.

The same computer was offered days earlier, on Monday, for $350 as part of another deal, which Dell also pulled out of.

Dell believes it is justified in refusing to honour the sales, saying it did not send customers a notice accepting the orders and therefore no contract was created. Dell did, however, send customers an automated response acknowledging the orders.

Dell Australia spokesman Marty Filipowski said the offer was simply a mistake and stemmed from Dell accidentally allowing customers to delete certain accessories from their orders.

"Those who deleted the preconfigured accessories from their order where inadvertently offered the product for $238.64," he said.

"We are contacting these customers now and believe they will understand the error."

The NSW Office of Fair Trading says traders such as Dell are generally obliged to deliver goods only if customers have paid for them, which creates a binding contract.

It is understood those who did not have their credit cards debited have little recourse, but those who paid by a direct bank transfer might have the ability to force Dell to honour the deal.

Filipowski rejected this, saying: "We have not accepted any funds."

ACCC spokeswoman Lin Enright, when asked if Dell had breached laws related to false advertising, said: "I'm advised that if it was a genuine mistake, and it seems to be, no action would be taken."

Landmark MySpace suicide case set to begin

2008-11-18T10:36:00.002+05:00

The case of US v Lori Drew is viewed in legal circles as landmark internet law, but as outlined in government documents with its neighbourhood feuds and a teen's suicide, it reads more like a plotline for a made-for-TV drama.

In fact, as the judge has noted, the case of the 49-year-old Missouri woman accused of taunting a 13-year-old girl on the internet to the point where she committed suicide has already inspired an episode of Law & Order.

US District Judge George Wu said he considered a defence motion to exclude evidence of the suicide from the trial that begins on Tuesday. But he finally decided it would be futile since people being called for jury duty most likely know about it.

Instead, he said he would instruct the jurors that the case is about whether Drew violated the terms of service of the MySpace social networking site, not about whether she caused the suicide of Megan Meier.

Drew has pleaded not guilty to one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing computers without authorisation. Each count carries a potential sentence of five years in prison.

Drew's lawyer, Dean Steward, argued that no matter what the judge tells the jury, once they hear the story, they will not see it as a case about violating rules in cyberspace.

"They will conclude it's about the tragic death of a young girl," he said. "The jury is going to end up thinking that Lori Drew is being tried for the death of Megan Meier."

Not so, said Assistant US Attorney Mark Krause, but his memorandum presents a compelling narrative of discord and death in the town of O'Fallon, Missouri.

The saga began years ago when the Drew and Meier families were friends in the St Louis suburb. Their daughters were the same age, attended school together and were friends.

Megan, who is referred to in court documents as M.T.M. because she was a minor, spent time with the Drews and traveled with them, the prosecutor said.

"However, their relationship was, at times, rocky," the document notes. "On ... occasions, M.T.M. feuded with defendant's daughter."

Megan's mother, Christina Meier, confided in Drew that she was concerned for her daughter's mental health and felt she was "particularly vulnerable," Krause said.

Eventually, the girls drifted apart and in 2005, Megan transferred to a new school.

In the summer of 2006, Drew became concerned that Megan was spreading malicious rumours on MySpace about her daughter. The mother discussed the matter with her daughter and her 18-year-old assistant, Ashley Grills, the document said.

The three plotted to invent "an attractive male teenager" on MySpace and approach Megan using the false identity. They allegedly planned to find out what she was saying about Drew's daughter.

Grills, who is expected to testify as the government's star witness, has said she warned they would get in trouble if unmasked. But she said Drew assured her that "many people created fake identities on the internet."

Prosecutors declined to comment on whether Grills has been given immunity in exchange for her testimony.

"Josh Evans" was born on MySpace on September 20, 2006, and was introduced as a new boy in town who was homeschooled and lonely.

The document said "he" contacted Megan, who quickly became smitten. After some innocent messages, Drew encouraged her co-conspirators to have him "flirt" with Megan.

Complications arose when another neighbourhood girl obtained the password for the "Josh Evans" account and sent messages to Megan saying Josh no longer wanted to be friends with her. A dispute erupted and on Octber 16, 2006, Grills typed a message telling Megan "that the world would be a better place without (her) in it."

Megan ran upstairs and her mother found her about 20 minutes later hanging in her closet. She died the next day in the hospital.

Steward said outside court that part of Drew's defence would be that she was not at home when the message was sent.

Grills said during an interview with the ABC's Good Morning America ealier this year that she wrote the message to Megan in an effort to end the online relationship with "Josh" because Grills felt the joke had gone too far.

When she learned of the suicide, Drew told her "co-schemers" to delete the MySpace account, Krause wrote. She called the other girl who had become part of the MySpace conversation and told her to "keep her mouth shut" and to "stay off the MySpace."

Megan's death was investigated by Missouri authorities, but no state charges were filed because no laws appeared to apply to the case. But in California, US Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien, noting that MySpace was headquartered in Los Angeles, found a statute that seemed to apply.

O'Brien said this was the first time the federal statute on accessing protected computers has been used in a social-networking case. It had been used in the past to address computer hacking.

Periods of healthy old age 'vary'

2008-11-17T10:43:00.004+05:00

The health of older Europeans varies widely between countries, even in those with longer life expectancies, a report has claimed.

The study found people in Estonia, Latvia and Finland had fewer years of good health after the age of 50.

People in the UK fare relatively well, enjoying nearly 20 years on average.

The lead authors of the Lancet study, from Leicester University, said the figures could help governments plan for future health needs.

The researchers collected data on life-expectancy, then surveyed older people from each country to find out whether they felt that illness had limited their ability to carry out normal activities.

This was used to calculate how many "healthy life years" a man and woman from each EU country could expect after their 50th birthday.

In some cases, this revealed problems not immediately apparent by just looking at life expectancy charts.

For example, Austria men and women can expect to live on average to 79 and almost 84 respectively.

However, only half of their years after 50 will be free of ill-health, according to the figures.

In Germany and Finland, the gap between life-expectancy and healthy years is even worse.

The newest entrants to the EU, already recording lower life expectancies than established members, appear to have populations blighted by chronic illness in old age.

In Estonia, men live on average to just under 73 years old, and women to over 80 - but men can expect only nine years good health after 50, and women only a year more than this.

UK 'average'

While the UK has a generally lower life expectancy than some other EU states, its "healthy life year" score suggests that the health gap is not as wide as suggested by life expectancy alone.

Men here can expect to live until almost 80, and women to more than 82. However, for men, almost 20 years of this will be in good health, and just over 20 for women.

This compares to Spanish women, who live to 85, but can expect fewer of those extra years to be healthy ones.

Lead researcher Professor Carol Jagger, from Leicester University, said: "What we have here, for the very first time, is data we can really compare.

"And it really questions whether the countries with the longest life expectancies are the healthiest.

"In the case of the UK, we are looking pretty average, but slightly better than our life expectancy figures suggest."

She said that the figures might be useful to governments who are trying to work out the number of older people able to remain working, or who will need health care.

The results might mean that an EU target of increasing the number of older people working might be a difficult one to meet.

"Without an improvement in the state of health of older people, it will be difficult to raise the retirement age or bring more older workers into the workforce for certain EU countries."

John Appleby, from the health policy think tank The King's Fund, said that the figures threw up some "interesting differences" between countries.

He said: "I'm not entirely surprised by the results for the UK. It possibly partly reflects a better health and welfare system which supports older people in this country.

"This is an area which is often missed out in comparisons between countries. Life expectancy on its own is quite a crude measure, and just doesn't tell you about the quality of that life."

Shuttle docks with space station

2008-11-17T10:41:00.001+05:00

A Nasa shuttle, carrying seven astronauts, has docked with the International Space Station as part of a mission to refit its living quarters.

The Endeavour is carrying 14,000lb (6,350kg) of fittings to allow the station to accommodate six crew members instead of the current three.

A new astronaut, Sandra Magnus, is also joining the ISS crew.

"International Space Station is indeed ready for extreme home makeover," joked ISS station commander Mike Fincke.

Endeavour docked with the ISS at 2201 GMT, a few minutes earlier than scheduled, as the spacecraft passed over India.

'Extreme make-over'

Engineers studying film of Endeavour's launch from Florida have found no obvious signs of damage from debris.

At least two pieces were spotted during the launch on Friday night, sparking fears that a narrow strip of thermal blanket may have been torn off.

Such inspections are standard since the Columbia disaster of 2003, when debris from the external tank struck the shuttle, damaging the heat shield and causing its destruction as it tried to re-enter the atmosphere. All seven crew members died.

This is the final orbiter mission of 2008.

Four spacewalks are planned on the 15-day flight, including repairs to joint damage on the ISS's solar arrays.

The mission has been dubbed Extreme Home Improvements. It will see the crew installing new crew quarters, with an additional bathroom and a galley.

There will be two new sleeping compartments, more exercise gear and a second toilet.

Nasa plans to double the station's crew size as early as May.

Also in the cargo is a water regeneration system that distils, filters, ionises and oxidises wastewater - including urine - into fresh water for drinking.

The equipment has been packed inside refrigerator-sized racks that require forklifts to lift them on Earth but in space, a single astronaut can move a rack around with little problem.

The fresh crew member is due to replace Gregory Chamitoff.

Endeavour and its crew are due to land back at Kennedy on 30 November.

The flight is the fourth mission of the year.

Nasa had hoped to fly a servicing call to the Hubble Space Telescope last month but delayed the mission to May 2009 to prepare for some additional repair work on the observatory.

In all, Nasa plans 10 more shuttle flights before the fleet is retired in 2010.

Ubuntu to debut on smartphones

2008-11-17T10:38:00.001+05:00

Mobile phone chip designer Arm has announced an alliance with the makers of the Ubuntu open source software.

The deal will produce a version of the operating system for small net-browsing computers known as netbooks.

It marks a departure for Arm, which before now has been best known for designing the chips inside smartphones and feature phones.

The new operating system for Arm-powered machines looks set to be available in April 2009.

Battery power

Rob Coombs, director of mobile marketing at Arm, said he expected to see the first devices running the version of Ubuntu by the time of the Computex show in June.

The devices will be based around the Arm7 architecture and, in particular, the Cortex A8 and A9 processors.

"It's significant in that it is taking Arm onto larger screen formats," he said.

The resultant netbooks were likely to sport screens up to 25cm (10in) across and be able to run good quality video, web browsers, and the well-known suite of Open Office programs, said Mr Coombs.

Equally, he said, these netbook devices would have the long battery life enjoyed by many mobiles.

"They'll be for people who want a small internet-centric device," he said.

Small form-factor notebooks have proved hugely popular with many people looking for a small device that they can use to go online while out and about.

The interest in the market sector is being driven by devices such as the XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child project and the Eee machine from Asus.

Arm produces chip designs that firms such as TI, Qualcomm and many others turn into processors that power 70-80% of the world's mobiles.

Arm-designed chips also drive many smartphones such as the G1 - the first phone powered by Google's Android software.

The tie-up with Arm builds on Canonical's announcement in May 2007 that it would develop versions of Ubuntu specifically for low-cost note books.

Obama might have to kick his CrackBerry habit

2008-11-17T10:35:00.002+05:00

Sorry, Mr President. Please surrender your BlackBerry.Those are seven words president-elect Barack Obama is dreading but expecting to hear, friends and advisers say, when he takes office in 65 days.

For years, like legions of other on-the-move professionals, Mr Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry - or CrackBerrys as they are sometimes called for exactly that reason..

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about keeping email secure, he faces the Presidential Records Act - which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review - and the threat of subpoenas.

A final decision has not been made on whether he could go against precedent to become the first emailing president but aides said that seemed doubtful.

For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the US is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive. But Mr Obama seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score. Aides said he hoped to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first US president to do so.

Mr Obama is the second president to grapple with the idea of this self-imposed isolation. Three days before his first inauguration, George Bush sent a message to 42 friends and relatives to explain his predicament.

"Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace," Mr Bush wrote from his old address, G94B@aol.com. "This saddens me. I have enjoyed conversing with each of you."

But in the eight years since, as BlackBerrys have become ubiquitous - and often less intrusive than a telephone - the volume of email has multiplied and the role of technology matured.

Mr Obama used email to stay in touch with friends when he was on the road. He also relied on email to keep abreast of the rapid whirl of events on a campaign day.

"Given how important it is for him to get unfiltered information from as many sources as possible, I can imagine he will miss that freedom," said Linda Douglass, an adviser who was on the campaign.

Even if he does not carry a BlackBerry or a mobile phone, Mr Obama almost certainly will not lack a variety of new forms of communication.

Cancer drug success 'on the rise'

2008-11-16T11:21:00.001+05:00

Cancer drug research is entering a new era which will mean more successful drugs for patients, says a charity.

However, Cancer Research UK called for pharmaceutical firms and academics to be more open about those which do not make the grade.

Improved knowledge of cancer's biology means 18% of new drugs, compared to 5% previously - will become standard treatments, said the charity's experts.

Their research was published in the journal Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.

The hunt for cancer drugs is carried out on a massive scale, but there is also a massive failure rate, as promising candidates fall by the wayside in clinical trials.

This costs drug firms and charities such as Cancer Research UK many millions, although scientists can learn lessons even from expensive failures.

Some studies have estimated that, in the past, just 5% of cancer drugs in the pipeline actually end up in the clinic being used day to day.

Data on 974 drugs under development, gathered by Cancer Research UK experts, suggests that 18% of them will prove successful in clinical trials.

It is hoped that many of them will be alternatives to conventional chemotherapy, which can have unpleasant and dangerous side-effects, targeting the mechanisms of cancer cells more directly, with less damage to healthy cells.

Genetic make-up

Dr Ian Walker, the licensing manager at the charity's commercial development arm, said: "This clearly demonstrates the benefits of developing molecularly targeted treatments for cancer - understanding more about the basic biology of cancer is making a real difference to the success rate for new anti-cancer drug development."

The ability to tailor drug choices to the genetic make-up of patients in some cases is also having a benefit.

However, Professor Herbie Newell, also from Cancer Research UK, said that minimising the number of "failures" - and their cost to the industry - would be vital, and this could be helped if researchers and drug companies were more open about what worked, and what did not:

"We strongly believe that both industry and academia must improve the availability of data related to failed as well as successful drug development programmes.

"The sharing of such information can only be beneficial for clinical, scientific and commercial reasons - and will help measure our progress as well as pinpoint areas for improvement."

Ask and ye shall Google it

2008-11-16T11:18:00.001+05:00

Pushing ahead in the decades-long effort to make computers that understand human speech, Google researchers have added sophisticated voice-recognition technology to the company's search software for the Apple iPhone.

Users of the free application can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, such as: "Where's the nearest Starbucks?" or "How tall is Mount Everest?" The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google's servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.

The search results, which may be displayed in seconds on a fast wireless network, will at times include local information, taking advantage of iPhone features that let it determine its location.

The ability to recognise just about any phrase from any person has long been the supreme goal of artificial-intelligence researchers looking for ways to make man-machine interactions more natural. Systems that can do this have recently started making their way into commercial products.

Yahoo and Microsoft already offer voice services for mobile phones. The Microsoft Tellme service returns information in specific categories such as directions, maps and movies. Yahoo's oneSearch with voice is more flexible but does not appear to be as accurate as Google's offering. The Google system is far from perfect and it can return queries that appear as gibberish.

Google executives declined to estimate how often the service - set to become available in the US this weekend - gets it right, but they said they believed it was easily accurate enough to be useful to people who wanted to avoid tapping out their queries on the iPhone's touch screen.

The service can be used to find restaurant recommendations and driving directions, look up contacts in the iPhone's address book or settle arguments in pubs.

A request for restaurant recommendations in a particular area will return a list of restaurants in the district, each with starred reviews from Google users and links to phone numbers and directions.

Artificial-intelligence researcher Raj Reddy, who has done pioneering work in voice recognition, said Google's advantage in this field was the ability to store and analyse vast amounts of data.

"Whatever they introduce now, it will greatly increase in accuracy in three or six months," he said.

"It's important to understand that machine recognition will never be perfect.

"The question is: how close can they come to human performance?"

For Google, the technology is critical to its next assault on the world of advertising. Google executives said location-based queries would make it possible to charge higher rates for advertisements from nearby businesses, for example, although it is not selling such ads now.

As with other Google products, the service is freely available to consumers and the company plans to eventually make it available for phones other than the iPhone.

Heart test 'cannot predict risk'

2008-11-15T10:51:00.001+05:00

Heart tests offered to many patients with chest pain are of little value in predicting future heart disease, say researchers.

Instead of electrocardiagram (ECG) tests, doctors should spend more time quizzing patients about their symptoms and examining them, they said.

The British Medical Journal study, by the London Chest Hospital, followed 8,176 suspected angina patients.

A heart charity stressed that the test was useful in other circumstances.

Approximately two in 100 people in the UK experience angina, which is the most common symptoms of heart disease.

Reporting chest pain to a doctor generally means referral to a rapid access clinic, where ECGs taken to predict whether a patient needs further attention.

An ECG monitors the electrical activity of the heart over a period of time, looking for evidence of weakness in the heart muscle, or abnormal rhythms.

Often the patient will be asked to undergo the test while exercising, which can help highlight these problems.

The study compared the progress of the patients, 60% of whom who had an exercise ECG performed.

Among the 60%, 1,422 not only had the basic "summary" results recorded, but had detailed data from the ECG used to help make a diagnosis.

All the patients were then followed up for the next few years.

History call

However, almost half of all coronary "events", such as heart attacks, that happened during this period, happened in patients whose ECG results had not shown any sign of problems.

A routine clinical assessment, which involved taking a detailed "history" from the patient, and examining them thoroughly, was almost as good in predicting future heart disease as the exercise ECG.

The researchers concluded that the tests were "of limited value" to doctors faced by patients with no prior heart disease.

Dr Mike Knapton, from the British Heart Foundation said that while early diagnosis of angina was important, the study showed that the best way to achieve that was to talk to the patient.

"Tests such as resting or exercise ECGs can be helpful when patients present with unusual symptoms or suffer from chest pain following a heart bypass.

"But exercise ECG is not very good at assessing future risk. Better risk assessment of patients with angina is needed to help identify those most at risk of heart attack or death.

"Any results for ECGs should be in addition to consultation with your Doctor to properly monitor your condition."

Indian probe touches down on Moon

2008-11-15T10:49:00.001+05:00

India's first unmanned lunar spacecraft, Chandrayaan 1, has placed a probe on the surface of the Moon.

The probe, painted with the Indian flag, touched down at 2034 (1504 GMT), the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said.

It will perform various experiments, including measuring the composition of the Moon's atmosphere.

The mission is regarded as a major step for India as it seeks to keep pace with other space-faring nations in Asia.

The BBC's Sanjoy Majumder in Delhi says the success of the mission has been hailed in India where many see it as another sign of the country's emergence as a global power.

Video journey

Earlier this week Chandrayaan 1 began orbiting the Moon some three weeks after it was launched from a space centre in southern India.

The dropping of the Moon Impact Probe (MIP), weighing about 30kg, concludes the first phase of the mission.

"During its descent from Chandrayaan 1, an onboard video camera transmitted lunar pictures to the ISRO command centre," spokesman S Satish said, AFP news agency reports.

In the days to come, the probe will measure the composition of the Moon's ultra-tenuous atmosphere, or exosphere.

For the next two years, Chandrayaan 1 will map a three-dimensional atlas of the Moon and also check for the presence of water-ice with the help of instruments built by India and other countries including the US, Britain and Germany.

The chairman of India's space programme, Madhavan Nair, has described the mission as 95% successful so far and has announced a second lunar mission to be launched by 2012.

"We have now successfully put our national flag on the lunar surface," he told a news conference.

Mr Nair has also said India is considering sending a satellite to Mars.

Cash only as ANZ goes offline

2008-11-15T10:46:00.002+05:00

Retailers across the country were demanding cash-only sales for three hours today after a computer crash at ANZ rendered them unable to accept credit or debit cards.

Franklins supermarkets across NSW were unable to process the cards from around 1pm today, financial director Roni Perlov said.

"My understanding is their [ANZ's] system that operates their card acquiring business has crashed," he said.

"At present they're unable to give us a timing as to when their systems will be restored, so it must be a major issue on their side - it's very unusual that something of this magnitude happens."

Perlov said the problem affected any retailers that used ANZ to process cards.

An ANZ spokeswoman said the issue related to "switching hardware" for point-of-sale transactions and occurred "after the input of some invalid data by a merchant".

She would not elaborate except to say the issue affected retailers nation-wide.

"This is also affecting switching for non-ANZ customers using ANZ ATMs," she said.

"The slowness is causing time-outs for transactions in many cases which in turn is resulting in transactions not being processed."

The bank said the problem was resolved by 4pm.

A shopper at the Franklins Crows Nest store said staff were "at their wit's end trying to work out what to do".

"In fairness to them they dug around and found an old card-swipe machine and ultimately managed to process some of us manually," said the shopper, who did not want to be named.

Sex-matched transplants 'better'

2008-11-13T10:48:00.002+05:00

The chance of long-term survival after a heart transplant rises if the person getting the new heart is the same sex as the donor, researchers say.

The US study of more than 18,000 operations found death rates rose by a fifth above average levels if it was a woman who had received a man's heart.

Same-sex transplants had lower rates of rejection over the next few years.

The precise reason is unclear - although the difference in size could be a factor.

Men and women's hearts are anatomically identical, and with donor organs in short supply, many transplants will involve a heart taken from a donor of the opposite sex to the patient.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore suggest that this may not be the best way to use them.

They looked back at heart transplants which happened between 1998 and 2007, comparing survival rates in matched against non-matched transplants.

Overall, seven out of ten operations involved matched transplants.

They found a 13% lower risk of rejection - where the body recognises the new heart as "foreign" and attacks it - in matched transplants over the first year.

There was a 25% lower rate of death within 30 days of the operation in the matched group.

Further analysis revealed that the worst scenario appeared to be a woman receiving a "male" heart, while the most successful operations were those involving male recipients and male donors.

Dr Eric Weiss, who led the study, said: "We generally don't assume that organs from male and female donors have inherent differences affecting long-term outcomes, but our data suggest that there are important differences which must be taken into account.

"Heart size would seem to be the most important factor, beyond that, no-one knows why sex matching is important to transplant survival."

However, he said that if the patient was in severe heart failure, then receiving an non sex-matched organ would still be better than waiting longer.

Professor Robert Bonser, a cardiac surgeon from Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, said that while the findings were "interesting", the scarcity of organs meant that gender matching was unlikely to become the rule.

He said: "In the UK there are too few donors to make gender matching really practical - the researchers recommend that patients do not wait longer for a same sex organ, and we would certainly agree with that."

'Love handles' raise death risk

2008-11-13T10:46:00.001+05:00

Carrying extra fat around your middle dramatically increases your risk of early death, even if your overall weight is normal, say researchers.

A study of almost 360,000 people from nine European countries found waist size a "powerful indicator" of risk.

Each extra 2ins (5cm) raised the chance of early death by between 13% and 17%.

The New England Journal of Medicine study stressed GPs should regulraly measure patients' waists as a cheap and easy way to assess health.

The link between waist fat and health problems has been established for some time, but the sheer size of the study gives scientists a far more accurate picture.

The researchers, including some from Imperial College London, followed the volunteers, who were an average of 51 years old at the start of the study, for the next 10 years, during which time 14,723 of them died.

The standard measure of obesity, body mass index (BMI) remained a reasonable predictor of health problems, with those with a high reading more likely to die from cardiovascular disease or cancer.

However, the 'hip/waist ratio', a number produced by dividing the waist size by the hip measurement, and just the waist measurement on its own, were both good ways of sorting out those at highest risk.

Some people who had a completely normal BMI score, but a larger than average waist, were at significantly higher risk of early death.

At the extremes, men with waists exceeding 47ins (119cm) had a doubled rate of death compared with those with waists under 31.5ins (80cm), and a similar statistic was found when women with waists over 39ins (99cm) were compared to those under 25.5ins (64.7cm).

An increase in risk of death could be plotted every time the belt was let out by another two inches - for two people with the same BMI, every additional 2ins (5cm) on their waistband added up to a 17% increase in risk for men, and 13% for women.

Professor Elio Riboli, from Imperial College London, said: "We were surprised to see the waist size having such a powerful effect on people's health and premature death.

"There aren't many simple individual characteristics that can increase a person's risk of premature death to this extent, independently from smoking and drinking."

He added: "The good news is that you don't need to take an expensive test and wait ages for the result to assess this aspect of your health - it costs virtually nothing to measure your hip and waist size."

Fat message

The reason for the link is not entirely clear, but another researcher, Dr Tobias Pischon, from the German Institute of Human Nutrition at Potsdam-Rehbrucke, said that abdominal fat was not like other fat reserves, but could directly influence the development of chronic disease by releasing "messenger substances".

A British Heart Foundation spokesman welcomed the findings, saying they supported previous research which found the risk of heart disease to be higher when fat was concentrated around the waist area.

"It is important a variety of measurements are used to assess body weight and shape. - as well as BMI (Body Mass Index), waist circumference and waist-hip ratio can help to provide a better assessment of health risk.

"If you tend to gather weight around your middle, increasing the amount of activity you do and watching what you eat will help to reduce your risk of heart disease and of dying early."

Would sir like a $200 cable with his new plasma?

2008-11-13T10:43:00.001+05:00

Australian shoppers are being duped into spending hundreds of dollars on so-called "high performance" HDMI cables when they are buying new home entertainment equipment.

HDMI cables are commonly sold as an add-on to flatscreen television sets at all major electronic outlets, where salespeople generally link a higher price tag to superior visual performance.

However some technical experts argue that there is very little to distinguish a cable priced at hundreds of dollars from one that costs $20, and urge buyers to be on their guard against slick sales pitches that claim otherwise.

Robin Braun, a professor of telecommunications at UTS says that, because the HDMI cable carries a digital signal, most of the built-up "noise" that affects more traditional analogue cable images is absent, meaning that most short-range HDMI cables will give a perfect image every time, regardless of their price.

Although an HDMI cable forms a crucial link between a television set and other digital devices such as set-top boxes, few shoppers expect to fork out hundreds for a simple connection and therefore fail to research their purchase before hitting the shops.

Not only are many customers taking home products that far surpass their needs, but many retailers are profiting from generous mark-ups, which Mr Braun believes could be as much as 10 times the wholesale price.

"The range in price is all to do with market factors and what shops feel they can charge. I would strongly advise anyone buying to shop around," he said.

But those who do shop around will find little comparative performance data.

Consumer magazine Choice is planning to fill this void soon by conducting a range of tests for HDMI cable products across different price points.

"We found cables of the same length varying in price from $30 to $600 and we are really not expecting to find any significant difference in their performance," Choice media spokesman Christopher Zinn said.

"Thirty dollars might not be an unreasonable spend but $600 may be stretching credulity. Retailers always look for other avenues for profit. Often accessories and other things they can on-sell to you can be a very profitable part of their business.

"They will say their products are superior than less costly ones but from our background knowledge and preliminary work we would find that stretching credulity for most people most of the time," he said.

Many shoppers have flocked to cut-price online retailers who offer unbranded HDMI cables in the sub-$30 price range.

I'm selling bucketloads of HDMI cables every day," said Keith Collier, who is a partner in the EzyHD online store.

But John Kranitis, managing director of upscale home entertainment specialist, Life Style Store, said that, when it came to cheap cable, you only get what you pay for.

His high-end HDMI cables can cost about $400 a metre, and for your money you get "better shielding, termination, less resistance and less interference", he said.

"You can buy the best TV in the world or the best DVD but if you put in the cheapest cable you do not get best image."

Although his views differ from those of other specialists interviewed, most agree that, when it comes to longer cables, premium products may genuinely prove a better purchase.

"If you are wanting ultimate screen size and definition, and have any significant cable length, then you are likely to need a higher quality cable," Mr Braun said.

Clint DeBoer, editor of audio visual magazine, Audioholics, conducted performance testing of a range of HDMI cables this year, and concluded: "At lengths less than four metres you can just about use silly string (OK, not really) and get HDMI to pass at any current resolution. Don't spend a lot on these cables and if you want to save money you won't let anyone at a big box store talk you into buying from them.

"For cables over five metres it's a good bet that you'll want to stick with trusted manufacturers who deliver on their specs."

Too many twitters drown out Rudd website

2008-11-13T10:41:00.001+05:00

So many people were signing up to follow Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's short text message updates on Twitter last night that his new page on the social networking site crashed.

A spokeswoman for Mr Rudd said the Prime Minister had 670 Twitter followers late last night, but he lost most of them when the page crashed due to high demand.

Having witnessed the power of the web in the US presidential election campaign, the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader are engaged in a high-tech arms race to win the hearts and minds of switched-on Australians.

Mr Rudd effectively used internet profiles on MySpace and Facebook and his slick Kevin07 website during last year's federal election but, since becoming Prime Minister, he hasn't had much time for the web.

But last night Mr Rudd sent an email to all his supporters informing them of his new website, KevinPM.com.au, which includes links to MySpace, Facebook, a new YouTube account, a Flickr photo sharing page and his newly created Twitter page for broadcasting short snappy text messages.

In an introductory video on the new site, Mr Rudd says his aim is to show the public exactly what the Government is up to and to create a two-way dialogue.

"A new Australia needs a new way of governing and that also means keeping in touch with the community in different ways as well," Mr Rudd says.

His Liberal counterpart, Malcolm Turnbull, also has accounts on Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube but, while Mr Rudd is new to Twitter, Mr Turnbull has been communicating with Twitter users since mid-October.

Mr Turnbull's Twitter updates have evolved from bland remarks announcing he is "in Parliament" and "reading the morning papers" to sharing links to his statements and responding directly to other Twitter users.

At the time of writing, Mr Turnbull has 1264 people following his Twitter updates (94 have been made so far), while Mr Rudd, who joined yesterday, has 323 followers and two updates.

"There were 670 followers as I understand it and at 10.30 last night it crashed and all the Twitter followers disappeared with the crash and there were only 33 left then," Mr Rudd's spokeswoman said.

"It's because Twitter essentially is not used to people getting so many followers in such a short time."

The claim has been verified with those who saw Rudd's Twitter page last night.

Mr Turnbull has been ranked 25th on a list of the top 100 influential Australian Twitterers, based on the number of people following his updates.

He has said on Twitter that he writes his updates personally, while Mr Rudd's spokeswoman said she would need to come back with information on whether Mr Rudd updates Twitter himself.

Twitter's 140-character limit for each message could pose challenges for the Prime Minister, who is known to ramble.

In the US elections, the Republican ticket largely ignored the internet while President-elect Barack Obama embraced it, using it to project a young, switched-on image and for fund-raising.

Mr Obama's official Twitter account has almost 130,000 followers, however, he hasn't posted any updates since winning the election..

Mr Rudd added four new videos to his YouTube account yesterday, including one introducing his new website and others announcing his plans to fix the ailing economy.

Mr Turnbull, on the other hand, has added only two new clips to his YouTube page in the past six months.

Mr Rudd has 24,479 friends on MySpace and 24,897 fans on Facebook, while Mr Turnbull has 292 MySpace friends and 5000 friends on Facebook.

But Mr Turnbull has at least one weapon in his armoury that Mr Rudd lacks - blogs for his pet dogs.

Australian jailed for euthanasia

2008-11-12T11:02:00.003+05:00

A 60-year old Australian woman, Shirley Justins, has been sentenced to spend her weekends in jail for nearly two years for killing her partner.

Ms Justins had believed she was doing what Graeme Wylie wanted but knew he lacked the capacity to decide whether to take his own life, the judge said.

He accused her of being "selfish and cruel" for denying Mr Wylie's daughters the chance to say goodbye in 2006.

Mr Wylie had been rejected for a legally assisted suicide.

That rejection in Switzerland was due to concerns he lacked the cognitive ability to make such a decision, leading Ms Justins to give the 71-year-old Alzheimer's sufferer the drug Nembutal.

Mr Wylie's daughter, Tania Shakespeare, welcomed the sentence handed out to Ms Justins.

"She did deceive our family. She did deceive Dad," she said.

"I'm heartbroken that I wasn't able to say goodbye to my father," she added.

A family friend, 75-year old Caren Jenning, was convicted as an accessory to manslaughter in June this year, for her role in travelling to Mexico to get the drug for herself and Mr Wylie, a former pilot for the national carrier Qantas.

Ms Jenning, who was suffering from terminal breast cancer committed suicide in September, saying she did not want to die in jail.

Nembutal is a powerful barbiturate favoured by euthanasia advocates.

Test case?

Supreme Court Justice Roderick Howe told the Sydney court he did not see the trial as a test case for euthanasia.

"It was no such thing. The law holds human life so sacred that it does not give permission for someone else to take it," he said.

He described the actions of Ms Justins and Ms Jenning as "a joint criminal enterprise", saying that "a calculated and unlawful taking of human life is an affront to every aspect of civilised society".

Dr Philip Nitschke, head of the euthanasia group Exit International, told reporters that the fate of the two women showed that people who wanted to take their own lives should make preparations in time.

"He asked (the women) to help him when he ran out options. Those two women loved him that much that they took that choice and they're now paying one hell of a price for it," Mr Nitschke said.

Ms Justins had faced a maximum 25-year prison sentence for her role in helping her partner of 18 years to die.

Google juices up Gmail with video

2008-11-12T10:57:00.002+05:00

Google is introducing new tools that will convert its free email service into a video and audio channel for people who want to see and hear each other while they communicate.

Activating the features, introduced on Tuesday, will require a free piece of software as well as a Webcam, which are becoming more commonplace as computer manufacturers embed video equipment into laptops.

Once the additional software is installed, Gmail users will be given the option to see and hear each other without leaving the email application.

The video feature will work only if all the participants have Gmail accounts. It's supposed to be compatible with computers running the Windows operating system or Apple's Mac computers.

Google, the internet's search leader, has been adding more bells and whistles to Gmail as part of its effort to gain ground on the longtime leaders in free email, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Although Google has been making strides since it began welcoming all comers to Gmail early last year, it remains a distant third with nearly 113 million worldwide users through September - a 34 per cent increase from the previous year, according to comScore.

Microsoft's email services boasted 283 million worldwide users, up 13 per cent from the previous year, while Yahoo was a close second at 274 million, an 8 per cent gain, comScore said.

Google also modified Google Reader, a popular tool for setting up Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds from favorite websites, to feature automatic translation of content into users' chosen languages.

An RSS feed can be set up using Google Reader, for example, to pull articles from a Turkish blog or website, and the content can be automatically translated into English or any of the other nearly 20 languages available.

Computer can crunch a quadrillion calculations per second

2008-11-12T10:55:00.002+05:00

How fast is the new supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory? If everyone in the world performed one mathematical calculation per second, it would take 650 years to do what this machine can do in one day.

That makes the $US100 million computer, nicknamed "Jaguar" by scientists, the fastest in the world for unclassified scientific research. At more than 1 quadrillion mathematical calculations per second, it is about 55,000 times faster than your typical PC.

Only one other supercomputer is faster, and it's devoted to classified research on nuclear weapons at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Global climate change, space matter that can't be seen, and alternative energy - everything from improved gasoline combustion to fusion - are some of the subjects Jaguar will be used to research.

In June, Jaguar, a Cray system, was rated fifth-fastest in the world by researchers who track the 500 top supercomputers. The Oak Ridge lab, a Department of Energy facility, announced Monday that it had upgraded Jaguar since then, and achieved its four-year goal of 1 quadrillion calculations per second - or 1 "petaflop" - six months ahead of schedule.

Jaguar recently achieved sustained performance of more than 1.3 petaflops while churning out calculations on superconductivity and has hit a peak speed of 1.64 petaflops, the lab said.

It is still undergoing final trials but should be ready for research by January. Thomas Zacharia, Oak Ridge's associate director for computing, anticipates a waiting list of proposals and near full-time operation when the computer begins work. All users must share their results with the broader scientific community.

Frozen embryos' health benefit

2008-11-11T10:41:00.001+05:00

More evidence has emerged that babies born from frozen embryos are healthier than those that develop from fresh embryos, researchers say.

Three studies presented to a US fertility conference found frozen embryo babies were less likely to be premature and under weight.

Previous research has suggested this is down to only the strongest embryos surviving the freezing process.

Fertility experts said more work was needed on the issue.

A Finnish study, to be presented to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine meeting in San Francisco, found that babies born from fresh embryos were 35% more likely to be premature and 64% more likely to have low birthweight than those born from frozen.

A second study, from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, found that babies born from fresh embryos were 51% more likely to have low birthweight and were 15% more likely to die around the time of birth than those born from frozen embryos.

And research by the Royal Women's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, found 11% of babies born from fresh embryos had low birthweight compared with 6.5% of babies born from frozen.

A total of 12.3% of babies born from fresh embryos were premature, compared with 9.4% of those born from frozen, while 1.9% also suffered death compared with 1.2% from frozen.

It is thought the results were related to the quality of the placenta, the digestive and respiratory system for the foetus.

The Australian researchers said the findings suggested women may prefer to use frozen embryos in the future.

But Dr Allan Pacey, a fertility expert from the University of Sheffield and secretary of the British Fertility Society, warned it was not so clear cut.

"Frozen embryo transfers are not as successful as fresh ones in terms of getting a pregnancy.

"So it may be that we have to balance the health of children against chances of success."

But he added: "It is intriguing research that goes against what we would normally assume. It now needs to be looked at again."

Nasa Mars mission declared dead

2008-11-11T10:37:00.003+05:00

Nasa says its Phoenix lander on the surface of Mars has gone silent and is almost certainly dead.

Engineers have not heard from the craft since Sunday 2 November when it made a brief communication with Earth.

Phoenix, which landed on the planet's northern plains in May, had been struggling in the increasing cold and dark of an advancing winter.

The US space agency says it will continue to try to contact the craft but does not expect to hear from it.

"We are actually ceasing operations, declaring an end to operations at this point," Phoenix mission project manager Barry Goldstein said at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"However, since we've been surprised by the robustness of this vehicle, we're going to keep listening. As the orbiters fly overhead every two hours, we'll constantly turn on the radio and try to hail Phoenix to see if it is alive."

Launched from Earth in August 2007, the robot arrived on Mars on 25 May, landing further north than any previous mission to the Martian surface.

To make it down, the probe had to survive a fiery plunge through the Red Planet's thin atmosphere, releasing a parachute and using thrusters to control its descent.

The mission was scheduled to last just three months on the surface, but continued to work for more than five months.

During its ground operations, the robot dug, scooped, baked, sniffed and tasted the Martian soil to test whether it has ever been capable of supporting life.

Phoenix's major achievement was in becoming the first mission to Mars to "touch water" in the form of the water-ice it found just centimetres below the topsoil. Chunks of ice were seen to vaporise before the lander's cameras.

"This was quite a thrill for everybody and it has been the study of that ice that has kept us busy for the last five months," said Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

"We've excavated that ice, we know its depth, we know how it changes over the surface; we've seen different types of ice."

The spacecraft found the Martian soil to be mildly alkaline, quite different from the acidic soils seen by previous missions to other parts of the planet.

Other key results included the identification in the soil of calcium carbonate, which on Earth is a chief component of limestone rock.

Phoenix also detected sheet-like particles, which were probably clays of some kind.

The significance of both minerals is that they form only in the presence of liquid water - which could have supported life.

The lander also detected perchlorate (an ion containing chlorine and oxygen) which is an oxidising chemical and, on Earth, can sustain some microbes.

Phoenix even recorded snowfall; and took more than 25,000 pictures, from the panoramas of its Arctic landing site to the atomic scale images of dust grains delivered to its microscope.

"Phoenix has given us some surprises, and I'm confident we will be pulling more gems from this trove of data for years to come," said Peter Smith.

Phoenix was never expected to be a long mission. At its high latitude (68 degrees North), it was always destined to be starved of light as the Arctic winter deepened.

In the end, though, the demise of Phoenix was hastened by a dust storm which obscured the Sun's precious rays still further.

With so little energy getting into its solar panels, the batteries on Phoenix would have gone flat, preventing the robot from heating any of its systems in temperatures that were heading down to minus 100C.

Nevertheless, Nasa says its Mars Reconnaissance and Odyssey satellites will continue to listen for Phoenix for a further three weeks, until Solar Conjunction, when the Sun moves between Mars and Earth.

Phoenix had risen from the ashes of two previous failures.

In September 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft crashed into the Red Planet following a navigation error caused when technicians mixed up "English" (imperial) and metric units.

A few months later, another Nasa spacecraft, the Mars Polar Lander (MPL), was lost near the planet's South Pole.

Phoenix used hardware from an identical twin of MPL, the Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander, which was cancelled following the two consecutive failures.

Nasa's robot rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, continue to work at their equatorial landing sites five years after arriving at the planet.

The next mission to the surface of Mars is due to leave Earth next year. The Mars Science Laboratory is a "smart" rover that will be dropped on to the surface of the Red Planet by a rocket-powered "skycrane".

At almost three metres in length and weighing 850kg, MSL is considerably bigger than the current rovers.

iPhones rule in US smart phone market

2008-11-11T10:36:00.001+05:00

Apple's iPhones are the mobile handset of choice for US consumers, according to a newly published report.

The report by Technology tracking firm NPD comes on the heels of studies showing that iPhones have taken the place of BlackBerry handsets as second-best selling mobile telephones worldwide and are half as likely to break down as the one's made by Research In Motion devices, the Canadian company behind the BlackBerry.

Nokia remains the mobile phone market leader worldwide.

US sales of iPhone 3G models in the third-quarter of this year topped those of former market-leader Motorola RAZR mobile telephones for the first time, according to NPD.

"The displacement of the RAZR by the iPhone 3G represents a watershed shift in handset design from fashion to fashionable functionality," NPD director of analysis Ross Rubin said in a release.

"Four of the five best-selling handsets in the third quarter were optimized for messaging and other advanced Internet features."

BlackBerry Curve models made by Canada-based RIM were the third most popular mobile telephones among US buyers in the third-quarter, according to NPD.

Sales of iPhone 3G models have rocketed since the touch-screen, motion-sensing devices geared for high-speed wireless Internet networks hit the market in July with starting prices in the US of $US199 per handset, plus a contract.

Global sales of iPhones more than quintupled between September of last year and the end of the same month this year, according to a report released by technology industry research firm Canalysis.com.

iPhones outsold BlackBerry devices worldwide during the three months that ended October 1. Apple iPhones had 17.3 per cent of the market and were closing ground on Nokia, which held 38.9 per cent, Canalysis reported.

BlackBerry sales were 15.2 per cent of the global mobile phone market in the quarter, according to the Britain-based research firm.

Worldwide shipments of smart phones, mobile telephones with wireless internet capabilities, in the third quarter of this year hit a new peak of 39.9 million, according to Canalysis.

While discussing Apple's recent-quarter with investors last month, the California firm's chief executive Steve Jobs pointed out "Apple beat RIM," calling it a "remarkable milestone."

Apple got more good news in the form of Square Trade Research findings indicating iPhones are half as likely as BlackBerry devices to break down in their first year of use.

Square Trade determined that iPhones had a 5.6 per cent "failure rate" as compared with 11.9 per cent for BlackBerry devices.

"Apple's extraordinary success with the iPhone has not come without complaints and skepticism," Square Trade said in its report.

"Shortly after both the 2.5G and 3G launches, hundreds of users expressed grievances with the iPhone in online forums and blogs, with abundant reports of users plagued by hardware and software problems.

Apple launched the first generation iPhone in June of 2007.

Apple sold 6.9 million iPhone 3G handsets in the third quarter, putting "sales well on track to exceed Steve Job's stated goal of selling 10 million 3G units this year," according to Square Trade.

Xbox price cut for Christmas

2008-11-11T10:33:00.002+05:00

Microsoft is aggressively cutting Xbox 360 prices in the lead-up to Christmas, with the low-end model now priced at $299 and the other models slashed by $100 each.

The move means the Xbox 360 is significantly cheaper than the $399 Nintendo Wii and the $699 Sony PlayStation 3.

But Michael Ephraim, managing director of Sony Computer Entertainment Australia, said comparing the "hobbled" $299 Xbox 360 Arcade to the PlayStation 3 was like comparing apples and oranges.

The Arcade model lacks features such as a hard drive for storing content and game saves, a headset for playing against other players over the internet on Xbox Live and high definition cables. However, a smaller 256MB memory stick is included, which can be used for storing some game saves.

Those looking for the above features must buy the Xbox 360 Pro model, which now sells for $399 and includes a 60GB hard drive. The high-end Elite model, which also received a $100 price cut, now sells for $549 and includes a larger 120GB hard drive.

Also for the holiday season, all Xbox models will come with two free games. Arcade buyers get Sega Superstars Tennis and five arcade games, while buyers of the other models get Lego Indiana Jones and Kung Fu Panda.

"You can buy a Wii and an Xbox 360 for less than a PS3, or you can buy an Xbox 360 and a stand-alone Blu-ray player for less than a PS3," said Xbox marketing manager Jeremy Hinton.

Hinton added that, according to GfK, 60 per cent of all sales for the previous generation of consoles were done at $299 or less.

While the PS3 is still significantly more expensive at $699, Sony has announced a Christmas special whereby PS3 buyers can receive a free game, choosing between LittleBigPlanet, Singstar ABBA, MotorStorm: Pacific Rift and Resistance 2.

Resistance 2 and LittleBigPlanet were among the most highly anticipated titles this year. Critics have hailed LittleBigPlanet as the most innovative game for this generation of consoles.

Ephraim said this and the fact that, unlike the Xbox 360, the PS3 includes a built-in high-definition Blu-ray player, meant PS3 was a better choice than Microsoft's offering.

He questioned whether the ageing Xbox 360 would have the power to run games such as Metal Gear Solid 4, which came out on the PS3 earlier this year.

"If people want a completely stripped down cheap video game machine and that's it, then the low-end Xbox fits that market and that's not the market we're in," Ephraim said.

Both Ephraim and Hinton said they intended to launch an online movie store for the PS3 and the Xbox 360 some time next year, which is already available to those in the US.

Hinton said the Xbox 360 would get a completely new user-interface at the end of this month, delivered over Xbox Live as a software update. Next year Xbox Live users would be able to compete in large online trivia games such as 1 vs. 100.

Meanwhile, Ephraim said Sony would next year launch PlayTV for the PS3, which allows users to record and watch live TV through the console.

While the PlayStation 3 launched a year after the Xbox 360, it has rapidly closed the gap in terms of unit sales. Ephraim, citing GfK figures, said the PS3 had an install base of 385,000 consoles, compared to around 420,000 for the Xbox 360.

A Microsoft spokesman said Ephraim's figures were internal Microsoft numbers and the GfK figures for Australia were actually 432,000 for the Xbox 360 and 309,000 for the PS3.

Ephraim said a promotion run by Sony in January and July offering customers a free PS3 with the purchase of a Sony Bravia TV had been an incredible boost for the console, with between 75,000 and 80,000 PS3s sold across both months.

Window into cancer-spread secrets

2008-11-10T11:02:00.002+05:00

A technique which literally places a window in a mouse's chest could help scientists unlock cancer's most mysterious and deadly process.

US scientists were able to keep a mouse alive for 21 days with the tiny piece of glass in place.

During that period they could watch cells from a breast tumour as they spread to other tissues, reports the journal Nature Methods.

Cancer Research UK said it could unlock ways to stop this spread in humans.

In many cancers, it is not the initial tumour that kills - the danger rises as bits of it break away and travel to other parts of the body.

However, what triggers this process, called metastasis, is still poorly understood.

This is partly because it is impossible to watch metastasis in action. The behaviour of cancer cells in a laboratory dish may be radically different from their behaviour in living tissue.

The team from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York, has been hunting for ways to allow scientists to view metastasis in the body.

Their earlier attempts involved peeling back a flap of skin on the mouse's chest so that the microscopic activity could be seen directly.

However, metastasis happens over days or even weeks, and the mice could not survive under anaesthetic for this long. In addition, conditions in the open wound were far drier than inside the body.

Their new technique involves inserting the glass "coverslip", which means the mouse can live - and the cancer cells observed - for much longer, with the "micro-environment" surrounding the tumour kept intact.

Then cancer cells were marked with substances which allowed their movements to be tracked under the microscope.

'Biggest challenge'

This approach is already reaping its rewards - they found that subtle changes to this "micro-environment" seemed to create the right conditions for cancer cells to begin their journey away to other parts of the body.

Dr Joanna Peak, Cancer Research UK's science information officer, said: "Tackling metastasis remains one of the biggest challenges in successfully treating cancer, but it's also one of the most difficult elements of cancer to study in the laboratory.

"This cutting-edge research provides new opportunities to study the complex relationship between cancer cells and their surrounding tissue - to help us understand metastasis in more detail."

Cyber criminals target Facebook users

2008-11-10T10:58:00.001+05:00

Facebook has been infiltrated by Nigerian scammers and other cyber criminals who use compromised accounts to con users out of cash.

Now that even non-tech savvy internet users know not to respond to, or click on links in, emails from strangers, online thieves have turned to social networks and are finding it is easier to trick people when posing as their friends.

On Friday, Sydneysider Karina Wells received a Facebook message from one of her friends, Adrian, saying he was stranded in Lagos, Nigeria, and needed her to lend him $500 for a ticket home.

Adrian used relatively good English but, after chatting further, words such as "cell" instead of "mobile phone" tipped Wells off that she was not talking to her friend but someone who had taken over his account.

Using sites such as Facebook allows scammers to research and target victims more effectively and avoid having their messages blocked by spam filters, said Paul Ducklin, head of technology at Sophos Asia Pacific.

It is likely the scammer obtained Adrian's Facebook login details after he was infected with a virus delivered by email or in an infected web page.

There are a number of viruses which, once installed on a computer, send back to the hacker a detailed log of everything entered using the keyboard, including online banking details and passwords for services such as Facebook.

Wells played along with the scammer, who asked her to transfer the money into a Western Union account.

"Naturally I was concerned as, to all intents and purposes, this seemed to be legitimate," she said.

"I pretended that I would help, obtained all the details of where he was and forwarded them to both Facebook and the relevant authorities."

But while the Nigerian scammer used the compromised Facebook account coupled with social engineering tactics to try to convince Wells to hand over money, many are using compromised accounts to spread malware.

Typically, the victim receives a Facebook message from a friend with a subject such as "LOL. You've been catched on hidden cam, yo" or "Nice dancing! Shouldn't you be ashamed?"

The body of the message contains a video clip link that appears to go to a legitimate site such as Facebook or YouTube but, when clicked on, it takes the user to a bogus web page.

Before the users can play the video they are told they need to download a video player upgrade, which is in fact a password-stealing virus.

The next time the victim logs into Facebook the malware-laden message is sent to all of their friends and the infected link is automatically added in comments on friends' pages.

Other less sophisticated attacks on Facebook members use spam emails, some appearing to come from Facebook itself, to spread viruses.

In September security firm WebSense reported on spam emails, purportedly sent from an @facebookmail.com address, that tell the victim they have received an invitation from Facebook to add a friend.

"The spammers included a zip attachment that purports to contain a picture in order to entice the recipient to double-click on it. The attached file is actually a Trojan horse," WebSense said.

Surgery beneficial in heartburn

2008-11-09T11:04:00.002+05:00

People with persistent heartburn should be considered for early surgery to prevent a lifetime of popping pills, NHS research suggests.

A year after keyhole surgery, only 14% of patients were still taking medication, compared with 90% of those treated with drugs alone.

The £1m trial of 800 patients suggests surgery should be done more routinely in patients with chronic acid reflux.

Experts said there was a view among GPs that surgery was "too extreme".

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen co-ordinated the trial of laparoscopic fundoplication at 21 hospitals around the UK.

The results so far suggest the procedure, although expensive at £2000 per patient, is cost-effective because reflux sufferers no longer have to take medication and their quality of life improves.

But they are following the patients for five years to check the benefits are long-term.

The operation involves wrapping a piece of the stomach around the oesophagus to create a new valve to prevent acid backing up from the stomach.

It used to be done by opening up the chest cavity, but with the advent of keyhole surgery is now a lot safer.

Common problem

Reflux is a very common condition with 20% of the population experiencing it at some point in their lives.

Those at the more severe end of the spectrum end up taking tablets for the rest of their lives - potentially for 20 to 30 years in younger patients - and few currently receive surgery.

Study leader, Professor Adrian Grant, said: "It looks pretty promising.

"I think these results will mean that surgeons will be suggesting the operation in those patients who are not quite so bad."

He added: "Like all surgery, fundoplication has some risks, but the more troublesome the symptoms, the greater the potential benefit from the operation."

Professor Roger Jones, head of general practice at King's College London and chair of the Primary Care Gastroenterology Society said surgery was often regarded as "too extreme" for something which is not a serious problem.

"But for some people, it is a serious problem which could potentially mean a lifetime of tablet taking."

Grapes are better cure for heart problems: Report

2008-11-09T11:02:00.004+05:00

The recent researches have proved that grapes are better cure for heart problems.

It was proved after a research conducted on several mice in the laboratories of Michigan State University that grape is better for heart failures.

According to research, grapes carry certain chemicals such as phytochemicals, Anti-Oxidants that are vital for hypertension. It was concluded from 18 weeks research on the mice, the blood pressure and heart of mice that were administered grapes in their food were normal and functioning well and those who were given normal food with medicines had normal blood pressure but defected hearts.

Researcher termed the research hopeful but said it would need more research to conclude better results. They also said heart problems faced by millions of people due to hypertension which is not treated by majority of people.

Indian satellite captured by Moon

2008-11-09T10:59:00.001+05:00

India is celebrating the arrival of its Chandrayaan 1 spacecraft at the Moon.

An 817-second burn from the probe's engine on Saturday slowed Chandrayaan sufficiently for it to be captured by the lunar body's gravity.

The craft is now in an 11-hour polar ellipse that goes out to 7,502km from the Moon and comes as close as 504km.

Further brakings will bring the Indian satellite down to a near-circular, 100km orbit from where it can begin its two-year mapping mission.

Launched on 22 October, Chandrayaan is India's first satellite to break away from the Earth's gravitational field and reach the lunar body.

The mission will compile a 3D atlas of the lunar surface and map the distribution of elements and minerals.

Powered by a single solar panel generating about 700 Watts, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) probe carries five Indian-built instruments and six constructed in other countries, including the US, Britain and Germany.

The Indian experiments include a 30kg probe that will be released from the mothership to slam into the lunar surface.

The Moon Impact Probe (MIP) will record video footage on the way down and measure the composition of the Moon's tenuous atmosphere.

It will also drop the Indian flag on the surface of the Moon.

H.I.V. Scare Unnerves a St. Louis High School

2008-11-09T10:53:00.002+05:00

Walking the halls of Normandy High School between classes, Mya McLemore, a senior, pays close attention these days to the faces of her fellow students. She keeps an eye out for those who avert their gaze, whose lips quiver or who allow a telltale tear to roll down their cheeks.

“I’ve been observing people, trying to see who’s acting different,” said Mya, 16. “Of course, you can’t tell by the way someone looks, but when you walk around and speak to people, you normally wouldn’t think that the person you’re talking to may have H.I.V.”

Life, however, has been far from normal for students at this struggling high school in suburban St. Louis since they learned last month that as many as 50 of their classmates may have been exposed to H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

The news went out in a letter Normandy High officials sent home to parents and guardians on Oct. 13. The letter stated simply that while investigating an H.I.V. case, epidemiologists with the St. Louis County Department of Health had learned that there was reason to believe that the virus might have been transmitted “among some Normandy Senior High School students.”

Health department investigators normally pursue such leads quietly and confidentially. But the superintendent of the Normandy School District, Stanton Lawrence, said the potential scope of the exposure prompted his district to inform all of the school’s roughly 1,300 students, in grades 9 through 12, of the investigation, and of the fact that all students would be offered free, confidential H.I.V. testing. Ninety-seven percent of the students chose to be tested. Results are expected this week.

“We weren’t trying to create mass hysteria and panic,” said Mr. Lawrence, who became superintendent in July. “We didn’t want to initiate an environment of fear.”

“We didn’t have a playbook,” he added.

H.I.V. can be transmitted by unprotected sex with someone who has the disease, sharing needles or syringes with someone who is infected, or from an infected mother to a child either during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding, health experts say.

Other than ruling out tattoos, health department officials have not specified how the virus may have been transmitted in this case, and though officials confirm that one person has tested positive for H.I.V., they have not disclosed whether that person is a student.

“We’re very limited in what we can release,” said a spokesman for the county health department, Craig LeFebvre. “We don’t feel like we can release anything that would indicate who it was. We don’t want witch hunts going on.”

But despite efforts to avoid the spread of misinformation, rumors flew through the halls of Normandy High, as students awaited their test results and tried to guess how it was that this deadly virus intruded on their high school years.

“It’s the only thing we talk about,” said Jamar McKinney, a junior. “Who could have H.I.V., who started it, how many people may have it. We always agree on who we think has it.”

Mr. McKinney, 17, said the episode had frayed his feelings for other students.

“I don’t trust nobody until I see the results,” he said, adding that he plans to display his negative test results on a T-shirt. “Nobody wants to walk around and say they’ve got H.I.V. because of how they’re going to be treated. Everybody’s just going to think they’re a walking disease.”

As the news spread, officials from a rival school called Normandy to say they were being bombarded by parents wondering if it was safe to play a scheduled football game. Normandy’s principal, Carl Hudson, said he had assured them that it was. Normandy won, advancing to the district championship with a 9-0 record.

But that was little consolation for Stephen Perkins, 16, a Normandy junior who said that whenever he meets girls at the mall, “the first thing they ask is, ‘What school do you go to?’ ”

“After I say Normandy,” Mr. Perkins continued, he was told, “ ‘The H.I.V. School? AIDS High?’ Normandy’s got a bad name.”

Students and teachers also complain that the school — whose student population is 99 percent black and which is in danger of a state takeover if student performance does not improve within three years — has been further stigmatized by inaccurate and sensational news coverage, which they say portrays the potential exposure as an outbreak.

“A lot of students felt like they were ambushed, that we were being watched and that the media blew the situation way out of proportion,” said Pamela Hughes-Watson, a science teacher. “The kids are really upset about that.”

Mr. Lawrence, the schools superintendent, said school officials knew they were risking a lot of negative attention when they decided to send the letters.

“Anytime you send 1,300 letters to parents, you can expect there’s going to be a call to the media,” he said. “There’s been some shameless sensationalism that’s gone with this story, but given the choice between spurious headlines and meeting these kids’ needs, I’m going to try to the meet these kids’ needs.”

As the glare of publicity fades and students anxiously await their test results, many are grappling with the lessons they have learned and the impact the episode may have on the rest of their high school years, and perhaps the rest of their lives.

“I’m not going to just hop into any relationship,” Mr. McKinney said. “I’m going to talk it out first with the person, and see what they sound like. And if it sounds good, ask if there’s any way I can see their results.”

Malaysia blogger's joy at release

2008-11-08T10:42:00.000+05:00

A prominent critic of the Malaysian government, blogger Raja Petra Kamaruddin, has been freed from jail on the orders of a judge.

Mr Raja Petra, 58, editor of the website Malaysia Today, has been held without trial for eight weeks under a draconian security law, the ISA.

He had been accused of causing ethnic tensions by ridiculing Islam.

"I'm really glad it's over," a tearful, haggard Mr Raja Petra said as he hugged his family and greeted supporters.

"I'm really tired. The judge's decision proves that there was no justification for my detention.

"We have to fight all-out and get the ISA abolished," he told reporters, referring to the Internal Security Act, which allows detention without charge for an initial two years, with indefinite extensions possible.

Mr Raja Petra was garlanded by supporters and then driven home in a maroon Rolls Royce which one of them had provided, said one report from the scene.

Critical

Mr Raja Petra was freed from a notorious prison camp in northern Malaysia on the orders of the high court in Shah Alam city near Kuala Lumpur.

It ruled that Interior Minister Syed Hamid Albar had overstepped his authority when he ordered the detention.

Mr Raja Petra has increasingly angered the Malaysian authorities with his critical Malaysia Today website, the country's best-known political blog.

He still faces charges of sedition for an article he published which linked Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak to the 2006 murder of a Mongolian woman, Altantuya Shaariibuu.

Mr Najib, who has consistently denied any involvement, is widely expected to take over as prime minister when incumbent Abdullah Badawi agrees on a transition date.

'Great day'

Raja Petra's lawyer, Malik Imtiaz, described Friday's ruling as "historic", saying it was the first time a court had ordered the release of an ISA detainee since the government banned such rulings in 1989.

It was "definitely a wonderful step in terms of civil liberties in Malaysia", he said.

His words were echoed by Malaysia's human rights commissioner, Denison Jayasooria, who called it a "great day for human rights and fundamental liberties", according to AFP news agency.

He called for the ISA to be used only "where there is a real threat to national security".

Mr Raja Petra was arrested on 12 September under the ISA as part of a government clampdown on opposition voices.

He was arrested along with opposition deputy Teresa Kok and journalist Tan Hoon Cheng, both of whom have since been released.

White House e-mail system attacked

2008-11-08T10:35:00.002+05:00

It was revealed this week that the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain were hacked over the summer. Now, a report has surfaced that the White House has suffered multiple attacks in recent months as well. According to a story by the Financial Times on Friday, U.S. officials have confirmed that the White House e-mail archives were attacked several times in recent months.

The report says the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, a new unit established in 2007 to tackle cybersecurity, detected the attacks on the White House, and also traced the attacks back to servers based in China.

The quoted source said each time the attack was detected, new defenses were put in place. "It is constant cat and mouse."

Overall, the attackers apparently only had access to the unclassified White House computer network. Nonetheless, the data could still have value.

The unnamed official quoted within the report speculated that the cyberattacks might follow the "grain of sands" approach used by Chinese intelligence. That involves parsing through often low-level information to find a few nuggets.

Cancer genetic blueprint revealed

2008-11-06T10:59:00.002+05:00

Scientists have decoded the complete DNA of a cancer patient and traced her disease to its genetic roots.

The Washington University team identified 10 gene mutations which appeared key to the development of the woman's acute myeloid leukaemia.

Just two of these had been linked to the disease before.

The sequencing technique, described in the journal Nature, could be applied to other cancers and aid the design of targeted drugs.

The researchers took two samples from the woman in her 50s - who later died from the disease - and examined the DNA for differences.

One sample was taken from healthy skin cells, the other from bone marrow tissue made up of cancerous cells.

They found that virtually every cell in the tumour sample had nine of the key mutations.

Like most cancers, acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) - a cancer of blood-forming cells in the bone marrow - arises from mutations that accumulate in people's DNA over the course of their lives.

However, little is known about the precise nature of those changes and how they disrupt biological pathways to cause the uncontrolled cell growth that is the hallmark of cancer.

Previous efforts to decode individual human genomes have looked at common points of DNA variation that may be relevant for disease risk.

In contrast the Washington team, using a gene sequencing technique, were able to sift through the three billion pairs of chemical bases that make up the human genome to pull out the mutations that contributed to the patient's cancer.

True landmark

Geneticist Dr Francis Collins, a former director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, called the study a "true landmark in cancer research".

He said: "In the past, cancer researchers have been 'looking under the lamp-post' to find the causes of malignancy - but now the team from Washington University has lit up the whole street.

"This achievement ushers in a new era of comprehensive understanding of the fundamental nature of cancer, and offers great promise for the development of powerful new approaches to diagnosis, prevention and treatment."

Three of the newly-discovered mutations were in genes that normally suppress tumour growth, and four were in genes linked to the spread of cancer.

The other appears to affect the transport of drugs into the cells, possibly fuelling resistance to cancer therapy.

The researchers are still looking for other gene mutations which may also play a part.

They also examined tumour samples from another 187 AML patients, but found none had any of the eight new mutations.

Lead researcher Dr Richard Wilson said: "This suggests that there is a tremendous amount of genetic diversity in cancer, even in this one disease.

"There are probably many, many ways to mutate a small number of genes to get the same result, and we're only looking at the tip of the iceberg in terms of identifying the combinations of genetic mutations that can lead to AML."

The researchers suspect that the mutations occurred one after another, with each pushing the cell closer to malignancy.

Kat Arney, of the charity Cancer Research UK, said: "This is a very important piece of research, not only for our understanding of leukaemia but for many other types of cancer.

"Thanks to advances in technology it is now possible to unlock the genetic secrets within cancer cells, which will be the key to better diagnostic tools and treatments in the future."

Ken Campbell, of Leukaemia Research said: "Although it is very early days, it is realistic to think that these findings could lead to new treatments.

"Its wider application to other cancers may be limited though - the technique is particularly valuable for blood cancers in which the chromosome changes are usually simpler than in solid tumours at the time of diagnosis."

IBM Unveils Mac Support, Roadmap For Lotus Symphony

2008-11-06T10:55:00.002+05:00

IBM (NYSE: IBM) on Wednesday outlined the roadmap for its free office productivity suite, saying that future versions would be developed on the OpenOffice 3.0 open source code base, would run on Apple's Mac OS X and would supportMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Office 2007 file formats.

During his keynote at the OpenOffice.org Conference in Beijing, Michael Karasick, director of IBM Lotus China Development Labs, said demand for Lotus Symphony, first introduced in September 2007, has been increasing globally with more than 3 million downloads so far in 28 languages. To boost adoption further, IBM planned to expand the software's OS support, as well as its incorporation of the latest open-source technology.

The 2009 roadmap for Symphony called for 60 new features that included developing the software entirely on version 1.2 of the OpenDocument format and OpenOffice 3.0 code base. The development strategy would enable "seamless interoperability" with Office 2007 file formats and bring support for Visual Basic macros.

"As we rebase Symphony on OpenOffice 3.0, we are very excited about providing next- generation document creation and collaboration capabilities for the millions of potential users out there," Karasick said, according to IBM. IBM also sees the potential for the global developer community to use Symphony extensibility in concert with that of ODF 1.2, so that documents can be more deeply integrated into business applications and processes."

In addition, Karasick said the latest version of Symphony is now available in beta for Mac OS X, the first time the suite has supported the OS. IBM also released a beta version for Canonical's Ubuntu 8.0.4 Linux.

Mac OS X was among the top requests made by Symphony supporters, IBM said. While the Mac version would initially be available in English, other languages would be supported as the software progresses out of beta to general availability.

Lotus Symphony is available at no charge by IBM, which also uses the software as part of the company's Open Collaboration Client Solution, which also includes the Lotus Notes e-mail client and the Lotus Sametime instant messaging client. The OCCS suite ships on Linux as an alternative desktop to Microsoft Windows.

Meanwhile, IBM and Sun Microsystems launched at the conference the OpenDocument Format Toolkit Union, an open-source software community project building tools to incorporate ODF in document software used in content management, business workflows and Web applications. Sun contributed to the ODF Toolkit an application programming interface for reading, writing and manipulating ODF documents. The software code includes an ODF Validator, a tool that validates OpenDocument files and checks certain conformance criteria.

ODF is a file format for electronic office documents such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word-processing documents. The specification was originally developed by Sun, but is now under the control of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, an international standards body.

Obama, McCain Campaign Computers Hacked

2008-11-06T10:48:00.002+05:00

Tech experts at the Obama headquarters initially believed that the computer systems had been invaded by a computer virus.

Computer systems used by the Obama and McCain campaigns were reportedly hacked over the summer by an unknown "foreign entity," according to an account of the attacks published Wednesday.

The sophisticated cyberattacks has prompted a federal investigation, Newsweek reported Wednesday. Attacks on both campaigns were similar in that investigators believed a foreign entity or organization sought to steal information on policy positions. Such information could be used in negotiations with the future administration.

Tech experts at the Obama headquarters initially believed that the computer systems had been invaded by a computer virus. The next day, however, they were told by the FBI and Secret Service that the problem was far more serious, the magazine reported.

"You have a problem way bigger than what you understand," an agent told Obama's team, according to Newsweek. "You have been compromised, and a serious amount of files have been loaded off your system."

Federal agents told Obama's aides that the McCain campaign had suffered a similar attack, which a top McCain official later confirmed to Newsweek.

Meanwhile, Newsweek also learned that the lavish shopping spree of McCain running mate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was more extensive than previously reported. The buying spree tainted the vice presidential nominee's campaign image as an everyday woman sympathetic with the plight of the working class.

While McCain's top advisers publicly supported Palin, behind the scenes they fumed at her behavior, the magazine said. Instead of buying just three suits and hiring a stylist, as instructed, she bought clothes and accessories for herself and her family at high-end stores, such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus.

One McCain campaign aid estimated that Palin spent "tens of thousands" of dollars more than the reported $150,000, the magazine said. Another aide described the shopping spree as "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast." Wasilla is the Alaskan town where Palin served as mayor before becoming governor.

The same aide said more details of Palin's shopping would likely come out when the Republican Party audits its books.

John McCain, GOP senator from Arizona, lost to Barack Obama, Democratic senator from Illinois, in Tuesday's Presidential Election.

TV shows link to teen pregnancies

2008-11-05T11:06:00.002+05:00

Teenage girls who watch a lot of TV shows with a high sexual content are twice as likely to become pregnant, according to a study.

Boys watching similar programmes, like Friends and Sex and the City, were also more likely to get a girl pregnant, the research in Pediatrics found.

The study authors said limiting exposure to sexual content on TV might reduce teen pregnancies.

Experts urged parents to talk more openly with their children about sex.

Study author Dr Anita Chandra of the RAND Corporation said adolescents received a considerable amount of information about sex through television and the problem was that programmes such as these typically did not highlight the risks and responsibilities of sex.

She said:"Our findings suggest that television may play a significant role in the high rates of teenage pregnancy in the US."

According to Dr Chandra, hers is the first study to show such a direct link.

The researchers interviewed 2,000 adolescents aged 12 to 17 three times between 2001 and 2004.

Teens who watched larger amounts of sexually charged TV shows were twice as likely to experience a pregnancy in the subsequent three years, compared with those with lower levels of exposure.

Sexual content

By the third interview, 744 of the teenagers said they had engaged in sexual intercourse and 718 of the youths shared with the researchers information about their pregnancy histories.

Of that group, 91 teens - 58 girls and 33 boys - were involved in a pregnancy.

Dr Chandra said: "Sexual content on TV has doubled in the last few years, especially during the period of our research. We found a strong association."

The US has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates among industrialized nations, with nearly one million adolescent females becoming pregnant each year, with the majority of these pregnancies unplanned, according to RAND.

Britain has Europe's highest teenage pregnancy rate.

Tory MP Nadine Dorries said it would be interesting to see if a similar study in the UK revealed a trend.

"Information such as this empowers parents when making difficult decisions as to what they do and don't allow their daughters to watch," she said.

Psychologist David Walsh, president of the National Institute on Media and the Family said many teenagers relied on the media to act as sex educator.

Dr Walsh said: "If you have a kid who no-one's talking to about sex and who then watches sitcoms on TV where sex is presented as 'this is what cool people do', the outcome is obvious.

"The message to parents is to talk to their kids about sex long before they become teenagers."

A spokeswoman from Brook said: "The causes of teen pregnancy in the UK are quite complex.

"There are a range of ways we can try to reduce the teen pregnancy rate, such as providing sex and relationship education and outreach and community services for young people.

"The idea of parents sitting down with their children and talking about the issues raised in these television programmes is a great one."

Drug 'tricks body to lose weight'

2008-11-05T11:04:00.001+05:00

French scientists say they have found a drug that tricks the body into burning off fat even when on a high-fat diet.

The University of Louis Pasteur team found the drug protected mice against weight gain and insulin resistance.

The drug SRT1720 - a chemical cousin of red wine extract resveratrol - targets the protein SIRT1, which is thought to combat ageing, Cell Metabolism reports.

UK obesity experts said new drug treatments were needed but should be used alongside lifestyle changes.

About a quarter of men and a third of women in the UK are overweight, according to government statistics.

A change in diet and an increase in physical exercise can shift excess weight, but can be hard for many to maintain.

With the removal of the anti-obesity pill rimonabant, also known as Acomplia, from the market amid safety concerns, fewer drug options exist.

Potent drug

The French team from the University Louis Pasteur became interested in the SIRT1 protein after earlier studies showing resveratrol countered some effects of a high-calorie diet via SIRT1.

But tests in mice suggested gallons of wine would be necessary for humans to stand a chance of getting the same benefits.

The scientists turned their attention to creating a more potent drug that would specifically target SIRT1.

They found that a low dose of SRT1720 partially protected mice from gaining weight on a high-fat diet after 10 weeks of treatment.

The drug worked by shifting the metabolism to a fat-burning mode that normally takes over only when energy levels are low.

At higher doses, the drug completely prevented weight gain. It also improved the rodents' blood sugar tolerance and insulin sensitivity, which are important for warding off diabetes.

The mice showed no sign of side effects. However, the scientists say further studies are needed to test the drug's safety and efficacy before it could be used in humans.

Other scientists are investigating SIRT1 activators similar to SRT1720 developed by Sirtris Pharmaceuticals.

Professor Stephen Bloom, who has been researching obesity at Imperial College London, said: "This sounds interesting but is terribly early.

"We do need new treatments for obesity, particularly as there are 1,000 deaths a week in the UK from obesity."

Prof Ian Broom, of the Centre for Obesity Research and Epidemiology at The Robert Gordon University, said: "Research in this area is to be welcomed as an additional route of combating the obesity epidemic and associated comorbid disease."

He added that any such drug should be used alongside dietary and lifestyle changes to tackle obesity.

MPs want UK jail time for hacker

2008-11-05T10:59:00.002+05:00

UK MPs are calling for hacker Gary McKinnon to serve any sentence he receives in a British jail.

Mr McKinnon faces extradition to the US for breaking into American military networks between February 2001 and March 2002.

He trespassed on networks owned by Nasa, the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Department of Defense.

If tried and convicted in a US court, Mr McKinnon could face decades of jail time, and millions of dollars in fines.

Medical notes

Despite taking his appeal to the House of Lords, Mr McKinnon lost a six-year legal battle to avoid extradition.

The European Court of Human Rights also declined to back Mr McKinnon's case against extradition.

Mr McKinnon is currently awaiting a decision by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith as to when the extradition process will begin.

In the interim, 20 UK MPs have signed an Early Day Motion which calls for any sentence imposed by a US court to be served in a British jail.

Drawn up by Shadow justice minister David Burrowes, who is Mr McKinnon's MP, the motion cites the practice of the Netherlands, and Israel, which routinely request that nationals suffering medical or mental problems are repatriated to serve their sentence.

It urged Jacqui Smith to delay extradition proceedings until she had won assurances from the US that Mr McKinnon, who has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, would be sent back to the UK to serve his sentence.

Mr Burrowes tabled the motion after receiving word from the Government that Mr McKinnon's diagnosis with Asperger's was not sufficient grounds for refusing the extradition order.

Scientists clone from frozen mice

2008-11-04T10:32:00.001+05:00

Japanese scientists have managed to create clones from the bodies of mice which have been frozen for 16 years.

Cloning had so far only been achieved using live donor cells and transferring their DNA to recipient eggs.

Experts believed that using thawed frozen cells would not be possible because of ice damage to the DNA.

The scientists in Kobe, Japan, said the technique raised the possibility of recreating extinct creatures such as mammoths from their frozen remains.

Every successful clone since Dolly the sheep was born in 1996 has been created by a method where the nucleus has been removed, placed in an empty egg and kick-started into replicating by chemicals or electricity.

Frozen bodies

The Japanese research suggests it is not the case that frozen cells would be unusable because the formation of ice would be likely to damage the DNA they contained.

The scientists successfully created clones using the brain cells from mice that had been frozen at -20C.

The frozen bodies of mammoths have been found dating back 40,000 years.

However, the researchers warned that the lack of suitable species for recipient eggs and surrogate mothers were "major problems" for the technique to be used for extinct or endangered animals.

The work at Kobe's Centre for Developmental Biology was reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Women's hands 'harbour more bugs'

2008-11-04T10:29:00.002+05:00

Women have a greater range of different types of bacteria on the palms of their hands than men, US research suggests.

The study also found that human hands harbour far higher numbers of bacteria species than previously thought.

Using powerful gene sequencing techniques, researchers found a typical hand had roughly 150 different species of bacteria living on it.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study found bacteria types varied greatly between individuals.

The researchers, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, hope their work will help scientists to establish a "healthy baseline" of bacteria species on the human hand.

This could potentially help them to identify which species are linked to specific diseases.

Lead researcher Dr Noah Fierer said: "The sheer number of bacteria species detected on the hands of the study participants was a big surprise, and so was the greater diversity of bacteria we found on the hands of women."

The study detected and identified more than 4,700 different bacteria species across 102 human hands in the study.

However, only five species were shared among all 51 participants.

Even the right and left palms of the same individual shared an average of only 17% of the same bacteria types.

Acidic skin

Dr Fierer said that the higher bacterial diversity on women's hands may be due to the fact that men tend to have more acidic skin, which provides a more harsh living environment for the microscopic bugs.

Alternatively, differences in sweat, oil gland or hormone production may be key - or the fact that women and men tend to make different use of cosmetics such as moisturisers.

Dr Fierer said the study also found hand washing had little impact on the diversity of bacteria found on an individual's hands.

While some groups of bacteria were less abundant following hand washing, others were more abundant.

However, the researchers said that washing with anti-bacterial cleansers was still an effective way to minimise the risk of disease.

The vast majority of bacteria are harmless and some even protect against the spread of disease.

The diversity of bacteria types on the palm was three times higher than that found on the forearm and elbow and appeared to outstrip that found in the mouth and lower intestine.

Lithium tested for impact on MND

2008-11-03T11:23:00.002+05:00

British scientists are embarking on a major new trial to assess the impact of the anti-depressant drug lithium as a treatment for motor neurone disease.

They say the research is necessary because positive findings from a small-scale Italian study were "too dramatic to ignore".

But they are urging patients with the disease not to take the drug in advance of their results.

They warn that some side-effects of lithium are potentially dangerous.

There are about 5,000 people in the UK living with motor neurone disease (MND).

At the moment there is no effective cure or treatment. It is often rapidly progressive and always fatal, usually within two to five years.

The disease can affect any adult at any age, although it is more commonly found in men, and is most likely to strike between the ages of 50 and 70.

Caution urged

Lithium has long been used as a treatment for depression.

But recent laboratory tests and animal trials have suggested that it may also have a protective effect with MND.

The recent trial of 16 people in Italy reported encouraging results.

But the MND Association said the study was small and poorly designed, and that its findings should be treated with caution.

The association's president, Professor Sir Colin Blakemore, said: "If you read the publication optimistically it might be taken to mean that lithium literally cures this disease.

"But it's very important, against the background of patient hopes and expectations, to stand back and ask whether the trial was large enough to make the claims that it did."

Side-effects

The director of the MND Care and Research Centre at King's College London, Professor Nigel Leigh, says patients are asking him every day whether they should be trying lithium, but that only a "tiny minority" are taking it.

"I'm a bit surprised. I thought more would do it.

"I think it's because everybody's discussing this openly on online sites and there's a very balanced discussion, and people are aware that there are side-effects."

These include tremors, stiffness, confusion, kidney damage and harm to the thyroid.

Professor Leigh says the only ethical approach is to do a full clinical trial, where people are randomised "blind", so neither they nor the researchers know if they are taking lithium or a dummy pill.

The 18-month study involving 220 patients who have had MND for between six months and three years will start at 10 centres across the UK.

Patients will be monitored closely for side-effects.

'Bear with us'

Professor Leigh stressed that GPs and patients with MND should wait for the results before taking Lithium.

"We've been here many times before, with drugs that have been promoted as being a fantastic answer. You don't always get the answer you expected.

Safety is paramount. Yes, it's tempting, but please bear with us.

"If you can take part in a trial that's great. We realise otherwise it's patience, and patience can be short in this condition. But it's much safer to wait."

The president of the Royal College of GPs, Professor Steven Field, backed the advice.

He said "While the information is encouraging, it's important to await results of clinical trials because the medicine has serious side-effects which could potentially make some of the symptoms worse."

PC users to invent ideal machine

2008-11-03T11:20:00.002+05:00

Intel and manufacturer ASUS have launched a project asking people to say what they would like to see in a PC.

The companies are asking people to "dream the impossible" to help design the first community-designed PC.

A website, WePC.com, has been set up to allow people to share and comment on ideas to "enable a global conversation about the ideal elements of a PC."

Both companies insist the project is not simply cheap talk, saying there is a commitment to building the machine.

"The spark for innovation can come from anywhere," said Intel's Mike Hoeffinger.

He added that both companies have joined together "to tap into the creative energy of consumers...and give people a voice in the design of technology they use every day."

Technology companies have always asked for customer feedback, but this is being billed as a new approach to product design and to customer involvement, says Lillian Lin, the director of marketing and planning at ASUS.

"By empowering WePC.com users to play a role in the design process, we expect to deliver cutting-edge community-designed products that address a consumer vision of the dream PC," said Ms Lin.

"Ghetto blaster laptop"

The mission statement for WePC.com is simple :"You dream it. ASUS builds it. Intel inside it."

"Your designs, feature ideas and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and could influence the blueprint of an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside," said the website.

"Everyone is very aware there is a commitment from everyone involved," said Josh Mattison of Federated Media, which is involved in the marketing campaign.

"If you start a conversation with your customers, the first step is knowing their voices will be heard and incorporating that into those companies' larger thought processes. That is absolutely something you can expect to see."

The community will be divided into what Intel has called three "conversation groups". They will address three of the most popular consumer PC categories: netbooks, notebooks and gaming notebooks.

WePC.com has urged users to let their imagination run wild.

"There is no limit to creativity," said Mr Mattison.

"And there is no forum quite like this for expressing that. Let those ideas flow, whether it's concerning something purely functional like battery life or something a bit more 'out there' like a computer needing a haircut every two weeks," he said.

Some of the suggestions for the community-designed PC already include a ghetto blaster laptop with woofers and tweeters and a "happy laptop" that would wake the user up in the morning.

It is unlikely that any consumer-inspired PC will make the market any time soon and it could be well into 2009 before the "dream PC" is turned into reality.

Firms demand aid on hi-tech crime

2008-11-03T11:18:00.001+05:00

UK businesses have little faith that the government is doing enough to tackle hi-tech crime, says a report.

Of those questioned 57% said any malicious hi-tech crime in the workplace would not be dealt with properly by the police.

Only 4% of respondents said they bothered to report every incident of hi-tech crime, it revealed.

The results come at a time when businesses report that they are almost under siege by cyber criminals.

The survey of the 3,500 members of the Corporate IT Forum, which represents technology managers at the UK's largest firms, found that 69% reported seeing increases in the amount of hi-tech crime committed against them.

'Too risk-free'

Firms were being hit by viruses, denial of service attacks and website defacements, the survey said. The variety and intensity of attacks led many to believe that hi-tech crime has been taken over by professional criminals.

Said the survey: "It has... become too easy and too risk-free for criminals to become involved in cyber crime."

Responding to a question about what would make a difference, 48% of respondents called for "consistent and appropriate penalties for cyber criminals and cross-border e-crime legislation".

'Rock-bottom'

David Roberts, head of the Corporate IT Forum, said: "IT chiefs in UK PLCs don't think the government appreciates the scale of the cyber crime threat, the seriousness of the threat or how much it's costing."

Even the creation of the new e-crime unit would not do much to improve this opinion, suggested qualitative interviews done alongside the survey.

Many of those tech bosses questioned believe the unit would not have the resources to tackle the boom in hi-tech crime.

"Business confidence in the government's ability to help them fight cyber crime is at rock-bottom," said Mr Roberts.

DNA clue to child brain tumours

2008-11-02T10:38:00.001+05:00

Scientists at Cambridge University have made a major breakthrough researching brain tumours in children.

For the first time a sequence of DNA present in around two-thirds of the most common tumour has been pinpointed.

Pilocytic astrocytomas is diagnosed in 145 children from five to 19 every year, with nearly 40 cases untreatable.

As little is known about the causes and genetics of brain tumours, it is hoped the findings could lead to better treatment.

Professor Peter Collins, who led the research at Cambridge University, carried out genetic scans on 44 pilocytic astrocytoma and found a DNA sequence rearranged on a chromosome in the majority of the samples.

The rearrangement creates a fusion gene, a hybrid created from two separate genes.

It is the first time fusion activity has been associated with a brain tumour.

Professor Collins said: "If we can diagnose exactly which type of brain tumour a child has as early as possible, the tumour is more likely to be treated successfully.

"We also hope the findings will mean it is possible to create therapies in the future that block the activity of the fusion gene and halt the growth of tumour cells."

Dr Lesley Walker from Cancer Research UK said: "Any discovery that adds to our understanding of the pathways that cause these tumours to form is quite exciting news.

"We think this important finding will be vital in guiding our future research."

Cancer Research UK and Samantha Dickson Brain Tumour Trust funded the project.

Paul Carbury, chief executive of the Samantha Dickson Brain Tumour Trust, said a major breakthrough had been achieved with a "world class piece of research".

Like never before, US voters plug into power of the Internet

2008-11-02T10:37:00.002+05:00

Barack Obama and John McCain have relied heavily on the Internet for their US presidential campaigns but it's not just the candidates who have tapped into the power of the web this election.

The voters have too -- whether it's finding how much money a neighbour or a celebrity has donated, watching a video on YouTube, reading a political blog or news site or consulting an online "Truth-O-Meter" for politicians.

Leaving aside the candidates' websites, Facebook pages, YouTube videos, Twitter feeds and emails, the average US voter this time around has an unprecedented trove of information available at his or her fingertips.

"There are a lot of great non-partisan sites that have all kinds of information, not just about the presidential candidates," said Micah Sifry, co-founder of techpresident.com, a blog which covers politics and the web.

"For sheer self-education there's a great deal available out there on the candidates on the local, state and national level," he told AFP.

Want to know how much someone donated this election cycle and to whom?

Easy.

Go to opensecrets.org and type a name in the search box along with a home state and/or zip code.

"If you've got a lot of time on your hands, there's the Federal Election Commission site," said Julie Germany, director of the Institute for Politics Democracy & the Internet at George Washington University.

"All the information is on fec.gov it's just really hard to find."

"There's also votesmart.org," Sifry said, "that's a great resource for figuring out about your local and state-level candidates.

"Opencongress.org is great for looking into the record of congressional incumbents -- what bills they've been sponsoring, how they've voted... It's all aggregated in one place," Sifry added.

There's also Thomas, the mother-of-all-websites at thomas.loc.gov, which is run by the US Library of Congress and tracks all legislation in the Senate and House of Representatives.

Think a candidate may be stretching the truth?

Try politifact.com, a site run by Congressional Quarterly magazine and a Florida newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, which checks the accuracy of statements made on the campaign trail with its "Truth-O-Meter."

There's also factcheck.org, a non-partisan site with the mission statement "Holding Politicians Accountable."

Want to know the latest polls?

There are dozens of polling sites but perhaps none better than realclearpolitics.com, where a political junkie can get lost surfing for hours.

Want to report a problem on Election Day?

YouTube has encouraged voters to take a camera phone or a video camera into the polling booth.

Footage from the "Video Your Vote" project is being posted at youtube.com/videoyourvote and can be tagged, if appropriate: "voter intimidation," "polling place problems" or "registration problems."

Micro-blogging service Twitter partnered with techpresident.com and others to launch "Twitter Vote Report," where voters can send the short messages known as "tweets" about their voting experience and report any problems.

Internet giants such as Google and Yahoo, but also startups and scores of other web-savvy individuals, have come up with their own dazzling tools for tracking the election online.

"I really like mapthecandidates.com," said Germany of the site started by two journalism students at the University of Pennsylvania.

"They took a Google map and every time a candidate made a road stop they collected as much information as they could -- newspaper articles, the text of the speeches, video clips of the speeches, analysis of what was said.

"It's all up on a Google map and is a useful information tool for voters."

Sifry said the many of the new tools are impressive, but probably haven't been used very much by the average Joe -- plumber or otherwise.

"Your average voter just goes to Google, types in someone's name and sees what comes up first," he said.

Use of the Internet overall, however, has soared this election, according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

A Pew poll found that 59 percent of registered voters have sought election content online or had some type of online communication about the campaign.

The use of online video in particular has exploded with the rise of YouTube as a political force.

Thirty-nine percent of voters told Pew in October that they have watched some type of campaign-related video online, up from 24 percent in December.

Social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace have also jumped into the political fray but the Pew study found that just eight percent of voters have visited a social network for campaign information.

The election has also driven record numbers of visitors to independent news sites such as HuffingtonPost.com, Politico.com and Drudgereport.com and blogs such as DailyKos.com and RedState.com, according to comScore, a company which measures online traffic.

Most Americans, however, still frequent the more established media outlets and the television networks, as in the past, are expected to be the source of election news for most Americans on the night of November 4.

"I think what we're going to see is a lot of people watching TV, either in their homes or with their friends," Germany said, although in a concession to the digital age many of them will be "armed with a laptop and a mobile phone."

Woman loses assisted suicide case

2008-10-30T11:43:00.001+06:00

A woman with multiple sclerosis has lost her High Court case to clarify the law on assisted suicide.

Debbie Purdy, 45, from Bradford, is considering going to a Swiss clinic to end her life, but fears her husband may be charged on his return to the UK.

She had wanted a guarantee that her husband, Omar Puente, would not be prosecuted.

There have so far been no prosecutions of relatives of 101 UK citizens who have gone to the Dignitas clinic.

Ms Purdy, who was diagnosed with primary progressive MS in 1995 and can no longer walk, was granted permission to appeal because of public interest in the case.

But speaking outside the High Court after the ruling, she said she was disappointed with the result and would be appealing.

"We still don't know how we can make sure that we stay within the law, because I'm certainly not prepared for Omar to break the law - I'm not prepared for him to face jail."

"How can we make sure that we act within the law if they won't tell us in what circumstances they would prosecute?"

She said she was still considering travelling to Switzerland to take a lethal dose of barbiturates prescribed by doctors at Dignitas.

Ms Purdy wants her husband at her side but fears he may be prosecuted on his return to Britain, and says she may therefore have to make the trip earlier than she really wanted.

Aiding or abetting a suicide is a crime punishable by up to 14 years imprisonment.

Guidance

A judicial review was granted to Ms Purdy on the grounds that the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) had acted illegally by not providing guidance on how decisions on prosecution are reached.

During the hearing earlier this month, she argued the lack of clarification was a breach of her human rights.

But two High Court judges have ruled they had not been infringed and existing guidelines were adequate.

Lord Justice Scott Baker said: "We cannot leave this case without expressing great sympathy for Ms Purdy, her husband and others in a similar position who wish to know in advance whether they will face prosecution for doing what many would regard as something that the law should permit, namely to help a loved one go abroad to end their suffering when they are unable to do it on their own.

"This would involve a change in the law.

"The offence of assisted suicide is very widely drawn to cover all manner of different circumstances - only Parliament can change it."

It is not the first time the issue has been raised in the courts.

In 2001 Diane Pretty, who had motor neurone disease, failed to get immunity from prosecution for her husband if he helped her to die in the UK.

Several attempts to legalise suicide in Britain have also been rejected.

Cybercrime wave sweeping Britain

2008-10-30T11:41:00.002+06:00

Cybercrime in the UK rose by more than 9% in 2007, according to a new report.

Online identity firm Garlik's cybercrime report claims that more than 3.5 million online crimes were committed in the UK last year.

The majority of crimes related to fraud and abusive or threatening emails. There was an 8% drop in online identity theft and sexual offences fell 2%.

Tom Ilube, of Garlick, said he expected to see a growth in online financial fraud due to the credit crunch.

In 2007, the sharpest rise was in online financial fraud, with more than 250,000 incidents reported in 2007; a 20% rise on the previous year.

The report highlighted a growing professionalism among online criminals, with personal and credit details being traded online.

Garlik said that the information black market had doubled, with more than 19,000 illicit traders identified.

Abuse and blackmail

Online harassment also increased. More than two million people were the victim of an abusive email, false accusation or blackmail attempt.

It is thought the growing popularity of social networking sites helped drive this, providing a new widespread medium for online harassment.

However, there was a drop in cases of online identity theft, which fell 8% to just over 80,000 reported cases.

The number of online sexual offences also fell by 2% to 830,000.

The report warned that a rise in overall cybercrime was to be expected, with people resorting to illegal activities as the economic climate worsens.

Cybercrime is one of the fastest-growing criminal activities and covers a wide range of offences, including financial scams, hacking, harassment and identity theft.

But some people think the report is just the tip of the iceberg.

Andrew Goodwill, from fraud prevention specialists The 3rd Man, said cybercrime was mushrooming out of proportion.

"Cybercrime costs the country hundreds of millions every year," he said.

"Retailers alone lost more than £270m in 2007 from internet fraud. And that's just the figures reported by banks.

"These numbers are a shadow of the real figure. Pretty much everyone who goes online will be the subject of some kind of internet crime, be it phishing emails, virus attacks or malware," he said.

According to the FBI, the UK is home to many of the perpetrators.

In a 2007 report by its Internet Crime Complaint Center, Britain came second after the United States (and before Nigeria) as the source of online crime.

Garlik's chief executive Tom Ilube sounded a warning for the future.

"It's critical in this time of financial crisis that individuals are vigilant with their personal information, because as long as the credit crunch continues, we can expect to see a real growth in online financial fraud," he said.

Climate damage science studied

2008-10-30T11:37:00.002+06:00

The UK's Royal Society is to investigate whether ambitious engineering schemes could reduce the impact of global warming.

Several "geo-engineering" schemes have been proposed including putting mirrors into space and iron filings in oceans.

The society says these must be properly assessed - however fantastical.

But environmental groups warn that technological solutions should not divert attention away from reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses.

A working group of climate scientists and engineers are to study a variety of these ideas and produce a report by the middle of next year.

Schemes include putting mirrors in space to reflect sunlight away from the Earth, seeding the atmosphere with particles to act as a planetary sun block and using iron filings to stimulate the growth of plankton in the oceans, which would in turn absorb CO2.

According to Professor Andrew Watson, from the University of East Anglia, who is a member of the geo-engineering working group, "some of the ideas might have unpleasant side effects, some of them might be very expensive and some of them might not work".

But he added: "We feel that there's quite a variety of these schemes out there now and increasing interest in them. And it's time there was an authoritative scanning of the horizon to see which of these might be useful and what more needs to be done."

But aren't some of these schemes obviously barking mad?

"Not absolutely obviously barking - no," said Professor Watson.

"The working group will not dismiss them because they appear fantastical. I do think that some of these schemes have the potential to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and some of the schemes certainly do have the potential to cool the planet."

Serious attention

The aim of the study is to provide a useful first step in order to define the parameters and limitations of these approaches and to offer recommendations on which deserve more serious attention.

In many cases, some of the proposals are likely to have unintended harmful effects on the environment. The working group aims to investigate these potential side effects and establish what further research needs to be commissioned.

Some environmentalists believe that even thinking about technological fixes diverts attention away from reducing CO2 emissions.

But according to Professor Watson, there is a feeling in the scientific community that these proposals should be researched because some may actually be useful as a last resort, at the very least.

"If the worst predictions of climate change are realised, what happens if, politically, we are unable to change our emission habits?" he said.

"As a last resort, we could turn to some of these possible methods. If we haven't done the research and properly evaluated these methods, that option would not be on the table."

NHS alcohol services 'struggling'

2008-10-29T11:48:00.001+06:00

The NHS is failing to get a grip on the growing alcohol problems in England, a watchdog says.

The National Audit Office said local health bosses did not have a clear idea of the scale of the problem and as a result were not co-ordinating services.

In particular, the report called on GPs to take more responsibility as the NHS was struggling to reach those at the early stages of alcohol abuse.

But the government said it was doing "more than ever" to tackle the problem.

The criticism comes after the number of alcohol-related deaths has doubled since the early 1990s to nearly 9,000 a year.

Hospital admissions for conditions such as liver disease have also soared, leaving the NHS bill for alcohol abuse at £2.7bn a year.

The NAO quizzed primary care trusts (PCTs), which are in charge of local services, GPs and a host of experts providing alcohol services.

It found that a quarter of PCTs had not carried out assessments of the problem locally, four in 10 did not have a strategy in place and a third did not know what they were spending on the problem.

Where evidence on investment was available, just £600,000 a year - or 0.1% of the budget - was spent on average.

The report said, because of the lack of co-ordination, the services were not providing value for money.

Hazardous drinkers

It said most of the responsibility was being placed on drug and alcohol action teams, which were often run jointly with councils, but these tended to focus on the most serious cases that required detox and counselling programmes.

It meant that too little was being done for the estimated 7m hazardous drinkers - those drinking above the recommended limits but who were not yet seeing their health affected.

The NAO said GPs were in the ideal position to help these groups of people through the use of brief advice during consultations on how to reduce drinking levels.

But the report added that currently this only happened sporadically.

Mark Davies, who oversees health at the NAO, said: "The NHS is just not getting to grips with the issue. It needs to take a much wider approach and improve the way it is delivering it services."

Don Shenker, chief executive of Alcohol Concern, added: "There is a clear case for urgent improvement to treatment services, if we want to see an end to spiralling costs of alcohol misuse to the NHS."

But a Department of Health spokesman said the government was doing "more than ever" to tackle alcohol-related problems.

He added: "Most PCTs with high levels of hospital admissions have already decided to tackle this as a local NHS priority.

"We have appointed regional alcohol managers to support the local NHS and develop regional strategies to reduce alcohol misuse."

Yahoo lets outside developers play with its software

2008-10-29T11:43:00.001+06:00

Yahoo on Tuesday followed through on a promise to give outside developer’s access to its software in order to jazz-up the website with fun, hip or functional programs.

Early this year, the pioneering Internet firm outlined a shift to an "Open Strategy" that it believes will invigorate Yahoo and lead to meshing offerings from hot online properties such as Amazon and iTunes with its web pages.

"We're open," Jay Rossiter of Yahoo Open Strategy said in message posted online. "Have at it."

Rossiter invited software developers to "come in and assess our tools and data so they can build applications for a more customized, social and relevant Yahoo! network and beyond."

Yahoo wants to enhance the social aspects of its website in order to attract new people to its online services and get existing users to spend more time on its advertising-supported pages.

Outside developers are invited to find creative ways to interlace and enhance popular Yahoo services such as it email, finance, sports and Flickr photo-sharing websites.

"Most obvious will be the social aspects," Rossiter said of Yahoo's evolution.

"We're rolling out a social platform that will draw on the hundreds of millions of connections on Yahoo! -- everything from random encounters with someone who commented on the same photo as you, to deep connections you have with friends who know nearly everything about you."

Yahoo users will be able to customize home pages with applications linking them to online auction house eBay, CNN news coverage and movie rental powerhouse Netflix.

"Reaching this step in our Yahoo! Open Strategy has been a significant effort, requiring hundreds of developers in offices around the world," Rossiter wrote.

"We've even worked hand-in-hand with Google, MySpace, and many other of our traditional competitors as partners in this effort."

Yahoo cautions that its Open Strategy is still in a nascent phase and will be honed based on feedback from users and developers.

"We're anxious to see what developers out there have up their sleeves and what you'll do with it," Rossiter said in his message.

Yahoo claims more than 500 million users worldwide but has been struggling to cash-in on its popularity.

Yahoo's sagging fortunes and Google's ascension as Internet advertising king prompted Microsoft on January 31 to offer to buy Yahoo for 44.6 billion dollars in a half-cash, half-stock deal.

Microsoft was eager to combine online resources with Yahoo in order to better battle Google.

Microsoft walked away from negotiations May 3 after Yahoo rejected an offer it raised from 31 dollars to 33 dollars per share, which amounted to 47.5 billion dollars.

Yahoo subsequently made a deal with Google to put its online advertising expertise to work on Yahoo websites. That deal is to take effect later this year if it passes muster with US anti-trust regulators.

Jab hope for rheumatoid arthritis

2008-10-28T11:40:00.001+06:00

A monthly injection could halt rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in half of all patients, trial data suggests.

The antibody drug tocilizumab works in conjunction with an existing treatment, methotrexate, to stop the condition in which the body attacks its own joints.

The drug, which will be sold under the brand name RoActemra by Roche, is awaiting approval by drugs regulators in Europe and the US.

The work was presented at a meeting of the American College of Rheumatology.

Nothing can be done to reverse the damage caused by RA but the new results show the two drugs taken together can achieve remission by stopping progression of the disease.

In trials involving 1,190 patients, taking tocilizumab plus methotrexate halted the condition in 47% of patients, compared to only 8% when methotrexate was taken alone.

X-rays showed the combination treatment slowed structural damage to joints by 85% on average, compared with 67% for methotrexate alone.

Drug options

Professor Paul Emery, from Leeds University, who led the study said: "Results of this pivotal study convincingly demonstrate that tocilizumab can effectively and rapidly diminish the painful and debilitating effects of RA.

"These trial findings are significant because it is critical to stop joint damage as quickly as possible to avoid joint deformity and to help people with RA maintain their quality of life."

here are other drugs available - anti-TNF therapy - that can halt RA disease progression.

In the UK, however, the use of these drugs on the NHS is restricted.

A spokeswoman for the Arthritis Research Campaign, whose scientists pioneered earlier anti-TNF therapy, said: "New trial data for tocilizumab is extremely encouraging and this drug could be an effective option for the 30% of people who fail on anti-TNF therapy.

"It's great news for people with rheumatoid arthritis as after years of having very few drugs available to them that slow down disease progression, there are suddenly several promising new therapies in the pipeline."

Ailsa Bosworth, chief executive of the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society, said: "We are encouraged by these findings, particularly as the treatment shows such promise of achieving remission, the ultimate goal for people with this cruel and debilitating disease.

"These results present new hope for the hundreds of thousands of people who suffer from RA in the UK."

Professor Iain McInnes, from the University of Glasgow, said: "We have seen great advances with the advent of biologic therapies however, a significant proportion of patients achieve only a partial response or do not respond at all to our current therapies.

"Newer treatments are required that will not only effectively treat the signs and symptoms of RA, but also prevent joint damage and help patients achieve remission - the 'Holy Grail' when treating RA.

"Tocilizumab data suggests that we are moving in the right direction and this exciting new treatment promises to be a powerful weapon in the fight against RA."

There are 400,000 people in the UK with RA.

Microsoft to battle in the clouds

2008-10-28T11:37:00.001+06:00

Microsoft has unveiled a cloud computing service, in which data and applications will not be stored on individuals' computers.

The new platform, dubbed Windows Azure, was announced at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

The platform was described by Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie as "Windows for the cloud".

The framework will be offered alongside the next Windows release, Windows 7.

The move sees Microsoft taking on established players like Google and Amazon in the rapidly growing business of online software.

The aim is to allow developers to build new applications which will live on the internet, rather than on their own computers.

Microsoft believes consumers will also want to store far more of their data - from letters to photos to videos - on the servers in its "cloud" of giant data centres around the world, so that it can be accessed anywhere, from any device.

The move, which Microsoft sees as a major shift in its corporate strategy, was unveiled in front of 6,000 software developers from around the world.

'Bloaty' software

The term cloud computing has become increasingly fashionable, as companies with large data centres start renting out space to businesses wanting to build rapidly growing online applications without needing to invest in more servers as traffic grows.

For consumers, there is the prospect of a future where much of their data and many of the applications they use could be stored online "in the cloud".

Microsoft, which still reaps huge profits from its Windows and Office products, is now moving into territory where it has so far struggled to make an impact.

Google, dominant in search and in online advertising, already has a suite of online applications living in the "cloud". Sam Schillace, who runs Google Docs, says he is not worried by the arrival of a big new rival.

"Competition, even stiff competition from Microsoft doesn't bother us because it will either make the internet as a whole better or it will be irrelevant to making it better."

Without naming Microsoft, Mr Schillace drew a contrast between the old model of "bloaty" software and a more open future where online applications would be updated virtually every week.

"The way people work and the way people communicate, openness and velocity and nimbleness and focus are much more valuable and I think that's a very big shift."

Fast-moving clouds

Amazon, with big data centres handling millions of e-commerce transactions, has been another pioneer in this field, with its Elastic Cloud Service.

Using the spare capacity on its servers, it allows a range of customers big and small - from Facebook application developers to the Washington Post - to build applications which can cope with a sudden rush of demand.

In his speech in Los Angeles, Ray Ozzie said he "tipped his hat" at Amazon for its work in this field, saying "we are all standing on their shoulders."

Microsoft is taking a different approach from some of its rivals, insisting that its customers still want to be able to choose to have their software offline, on their own computers, as well as online in the web cloud.

"We believe deeply in on-premises software and we believe deeply in this new world of software in the cloud," said Ray Ozzie.

It's a strategy which rivals will say is designed to protect the profits from its existing software products. But the scene is set for a battle in the clouds between the few big companies wealthy enough to be able to build the huge data centres on which this new form of computing will depend.

Purple tomato 'may boost health'

2008-10-27T11:42:00.001+06:00

Scientists have developed purple tomatoes which they hope may be able to keep cancer at bay.

The fruit are rich in an antioxidant pigment called anthocyanin which is thought to have anti-cancer properties.

A team from the John Innes Centre, Norwich, created the tomatoes by incorporating genes from the snapdragon flower, which is high in anthocyanin.

The study, published in Nature Biotechnology, found mice who ate the tomatoes lived longer.

Anthocyanins, found in particularly high levels in berries such as blackberry, cranberry and chokeberry, have been shown to help significantly slow the growth of colon cancer cells.

They are also thought to offer protection against cardiovascular disease and age-related degenerative diseases.

There is also evidence that the pigments have anti-inflammatory properties, help boost eyesight, and may help stave off obesity and diabetes.

The John Innes team is investigating ways to increase the levels of health-promoting compounds in more commonly eaten fruits and vegetables.

Tomatoes already contain high levels of beneficial antioxidant compounds, such as lycopene and flavonoids.

More benefit

Professor Cathie Martin, from the centre, said: "Most people do not eat five portions of fruits and vegetables a day, but they can get more benefit from those they do eat if common fruit and veg can be developed that are higher in bioactive compounds."

The John Innes team took two genes from snapdragon that induce the production of anthocyanins in snapdragon flowers, and turned them on in tomato fruit.

Anthocyanins accumulated in tomatoes at higher levels than anything previously achieved in both the peel and flesh of the fruit, giving them an intense purple colour.

Tests on mice bred to be susceptible to cancer showed that animals whose diets were supplemented with the purple tomatoes had a significantly longer lifespan compared to those who received only normal red tomatoes.

Professor Martin said: "This is one of the first examples of metabolic engineering that offers the potential to promote health through diet by reducing the impact of chronic disease.

"And certainly the first example of a GMO [genetically modified organism] with a trait that really offers a potential benefit for all consumers."

She said the the next step would be test the tomatoes on human volunteers.

Exciting

Dr Lara Bennett, of the charity Cancer Research UK, said: "It is exciting to see new techniques that could potentially make healthy foods even better for us.

"But it is too early to say whether anthocyanins obtained through diet could help to reduce the risk of cancer.

"We do know that eating a healthy, balanced diet that is rich in fibre, fruit and vegetables - and low in red and processed meat - is an important way to reduce your cancer risk."

Dr Paul Kroon, of the Food Research Institute in Norwich, said the research was an "important study".

"The technology offers great scope for altering colours of fruits and vegetables, and their content of potentially health-protective compounds."

However, he said it would be wrong to assume the effects seen in mice would necessarily occur in humans.

Anna Denny, a nutrition scientist for the British Nutrition Foundation, stressed there was no "magic bullet" against diseases such as cancer and heart disease.

"Fruit and veg with higher levels of health-promoting compounds should not been seen as a replacement for eating a healthy balanced diet."

Suicide linked to brain changes

2008-10-27T11:39:00.001+06:00

The brains of people who commit suicide are chemically different to those who die from other causes, a Canadian study has suggested.

Researchers analysed brain tissue from 20 dead people and, in those who killed themselves, they found a higher rate of a process that affects behaviour.

Writing in Biological Psychology, they said it appeared environmental factors played a part in the changes.

And they said the discovery opened up a new avenue of research.

The researchers, from the University of Western Ontario, Carleton University and University of Ottawa, analysed tissue from 10 people who had a serious depressive disorder and had committed suicide and 10 who had died suddenly from other causes, such as a heart attack.

They found that the DNA in the suicide group was being chemically modified by a process normally involved in regulating cell development, called methylation.

It is methylation which shuts down the unwanted genes in a cell - so the necessary genes are expressed to make a cell a skin cell rather than, for example, a heart cell.

The rate of methylation in the suicide brains was almost 10 times that of the other group, and the gene that was being shut down was a chemical message receptor that plays a major role in regulating behaviour.

In the paper, the researchers suggest this reprogramming could contribute to the "protracted and recurrent nature of major depressive disorder".

Previous research has suggested that changes to the methylation process can be caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors called epigenetics.

Modifications 'shape life'

Dr Michael Poulter, who led the research, said: "The whole idea that the genome is so malleable in the brain is surprising, because brain cells don't divide.

"You get dealt your neurons at the start of life, so the idea that there are still epigenetic mechanisms going on is pretty unusual."

He said the findings of the study opened up a new avenue of research and potential therapies for depression and suicidal tendencies.

John Krystal, the editor of Biological Psychiatry, said: "This is exciting new evidence that genetic and environmental factors may interact to produce specific and long-lasting modifications in brain circuits.

"Further, these modifications may shape the course of one's life in extremely important ways, including increasing the risk for major depressive disorder and perhaps suicide."

Rotavirus vaccines cut diarrhea sickness in US

2008-10-26T11:56:00.001+06:00

An oral vaccine for diarrhea reduced hospitalizations of children with rotavirus by 70 percent in Philadelphia, saved money and prevented infections among unvaccinated children, researchers reported on Saturday.

Three reports presented to a meeting of infectious disease specialists showed the benefits of the vaccine, which prevents the most common cause of severe diarrhea.

In one report, Irini Daskalaki of Drexel University College of Medicine reported that hospitals in North Philadelphia had seen a 70 percent drop in rotavirus-associated hospitalizations since rotavirus vaccinations began in 2006.

The number of babies aged 6 to 11 months admitted to the hospital with rotavirus plummeted by 94 percent, Daskalaki told a meeting of the American Society of Microbiology and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

"The extent of the decrease in cases ... is unprecedented and greater than any variation in numbers previously observed, suggesting that the vaccine played an important role," researchers wrote in a summary released before the presentation.

Merck and Co's Rotateq was recommended in 2006 for routine immunization of US infants, while GlaxoSmithKline Plc's Rotarix, was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in April. Both are considered equally safe.

Rotavirus is the leading cause of severe gastroenteritis, with vomiting and diarrhea, in infants and young children.

Before routine vaccination, the condition sent 410,000 children to a doctor every year, with more than 200,000 needing emergency care and 20 to 60 dying in the United States.

Globally, rotavirus kills 1,600 children under age 5 every day.

Doctors had been desperate for a vaccine to prevent the highly contagious infection. But the first one, sold by Wyeth , was pulled from the market in 1999 after it was linked to a rare, life-threatening type of bowel obstruction known as intussusceptions.

The new vaccines do not have that problem.

A team at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston also found a 94 percent reduction in diarrheal disease after Rotateq was introduced.

Researchers at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, found only 62 children were admitted for rotavirus infection in 2008, compared with more than 300 a year in previous years, saving about $3 million a year in hospitalization costs.

A team at Quest Diagnostics, a company that tests lab samples, said it found evidence the vaccine lowered rotavirus infections in every state by between 18 and 87 percent.

"These data show a marked reduction in rotavirus disease in the US after licensure of a live, oral rotavirus vaccine, although some states experienced greater declines than others," they wrote in a summary.

"Evidence of herd immunity was also observed." Herd immunity means even people who are not vaccinated are less likely to become infected because a disease is circulating less.

Action call over maternal deaths

2008-10-25T11:44:00.001+06:00

Urgent action is needed to reduce the number of women dying during pregnancy and childbirth, the World Health Organization has said.

Its director of maternal health, Dr Franciso Songanem, said funding needed to be better co-ordinated.

And he admitted the 2015 target to reduce maternal deaths by 75% from 1990 levels was likely to be missed.

Analysis in 2007 show rates have changed little - latest figures show 500,000 women are dying each year.

The research by Harvard University, shows that between 1990 and 2005 mortality rates fell at less than 1% per year.

The study said unsafe abortions, haemorrhaging and problems delivering were the major causes.

Dr Songane, director of the WHO's Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, said maternal deaths were still far too common and the 2015 target was "unlikely to be met".

"Some 99% of maternal deaths occur in the poorest communities of the world. Most deaths could be prevented and solutions exist, but are not available to those who need them most.

"Urgent global action is needed to increase investment and political commitment to scale up these life-saving services for mothers and their children."

He said the solution lay in more investment and directing funds to local projects that could make a difference.

He cited a project in Matlab in the south of Bangladesh run by the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, which is featured in the BBC World series Survival.

Nine in 10 women in Bangladesh give birth at home without any medical intervention, with more than one in 50 dying.

The scheme trains local women to offer advice about diet, run ante-natal classes and help deliver babies.

Dr Muhammad Yunnus, who is helping to run the project, said: "We have to give all women a better chance of surviving childbirth."

Texts tackle HIV in South Africa

2008-10-25T11:41:00.003+06:00

The popularity of mobile phones in South Africa is helping to tackle HIV and Aids in the nation.

Project Masiluleke will send one million free text messages a day to push people to be tested and treated.

Approximately 350,000 people die of Aids-related diseases in the country every year.

Trials of the system showed that calls to counsellors at the National Aids helpline in Johannesburg increased by 200% when messages were broadcast.

"I think this is the largest ever use of mobile phones for health information," said Gustav Praekelt, one of the project's originators.

Test case

The United Nations estimates that there are currently six million people living with HIV in South Africa.

"South Africa is the epicentre of the global HIV epidemic," said Zinny Thabethe, an HIV activist who is part of the project.

"You would think that in a country where it is so obvious that we are challenged by HIV that there would be enough knowledge to help people access care or change behaviour."

However, she said, misinformation and stigma remained rife in many communities and testing levels remained low.

"HIV testing is widely available ...but only 5% have managed to test for HIV," she said. "Most people only get a test when they are about to die."

Project Masiluleke was set up to try to counter this and encourage people to seek testing and treatment.

The initiative plans to broadcast millions of health messages every month to mobile phones across South Africa.

It is estimated that there are currently 43m handsets in a country of 49m people. Almost 95% of the phones are prepaid.

"There is near universal coverage," said Mr Praekelt. "And in the absence of other services, the mobile phone has become the central component for people to get access to information."

The system sends the messages using a so-called "Please Call Me" (PCM) service.

This free form of text messaging, found across Africa, allows someone without any phone credit to send a text to a friend asking them to call.

Each sent PCM message has the words "Please Call Me," the phone number of the caller, and space for an additional 120 characters.

The extra space is normally filled with advertising, which helps offset the cost of running the service.

About 30m PCM messages are sent every day in South Africa.

"This is a great opportunity to drive social change because we can send messages to parts of the population who just never get this kind of information," said Mr Praekelt.

Texts include: "Worried that you might have HIV and want to talk to a counsellor about getting tested? Call Aids helpline 0800012322."

Many of the messages have been written with the help of local communities and are broadcast in English and local languages such as Zulu.

Pilot projects showed that calls to the National Aids helpline rose from 1,000 to 4,000 when the system was in use.

The initiative will go live on 1 December, sending one million PCM messages a day through the MTN network.

Its developers hope it will encourage hundreds of thousands of people to go for an HIV test in the first year.

"As South Africans we have to take a stand and we have to take responsibility to solve our crisis," said Ms Thabethe.

The system will also eventually be used to provide information about tuberculosis.

It has been developed and funded by a group of technology firms such as Nokia Siemens Networks, HIV charities, design firms and educational organisations such as National Geographic.

It was launched at the Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine.

Study finds leukaemia drug can halt, reverse effects of MS

2008-10-23T12:27:00.001+06:00

Researchers at the University of Cambridge said Thursday they have found that a drug originally developed to treat leukaemia can halt and even reverse the debilitating effects of multiple sclerosis (MS).

In trials, alemtuzumab reduced the number of attacks in sufferers and also helped them recover lost functions, apparently allowing damaged brain tissue to repair so that individuals were less disabled than at the start of the study.

"The ability of an MS drug to promote brain repair is unprecedented," said Dr Alasdair Coles, a lecturer at Cambridge university's department of clinical neurosciences, who coordinated many aspects of the study.

"We are witnessing a drug which, if given early enough, might effectively stop the advancement of the disease and also restore lost function by promoting repair of the damaged brain tissue."

The MS Society, Britain's largest support charity for those affected by the condition, said it was "delighted" at the trial's results, which must be followed up with more research before the drug can be licensed.

"This is the first drug that has shown the potential to halt and even reverse the debilitating effects of MS and this news will rightly bring hope to people living with the condition day in, day out," said head of research Lee Dunster.

MS is an auto-immune disease that affects millions of people worldwide, including almost 100,000 in Britain and 400,000 in the United States. It is caused by the body's immune system attacking nerve fibres in the central nervous system, and can lead to loss of sight and mobility, depression, fatigue and cognitive problems. There is no cure, and few effective treatments.

In the trial, 334 patients diagnosed with early-stage relapsing-remitting MS who had not previously been treated were given alemtuzumab or interferon beta-1a, one of the most effective licensed therapies for similar MS cases.

After three years, alemtuzumab was found to reduce the number of attacks the patients suffered by 74 percent over the other treatment, and reduce the risk of sustained accumulation of disability by 71 percent over interferon beta-1a.

Many individuals who took alemtuzumab also recovered some of their lost functions, becoming less disabled by the end, while the disabilities of the other patients worsened, the study in the New England Journal of Medicine said.

Alastair Compston, professor of neurology and head of the clinical neurosciences department at Cambridge, said alemtuzumab was the "most promising" experimental drug for the treatment of MS.

He expressed hope that further trials "will confirm that it can both stabilise and allow some recovery of what had previously been assumed to be irreversible disabilities".

Alemtuzumab was developed in Cambridge and has been licensed for the treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.

Keyboard sniffers to steal data

2008-10-22T12:47:00.001+06:00

Computer criminals could soon be eavesdropping on what you type by analysing the electromagnetic signals produced by every key press.

By analysing the signals produced by keystrokes, Swiss researchers have reproduced what a target typed.

The security researchers have developed four attacks that work on a wide variety of computer keyboards.

The results led the researchers to declare keyboards were "not safe to transmit sensitive information".

Better attacks

The attacks were dreamed up by doctoral students Martin Vuagnoux and Sylvain Pasini from the Security and Cryptography Laboratory at the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL).

The EPFL students tested 11 different keyboard models that connected to a computer via either a USB or a PS/2 socket. The attacks they developed also worked with keyboards embedded in laptops.

Every keyboard tested was vulnerable to at least one of the four attacks the researchers used. One attack was shown to work over a distance of 20 metres.

In their work the researchers used a radio antenna to "fully or partially recover keystrokes" by spotting the electromagnetic radiation emitted when keys were pressed.

In a web posting they added: "no doubt that our attacks can be significantly improved, since we used relatively unexpensive equipments [sic]."

In videos showing their early work the researchers are seen connecting keyboards to a laptop running on battery power. They avoided using a desktop computer or an LCD display to minimise the chance of picking up signals from other sources.

Details of the attacks are scant but the work is expected to be reported in a peer-reviewed journal soon.

The research builds on earlier work done by University of Cambridge computer scientist Markus Kuhn who looked at ways to use electromagnetic emanations to eavesdrop and steal useful information.

Junk food causes a third of heart attacks

2008-10-22T12:45:00.001+06:00

Diets heavy in fried foods, salty snacks and meat account for about 35 percent of heart attacks globally, researchers reported on Monday.

Their study of 52 countries showed that people who ate a "Western" diet based on meat, eggs and junk food were more likely to have heart attacks, while those who ate more fruits and vegetables had a lower risk.

The study supports previous findings that show junk food and animal fats can cause heart disease, and especially heart attacks.

Dr. Salim Yusuf at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and colleagues questioned more than 16,000 patients, 5,700 of whom had just suffered a first heart attack.

They took blood samples and had each patient fill out a detailed form on their eating habits between February 1999 and March 2003.

They divided the volunteers into three groups.

"The first factor was labelled 'Oriental' because of its high loading on tofu and soy and other sauces," they wrote in their report, published in the journal Circulation.

"The second factor was labelled 'Western' because of its high loading on fried food, salty snacks, and meat intake. The third dietary factor was labelled 'prudent' because of its high loading on fruit and vegetable intake."

People who ate more fruits and vegetables had a 30 percent lower risk of heart attack compared to people who ate little or none of these foods, they found.

People eating a Western diet had a 35 percent greater risk of heart attack compared to people who consumed little or no fried foods and meat. Those eating the "Oriental" diet had an average risk of heart attack compared to the others.

The finding is important because it has not been clear if it is food per se or something else driving heart attack risk. Rich diets may be associated with a richer lifestyle that includes little or no exercise, for instance.

But the researchers note that heart disease is no longer an affliction only of the rich.

"Approximately 80 percent of the global cardiovascular disease burden occurs in low- and middle-income countries," they wrote.

The tofu-rich diet could be neutral rather than protective because it is high in sodium, they said. High sodium intake can raise blood pressure and the risk of heart attack and stroke.

Chinese surfers see red over Microsoft black-outs

2008-10-22T12:43:00.001+06:00

Chinese Internet users have expressed fury at Microsoft's launch of an anti-piracy tool targeting Chinese computer users to ensure they buy genuine software and not a copy.

The "Windows Genuine Advantage" program, which turns the user's desktop black if the installed software fails a validation test, is Microsoft's latest weapon in its war on piracy in China, where the vast majority of 200 million computer users are believed to be using fake software, unwittingly or not.

"Why is Microsoft automatically connected with my computer? The computer is mine!" one angry blogger wrote on popular Chinese web portal Sina.com. "Microsoft has no right to control my hardware without my agreement."

Another blogger railed over the cost of authorized versions.

"If the price of genuine software was lower than the fake one, who would buy the fake one?" he wrote.

Dong Zhengwei, 35, a Beijing lawyer, described Microsoft as the "biggest hacker in China with its intrusion into users' computer systems without their agreement or any judicial authority," the China Daily said.

"Microsoft's measure will cause serious functional damage to users' computers and, according to China's Criminal Law, the company can stand accused of breaching and hacking into computer systems," he was quoted as saying.

"I respect the right of Microsoft to protect its intellectual property, but it is taking on the wrong target with wrong measures. They should target producers and sellers of fake software, not users."

The software giant defends the program on its website as "part of Microsoft's commitment to help protect its intellectual property and to help you avoid problems before they happen."

Parents 'wrong' on child weight

2008-10-20T12:40:00.001+06:00

Many parents overlook their child's unhealthy weight because they believe it is normal, research suggests.

Data on 2,100 Australian children found 40% of parents with an overweight or underweight child had not spotted this.

Among children, the underweight were more likely to think of themselves as average than the overweight.

The University of Melbourne researchers said parents would not act to help their children gain or lose weight if they did not see the problem.

Child obesity is thought to be increasing fast in many countries, and experts are hunting for effective ways to intervene, both at school, and home.

The Australian research shows just how hard it could be to challenge parents' perceptions of their children.

The Melbourne researchers analysed the 2,100 children using both Body Mass Index and waist circumference, to try to establish which fell into the "underweight", "overweight" and "average" groups.

They then compared these results with the recorded perceptions of their parents.

In total 43% of parents of overweight or underweight children placed their child in the "average" bracket.

For overweight children alone, this rose to nearly half. Remarkably, a very small percentage of parents had even more extreme views, assessing an overweight child as underweight, or vice versa.

The parents of boys were less likely to make a correct assessment.

When the children themselves were asked, six out of 10 underweight girls and half of underweight boys did not assess their weight correctly.

Big society

Dr Pene Schmidt, who led the research, said: "Parents are more likely to take the necessary preventative actions if the perception of their child's weight - whether underweight or overweight - is correct."

Tam Fry, from the National Obesity Forum, said that the results were "unsurprising".

He said: "There was recent research in this country which showed that a similar proportion of health professionals were unable to make the distinction.

"We live in a society where being big is becoming far more common, and is seen as normal."

He said that it was hard for health visitors and doctors to intervene if they were likely to meet a hostile response from the parent.

Handsets to become crime targets

2008-10-20T12:38:00.001+06:00

The risk of spam and viruses that attack mobile devices is set to rise, says a report.

Security experts suggest current risks are small, and that attacks will take the same form as PC spam and scams.

End-user protection like anti-virus software is not yet mature in the mobile market, so the issue is being addressed by the network operators.

Mobile users are urged to employ the same safe behaviours familiar from PCs to reduce risks.

New threat

The annual Emerging Cyber Threats Report from the Georgia Institute of Technology Information Security Center (GTISC) in the US has identified mobile devices as particularly vulnerable platform.

It said that as more and more people adopt smartphones, more applications will allow financial and payment infrastructure that employs them, and the availability of such sensitive data will prove to be a draw for cybercriminals.

The growth of mobile spam and viruses has been reminiscent of the early days of PC spam and scam, says Simeon Coney of Adaptive Mobile, a firm that tracks malware and provides security software for mobile firms.

"One of common types we see now runs amok on the Symbian platform," Mr Coney told BBC News. "These viruses work their way through the contact book, sending themselves out to every subscriber who has been called or has called that handset."

Mr Coney says that network operators receive 100,000 virus incidences a day, nearly a 50% rise on last year. However, most subscribers are not infected - in part because mobile viruses are comparatively unsophisticated at present.

"The first generation of these were fairly easy for mobile operators to detect," Mr Coney said.

"Just like the first PC viruses came across as screensavers, in the mobile instance they came across as executable files. No-one was ever sending executable files themselves so it was easy to detect and block that.

"But in the last four months, the majority of viruses we now see are of a new type that either masquerade as an MP3 file, a picture file, or a media file."

Adaptive Mobile has identified one particular virus called Beselo that spreads via MMS or by searching for nearby Bluetooth devices - a true "airborne virus".

For a typical network operator, they find, the virus is responsible for a rise in spam from 0.5% of traffic to 6% over the last 12 months.

The simple solution for users, Mr Coney says, is to employ the same behaviours familiar from computing.

"People should start to exercise that same caution with their mobile devices that they do today on their PC; think twice before running any attachment from someone you don't know, check your bill on a regular basis, and ensure your Bluetooth connection is not set in discoverable mode.

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, said statistics it had gathered about mobile viruses suggested there were about 400 in circulation.

"The growth rate is slowing," he says. "This is because the mobile vendors are awake and are installing better built-in security in their new phone models."

"We haven't seen much mobile malware that would use exploits to target vulnerabilities on mobile phones to gain access," he adds. "Almost all of them instead rely on users installing the malware themselves. This could change."

'Missed opportunity'

Up to now, mobile security has largely been in the hands of the network operators, who have taken a very pro-active stance to security for their users.

But the report instead suggests that co-operation between operators, manufacturers and application developers will be necessary.

The report lauds open-source mobile operating systems like Google's Android, which will make it easier for application developers to develop robust security.

The average life-cycle of mobile devices is just two years - compared to 10 years for a PC - so developing security infrastructure for mobiles will happen quickly.

"Because the mobile communications field is evolving so quickly, it presents a unique opportunity to design security properly - an opportunity we missed with the PC," says the GTISC's Patrick Traynor in the report.

Earliest confirmed TB case found

2008-10-15T12:37:00.001+06:00

The 9,000-year-old remains of a mother and her baby discovered off the coast of Israel provide the earliest concrete evidence of human TB, say researchers.

The bones were excavated from Alit-Yam, an ancient Neolithic village near Haifa, which has been submerged in the Mediterranean for thousands of years.

The experts from University College London and Tel-Aviv University used DNA technology to confirm the bacterium.

Others have found remains that hint at TB dating from about 500,000 years ago.

However, there is no firm proof that the tell tale signs seen in the skeleton of a young man believed to belong to the first human species to migrate out of Africa - Homo erectus - were in fact caused by TB. Some experts doubt it.

Watery grave

The Israel bones, discovered by Dr Helen Donoghue and Dr Mark Spigelman, prove the disease is at least 3,000 years older than previously confirmed in other remains found in Italy. The watery grave provided the ideal environment to preserve the skeleton and its DNA.

The Atlit-Yam site was located within marshland, the graves were encased in clay, eventually covered by thick layer of sand and later by salt water, protecting the bones from decay.

The size of the infant's bones, and the extent of TB damage, suggest the mother passed the disease to her baby shortly after birth.

They lived around the time of the first great transition of man from hunter-gatherers to a settled agriculture-based lifestyle.

One theory is that TB originally spread from cattle to humans.

But these latest findings, published in PLoS One journal, suggest human TB predates bovine TB.

Dr Donoghue said: "What is fascinating is that the infecting organism is definitely the human strain of tuberculosis, in contrast to the original theory that human TB evolved from bovine TB after animal domestication.

"This gives us the best evidence yet that in a community with domesticated animals but before dairying, the infecting strain was actually the human pathogen.

"The presence of large numbers of animal bones shows that animals were an important food source, and this probably led to an increase in the human population that helped the TB to be maintained and spread."

The scientists were also able to show that the DNA of the strain of TB in the skeletons had lost a particular piece of DNA which is characteristic of a common family of strains present in the world today.

"The fact that this deletion had occurred 9,000 years ago gives us a much better idea of the rate of change of the bacterium over time, and indicates an extremely long association with humans," said Dr Donoghue.

Dr Simon Mays, skeletal biologist at English Heritage's Centre for Archaeology, said: "This does predate the other earliest convincing cases of TB from Italy by about 6,000 years.

"It tells us that the human form of TB is quite ancient."

Ultimately, Dr Donoghue's team hope their work will help others find more effective treatments for TB.

About nine million new cases of TB, and nearly two million deaths from TB, are estimated to occur around the world every year.

Deaf people lobby MPs over phones

2008-10-15T12:35:00.001+06:00

Deaf campaigners fighting for equal access to the telephone are lobbying MPs at a reception in parliament.

Consortium group TAG said deaf people are being held back in their jobs and lives because phone technology is no longer easily available or affordable.

Chairman Ruth Myers said it was vital services keep pace with technology.

The deaf are able to communicate using phone systems which either turn speech into text and vice versa or use sign language interpreters via video link.

Another system called captioned telephony, which uses speech recognition technology to convert an operator’s voice into text, closed in December for funding reasons.

Ms Myers said: "No-one can participate fully in today’s fast-moving society without easy and affordable access to the telephone.

"Much better access has been shown to be within grasp, but most of the services that deliver it have folded because they are too expensive for deaf individuals."

TAG's reception for MPs is being held at Portcullis House under its campaign "Bringing Deaf Telecoms into the 21st Century".

The group represents all the main UK deaf organisations concerned with telecoms and broadcasting.

Alan Goldsmith, a European quality manager for a global chemical company, used captioned telephony in the UK until the service closed.

He told BBC News: "About five years ago, I learned about captioned telephony and it far exceeded my expectations.

"Not only could I assess emotions in the call, I could also participate in conference calls - something I could not do previously with the old-style relay service.

“All my European work colleagues contacting me by phone thought my hearing had returned!

“To say I miss captioned telephony is an understatement I'm convinced it has helped my career progress.”

Malcolm Bruce MP - the chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Deafness - is hosting the reception.

He said: “Four decades after telephones became commonplace in British households, many deaf people still struggle to use the telephone network and some cannot use it at all.

“Deaf people are bereft of key telephone services that could help them gain social, educational and professional equality with the rest of society.

“Modernised phone relay systems can dramatically improve their telecommunications, but the powers that be are dragging their feet in ensuring they are available and affordable.

"This is an increasing and unintended form of discrimination that must be rectified."

Software thwarts mobile phone chatting while driving

2008-10-15T12:33:00.001+06:00

Canadian company on Monday unveiled software crafted to prevent people, particularly mobile device-loving teenagers, from making telephone calls or text-messaging while driving.

Aegis Mobility describes DriveAssist as "advanced call management technology" that essentially creates virtual personal secretaries to intercept calls or text messages intended for mobile telephones in moving cars.

DriveAssist software detects when phones are moving at automobile speeds and then tells callers that the person they are trying to reach is driving. Callers are invited to leave messages or call-back numbers.

The service will also tell callers, presumably parents or employers, where the person they are trying to reach is located by using satellite navigation technology in devices or orienting based on cell signal towers being used.

People can bypass the service and be connected to drivers by indicating calls are emergencies.

DriveAssist is negotiating with telecom carriers to make the service available on a monthly subscription fee basis.

Parkinson's linked to vitamin D

2008-10-14T12:06:00.001+06:00

Scientists are testing whether vitamin D supplements can ease symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

A US team found 55% of Parkinson's patients had insufficient levels of vitamin D, compared to 36% of healthy elderly people.

However, the Emory University researchers do not yet know if the vitamin deficiency is a cause or the result of having Parkinson's.

The study appears in the journal Archives of Neurology.

Parkinson's disease affects nerve cells in several parts of the brain, particularly those that use the chemical messenger dopamine to control movement.

The most common symptoms are tremor, stiffness and slowness of movement. These can be treated with oral replacement of dopamine.

Previous studies have shown that the part of the brain affected most by Parkinson's, the substantia nigra, has high levels of the vitamin D receptor, which suggests vitamin D may be important for normal functions of these cells.

Sunlight

Vitamin D is found in the diet, but is primarily formed in the skin by exposure to sunlight.

However, the body's ability to produce the vitamin decreases with age, making older people more prone to deficiency.

One theory is that people with Parkinson's may be particularly vulnerable because their condition limits the amount of time they spend out of doors.

However, scientists say it may also be possible that low vitamin D levels are in some way related to the genesis and origin of the disease.

The researchers examined vitamin D levels in 100 people with Parkinson's, 100 with Alzheimer's disease and 100 who were healthy. The groups were matched for age, and economic circumstance.

Among the Parkinson's group 23% of patients had vitamin D levels so low that they could be described as deficient. In the Alzheimer's group the figure was 16%, and in the healthy group 10%.

The researchers said the findings were striking because the study group came from the South West of the US, where sunny weather is the norm.

'Intriguing finding'

Researcher Dr Marian Evatt said: "We found that vitamin D insufficiency may have a unique association with Parkinson's, which is intriguing and warrants further investigation."

Dr Kieran Breen, director of research, Parkinson’s Disease Society said: "Further research is required to determine at what stage the deficiency in vitamin levels occur in the brains of people with Parkinson's and whether the provision of a dietary supplement, or increased exposure to sunlight may help alleviate symptoms or have an affect on the rate of the condition's progression.

"This would help us answer the question as to whether the decrease in vitamin D levels in Parkinson’s is a cause or effect of the condition."

Doctors have known for decades that vitamin D plays a role in bone formation.

More recently, scientists have been uncovering its effects elsewhere, including producing peptides that fight microbes in the skin, regulating blood pressure and insulin levels, and maintaining the nervous system.

Low vitamin D levels also appear to increase the risk of several cancers and auto-immune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and diabetes.

'New pathway' for African exodus

2008-10-14T12:04:00.002+06:00

Researchers have found a possible new route taken by early modern humans as they expanded out of Africa to colonise the rest of the world.

A study published in the journal PNAS proposes a "wet corridor" through Libya for ancient human migrations.

Rivers once flowed from the central Saharan watershed all the way to the Mediterranean, the team explains.

This might have enabled modern humans to spread beyond their ancestral homeland about 120,000 years ago.

The Sahara then covered most of North Africa, as it does now. So it would have presented a formidable obstacle for early modern humans wishing to cross from the south to the north of the continent.

Researchers had previously focused on the Nile Valley as the principal route of dispersal into other continents by early representatives of our species.

Previous data show there was increased rainfall across the southern part of the Sahara between 130,000 and 170,000 years ago; in a gap between Ice Ages known as the last interglacial period.

The researchers, from the universities of Bristol, Southampton, Oxford, Hull and Tripoli in Libya, investigated whether these wetter conditions had reached a lot further north than previously thought.

Radar images from space revealed fossil river channels crossing the Sahara in Libya, flowing north from the central Saharan watershed to the Mediterranean coast.

Using geochemical tests, the scientists showed the channels were active during the last interglacial. This would have created vital water courses across an otherwise arid region, the researchers write in PNAS.

The central Saharan watershed is a range of volcanic mountains formerly considered to be the limit of this wetter region.

Researchers analysed the forms, or isotopes, of different chemical elements in snail shells from two sites in the fossil river channels and from the shells of planktonic microfossils in the Mediterranean.

Despite being hundreds of kilometres from the volcanic rocks of the Saharan watershed, the tests revealed a distinct volcanic signature to these shells, which was quite different to rocks from surrounding sites.

The scientists concluded that water flowing from the volcanic mountains of the central Sahara was the only possible source of this signature.

"It's a possible route that the early modern humans could have taken," lead author Anne Osborne, from the earth sciences group at Bristol, told BBC News.

Similarities in the style of stone tools being made in Chad and Sudan with those manufactured in Libya during this key period, lend the theory some support, say the scientists.

"We now need to focus archaeological fieldwork around the large drainage channels an palaeo-lakes to test these ideas," said co-author Dr Nick Barton, from the University of Oxford.

Although it is unclear which routes they took to get there, Homo sapiens had reached the Levant by around 100,000 years ago, where their remains are known from Es Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel.

However, this appears to have been an early, failed foray outside Africa by modern humans. By 75,000 years ago, Neanderthals had replaced our species in the region.

Then, about 45,000 years ago, modern humans reoccupied the area.

Genetic evidence suggests that populations living outside Africa today are the descendents of a migration which originated in the east of the continent between 60-70,000 years ago.

Some of these pioneers probably crossed the Red Sea at the Bab-el-Mandab straits, taking them from the Horn of Africa across to the Arabian Peninsula.

Fans anxiously await revamped, cheaper Apple laptop computers

2008-10-14T12:01:00.001+06:00

Apple is expected to unveil new notebook computers, perhaps even one priced for those with tight budgets, at a 'town hall' gathering at its northern California headquarters on Tuesday.

In typical enigmatic style, Apple hinted at the theme of the invitation-only event but provided no details other than that it would be held Tuesday morning at the iconic firm's headquarters in the city of Cupertino.

Invites sent out by email late last week bore the lone message "The spotlight turns to notebooks."

That was enough to ignite a firestorm of rumor on the Internet as Apple's cultish followers began feverishly trying to deduce what the iconic California company might be planning to unveil for the year-end holiday shopping season.

By Monday, speculation online included talk that Apple will introduce a Macintosh laptop computer priced perhaps as low as 800 dollars in an unprecedented break from selling premium-products at premium-prices.

Apple has never marketed a Macintosh laptop computer priced less than 1,000 dollars.

"I think Apple has to go less than 1,000 dollars," analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group in Silicon Valley said of pricing for Macintosh laptops.

"With the economy the way it is, holding on to a premium price point would mean taking a bath in the Christmas shopping season. It is tough to move premium products; that category is at huge disadvantage."

Apple's Macintosh computers remain a distant second place to world-dominating PCs based on Windows operating systems from Microsoft but have been gaining market share.

Analysts believe the popularity of Apple's trendy iPod MP3 players and iPhones revived the company's cachet and attracted buyers to its computers.

A "refreshed" line of Macintosh laptop or notebook computers is likely to feature technical upgrades made possible by powerful NVidia or Intel processors that serve as computer engines.

Not everyone is convinced Apple is ready to begin battling on price in a fat but heavily competitive segment of the laptop market.

"There is a possibility they might go there, but in general they have consistently played at the very high end of the market," said Gartner analyst Van Baker.

"While I would love to see Apple compete in the 799-999 dollar price range, based on past history I am skeptical they are going to do that."

Baker says it is more likely Apple is giving its MacBook Pro line of laptops a thinner, more industrial design that proved successful with its MacBook Air model.

Apple is expected to be shifting from plastic laptop casings to more stylish and eco-friendly aluminum.

At least one Internet website known for keeping tabs on Apple says the firm might surprise the world with a television customized to link to the Internet and download digital movies from iTunes online shop.

An Apple TV set-top box for routing movies or high-definition television shows or movies from home computers to televisions has been a slow seller.

"Apple has had this all-in-one idea for a while," said analyst Enderle. "Apple TV built into a television could be interesting. I think it is at least possible."

While discussing earnings with investors earlier this year, Apple executives tempered profit expectations by saying it is investing in new designs but didn't give specifics.

Gut 'tasting' could beat poisons

2008-10-12T11:45:00.002+06:00

The human intestine detects potential poisons passing into it - and may take action to reduce the harm they cause.

US researchers have found a link between receptors in the gut which detect bitter foods and higher levels of a digestion-slowing hormone.

The same hormone also reduces appetite - perhaps to stop us eating any more.

The scientists, writing in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, say it means that sweeter-tasting medicines could be more effective.

Humans, and other animals, have evolved to dislike bitter tastes, probably because many natural plant poisons carry these flavours.

The researchers from the University of California at Irvine, led by Dr Timothy Osborne, are suggesting that when we do manage to eat something bitter, another defence mechanism may kick in.

It has been established for some time that the same taste receptors which are found on the tongue, and help us differentiate between sweet and bitter flavours, are found in the gut.

While the tongue-based receptors send a message to the brain, those in the gut are thought to trigger other chemical signals involved in digestion, although these have yet to be fully understood.

The US team found that when the bitter taste receptors in the gut are activated, this leads to the production of a hormone called cholecystokinin.

This is already known to not only slow up "motility", the rate at which food passes through the digestive system from the stomach, but also suppress appetite.

Slow the flow

The researchers believe that keeping potentially poisonous food in the stomach for longer might mean a bigger chance it would be expelled before its ingredients are absorbed.

Additionally, suppressing appetite might mean that less of the poison is eaten.

They are now eyeing the practical uses of their findings - and suggest that some medication might be absorbed more quickly if it was not so bitter tasting.

Professor Soraya Shirazi-Beechey, from the University of Liverpool, led research which proved that the action of "sweet" taste receptors in the gut could actually alter the way that glucose was absorbed into the body.

She said it was "quite reasonable" that bitter receptors might also have an effect on digestion.

"The whole scientific area of 'nutrient sensing' is really getting quite big. This is the first time that the link between bitter taste receptors and this hormone has been made."

Sea levels could rise one metre by 2100: German institute

2008-10-11T11:33:00.001+06:00

Sea levels could rise one metre (3.3 feet) by 2100, a leading German research institute said Thursday, much more than even the most pessimistic projection by the UN climate panel.

"We should prepare for a rise of sea levels of one metre this century," said Joachim Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), which advises the German government on environmental policy.

The rates that glaciers in the Himalayas and the Greenland ice-sheet have doubled or even tripled in recent years, due partly to the increased greenhouse gas emissions by Chinese power stations, Schellnhuber said.

In February 2007, in the first volume of a landmark report, the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted the oceans would rise by between 18 and 59 centimetres (seven and 23 inches) by 2100.

Repossession 'is mental threat'

2008-10-11T11:32:00.001+06:00

The fallout from the economic downturn could be a significant threat to mental health, according to a survey.

House repossession was rated as the event most likely to cause mental health problems, ahead of redundancy, or finding out about infertility.

Charity Rethink called for action to prevent a "mental health disaster".

The survey was published as a UN report showed England spends more of its health budget on mental health care than any other European country.

Rethink's director of public affairs Paul Corry said: "I wouldn't be surprised if we see a rise in the number of people going to their doctor because of mental health problems in the coming months.

"Even for people lucky enough to hang on to their home, the stress and worry of arrears building up can be enough to harm your mental health - this survey shows it worries millions of us."

He said that people who already had mental health problems were likely to be treated less well by their lenders, and did not have a "safety net" to protect them.

He said: "There's an urgent need to do something to prevent a mental health disaster."

Another mental health charity agrees with that assessment - Mind, which is launching its own £16m initiative to link exercise to better mental health, and to reduce stigma, released its own report earlier this year warning about the dangers of debt.

High ranking

The survey of 2,000 people was released to mark World Mental Health day.

The World Health Organisation report contained a far cheerier message about the services in place to tackle the UK's mental health problems.

It compared spending on mental health in European countries, and found England and Wales spent 13.8% of its health budget on mental health - the highest level in Europe.

Scotland spent 9.8%, according to the report, and in the UK as a whole, the numbers of psychiatrists per 100,000 people was found to be above the European average.

More detained

Health Secretary Alan Johnson said he was "delighted" by the report, citing a huge rise in investment as the reason for the UK's present position, and said that the focus was now on community-based teams to treat patients.

"The pernicious concept of the asylum is over, but our commitment to improving services further is undiminished," he said.

However, a report in this week British Medical Journal suggested that, over the past 10 years, the use of inpatient mental hospitals has increased, rather than lessened.

Dr Patrick Keown, a Newcastle-based psychiatrist, calculated that the number of patients "sectioned" under the Mental Health Act increased by a fifth between 1996 and 2006.

At the same time, the number of psychiatric beds in England fell.

A spokesman for the charity Sane said: "Improvements in community care are supposed to reduce the need for compulsory admission when someone reaches crisis point - yet precisely the opposite appears to have happened.

"We urgently need to find out why this is the case."

'Spam attack' halts Virgin e-mail

2008-10-11T11:30:00.001+06:00

Tens of thousands of Virgin customers have spent four days cut off from, or with little access to, their e-mail accounts after a suspected spam attack.

The problem affected a company which processes messages delivered through the Virgin.net platform.

All legitimate e-mails were held back when the "large" attack began on Tuesday evening so the spam could be removed, a Virgin Media spokesman said.

E-mails were gradually being delivered now the fault was cleared, he added.

He said these messages should now have been available but access via webmail may have been taking longer to restore.

'Nothing lost'

About 200,000 people use the Virgin.net service but well under half of these were affected by the problem, the company stated.

Error messages were displayed when they tried to log on. Virgin Media stressed that no e-mails had been lost.

"Since late Tuesday evening, some customers on our Virgin Media DSL service may have been unable to access e-mail or webmail," the spokesman said.

"This was due to a suspected spam attack suffered by our e-mail supplier which also affected a number of other ISPs. No customers on our cable service were affected.

"All customers are able to access e-mail again now, though due to a large queue of undelivered e-mail messages, there may be a short delay before some e-mails reach customers' accounts."

Hackers using fake YouTube pages to attack computers

2008-10-11T11:27:00.001+06:00

Computer security specialists warn that hackers are using fake YouTube pages to trick people into opening their machines to diabolical software.

A deceptive YouTube attack evolving as it spreads on the Internet is part of a growing trend of hackers to prowl popular online social networking communities in which people trustingly share web links and mini-programs.

"We are seeing tools like this not just for YouTube, but for MySpace, Facebook, America Online instant messaging ...," Trend Micro software threat research manager Jamz Yaneza told AFP on Thursday.

"All the various social networking sites have been hit with some page or another."

Hackers using the YouTube attack send people links to what are said to be must-see snippets at the Google-owned video-sharing website.

The links, instead, connect to convincingly realistic replicas of YouTube pages and tell people that a software update is needed to view a requested video.

Agreeing to the update lets the hacker install malicious software that could log keystrokes, steal data, or even take over people's computers, according to David Perry of Trend Micro.

Victims are not likely to catch onto the invasion since the hackers' software is able to stealthily link to the real YouTube website and play a promised video.

"This works as your typical drive-by download," Yaneza said of hackers planting malicious software in machines while rerouting online traffic.

"Essentially this can be used as a tool to serve up everything -- botnets, key loggers. Visually, you can't differentiate this from your regular YouTube page, it is done so well."

While some computer users might be able to spy something unusual about the online address, or "URL," of a bogus page, the safest thing to do is not trust links and instead go directly to YouTube for recommended videos.

"The reason they are using YouTube now is that during the elections we are looking at YouTube a lot," Perry said of hackers. "It is using social networking software in an anti-social way -- anti-social networking."

Hackers at a recent gathering of software savants in Las Vegas told AFP that social networks are prime places to take advantage of people's trust.

While people may be wary of links or programs emailed to them by strangers, they eagerly open such offerings from "friends" in social networking communities.

Online evil doers can easily create false social networking profiles and even impersonate people who may be well known or respected. The imposter can then build a network of trusting contacts in online communities.

Estimates are that as much as 40 percent of social networking profiles are fakes, according to figures cited by Cloudmark Inc., a company specializing in protecting Internet messaging systems from spam and hackers.

A poll conducted in the United States in June for Cloudmark concluded that 83 percent of the people using social networking accounts received unwanted "friend" invitations or messages steering them to dubious websites.

"Friends" are granted access to pictures, message boards, contact lists and other personal data stored in social networking profiles.

"Unfortunately, the very qualities that make social networks successful -- the wide variety of communication channels, the openness of the networks and the size of the audience -- are also powerful lures for spammers and hackers," Cloudmark says.

Be wary of taking strangers in as friends at social networking websites and only install trusted applications when customizing profile pages with mini-programs, sometimes called "widgets," according to Cloudmark.

Security specialists say to also limit the amount of personal information revealed to the Internet through profile pages.

"Understanding the risks and knowing how to protect yourself is critical to avoiding scams and other threats" said Cloudmark chief technical officer Jaime de Guerre.

"As spammers, hackers and other online criminals broaden their scope to social networks (people) must be especially vigilant and employ safe practices while engaging in online communities."

Blackberry releases touch-screen phone

2008-10-09T12:02:00.003+06:00

Research in Motion Ltd (RIM), maker of the Blackberry, released its first mobile phone with a touch-screen on Wednesday, its answer to the popular Apple iPhone.

The smartphone, the Blackberry Storm, will be available later this year through Verizon Wireless in the United States and Vodafone in Europe, India, Australia and New Zealand, the Canadian company said.

The Storm resembles the iPhone but its color touch-screen differs in that it is "clickable" -- the screen depresses slightly when touched like a typewriter key.

RIM president Mike Lazaridis described the touch-screen as a "truly tactile touch interface" which "solves the longstanding problem associated with typing on traditional touch-screens."

Users navigate on the touch-screen by using their finger like a cursor, scrolling, highlighting, panning and zooming and clicking on selections.

Other features of the Storm include wireless email through high-speed 3G mobile broadband networks, an HTML Web browser which allows audio and video streaming and SMS, MMS and IM messaging.

It also features a media player, a 3.2-megapixel camera, a video camera and Global Positioning System (GPS) capability along with Blackberry Maps.

RIM did not provide a price for the phone or a release date except to say it would be available by the Christmas holiday season.

The Storm is seen by industry analysts as Blackberry's response to the iPhone and an attempt to increase its popularity beyond that of businessmen addicted to its email capabilities.

The release of the Storm also comes some two weeks after Internet giant Google entered the mobile phone market with a smartphone developed with T-Mobile, the T-Mobile G1, which runs on Google open-source software.

Firefox users gain location tool

2008-10-09T12:00:00.001+06:00

Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox browser, has released technology that helps websites detect the physical location of computers.

The system will allow users, for instance, to find local restaurants when they travel to a new town.

The Geode project is an experimental add-on ahead of a full blown launch of geolocation technology in version 3.1 of Firefox.

Users will have control over how much location information they give.

It uses technology from a firm called Skyhook which works out a computer's location from nearby wireless networks.

Its so-called Loki system can determine location within seconds with an accuracy of about 10 to 20 metres.

Local news

Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering believes Geode will have a range of applications going beyond looking up restaurants.

"People have got to eat but there is a lot more to it than that," he said.

"We see location as adding an extra layer to help get people the information they need," he said.

Specific local news and website authentication that only allows people to log in from certain locations are other possible uses of the technology.

Farther out, Mr Shaver envisages location becoming "ambient", with people able to look up what others have done at particular places.

Geode is strictly controlled by the user. When a website requests a location, a notification bar lets users decide whether to give their exact whereabouts, the neighbourhood or city they are in or nothing at all.

Firefox is keen to stay ahead of privacy concerns and plans ultimately to also allow users to select what service providers and geolocation methods they want.

Loki is one of many such geographically specific applications and sites that aim to make information more "contextualised" and based on increasingly mobile web users.

Among those trialling Geode is the social network Pownce, which has added a location element to its service which makes it easier to send files and messages to friends.

Irksome?

Yahoo's Fire Eagle, which aims to be the broker for a number of location-aware applications, will also use it.

Mr Shaver acknowledges that, while content providers have long seen geolocation as an important tool, the views of users are yet to be tested.

"That's one of the reasons why we want people to try out Geode. We want people to tell us about their experiences and we realise it could become irksome, for example if every website is asking you whether you want to reveal your location," he said.

'Vaccinate now' to beat bird flu

2008-10-09T11:57:00.001+06:00

A vaccine available right now could help save lives in a future bird flu pandemic, UK scientists claim.

A jab against one strain of avian flu, given years earlier, may "prime" the immune system to fight a wide range of bird flu strains.

When the pandemic arrives, "pre-vaccinated" people could then be given a booster shot, and be protected far quicker, said researchers.

The research was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The speed that pandemic flu - labelled the "gravest threat" to the UK by a recent government document - could sweep the world, is one of the great challenges facing scientists and governments.

Some suggestions say it might only be a matter of weeks before an emerging virus reached the UK.

By the time a vaccine exactly matching the pandemic strain is developed and administered, it may already have claimed many thousands of lives.

Unlike seasonal flu, to which most of us have been exposed at some point, most humans will have far less immunity to pandemic flu, and this means that multiple vaccinations over a period of at least a month will be needed, in addition to a delay of weeks while antibodies tailored to fight the strain are built up.

The Leicester researchers say that their solution could mean that a single vaccination of the pandemic strain vaccine would be needed, and it could be effective within a week.

The research centred on people given a vaccine against the H5N3 strain of bird flu between 1999 and 2001.

The vaccine contained another ingredient called MF59 designed to boost its effectiveness.

Years later, they were vaccinated against the H5N1 strain of avian flu, and their immune system response compared against a group of people who had not received the earlier vaccination.

After just seven days, 80% of the "primed" group had signs that their body was protected against H5N1, compared with 20% of the "unprimed" group.

The earlier vaccine had not only offered protection against that strain, but laid the foundations for protection against other avian flu strains, said the researchers.

No time to lose

Dr Iain Stephenson, one of them, said: "If a bird flu pandemic erupted tomorrow it isn't clear we would have six weeks to vaccinate people before it arrived in this country, even if the vaccine was stockpiled.

"We have been able to prove in this study that you can vaccinate people six, seven, or eight years ago and still get a very rapid response with a booster shot within a week."

Dr John Wood, from the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, a government funded body which helps in the production and testing of vaccines for emerging flu strains, backed the study.

"The fact that they seem to have this protection after eight years is really interesting," he said.

"If governments are thinking about stockpiling vaccine, you could actually be stockpiling it in people's arms."

He said that while there was no certainty that any flu pandemic would be based on avian flu, the Leicester research should be followed up, with the possibility that people might eventually be primed against a "cocktail" of different flu types.

Circumcision HIV impact doubted

2008-10-08T11:49:00.001+06:00

There is no hard evidence that circumcision protects gay men from HIV, research shows.

African trials have shown circumcision cuts the likelihood of male to female HIV transmission by up to 60%.

But a US analysis of data on 53,567 men who have sex with other men found HIV rates were not significantly lower among those who were circumcised.

The Journal of the American Medical Association study stressed more work was needed to draw firm conclusions.

The US team, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta examined data on 53,567 men who have sex with men, of which 52% were circumcised.

HIV levels among those who were circumcised were lower - but not significantly so.

However, there was evidence that circumcision may have had a protective effect in studies carried out before the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) in 1996.

The researchers said one possible explanation was that the advent of these more effective HIV drugs had encouraged higher levels of risk taking sexual behaviour, wiping out any marginal protective effect from circumcision.

Alternatively, the drugs may have helped lower the risk of transmission to the point where circumcision had no further benefit.

A third possibility is that there may have been a smaller proportion of men in the pre-HAART trials who primarily engaged in receptive anal sex, which carries the greatest risk for HIV infection among gay men.

Prevention

Michael Carter, of the HIV information service NAM, said: "It's my sense that there has been a tempering of the excitement about circumcision, and researchers are now favouring a 'combination prevention' approach.

"Circumcision may have a place in this in some settings, but so too do good sexual health, consistent condom use, and there's real excitement and debate about the role of HIV treatment in prevention."

Will Nutland, of the HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust, said: "This research adds weight to the evidence that circumcision isn't an effective method of HIV prevention for men who have sex with men.

"The majority of HIV infections in men who have sex with men are as a result of receptive anal intercourse and circumcision would make no difference in these cases.

"Rather than encouraging gay men to be circumcised, investment in prevention in the UK should focus on targeted education programmes, condom provision and easy access to testing."

DVD copying software gets pulled

2008-10-08T11:46:00.001+06:00

Software which claimed to be a legal way of copying DVDs has been withdrawn following legal action.

RealNetworks - the firm behind the software - has responded to restraining order issued by a US court stopped selling the RealDVD software.

Six major movie studios jointly sued the company on 30 September - the day the software was launched.

San Francisco District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel is due to review the case on 7 October.

Common ground

RealDVD is touted by RealNetworks as a legal way to turn a PC into a media server.

"It makes it easy to pause a programme and resume right where you left off, makes it easy to find the movie you want and no more lost or scratched discs," said Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks, on his firm's blog.

Mr Glaser claims that a second layer of encryption is built into the software but the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) said RealDVD circumvents its rules about copying.

The RealDVD site was taken down on 3 October but a defiant message posted to it read: "Rest assured, we will continue to work diligently to provide you with software that allows you to make a legal copy of your DVDs for your own use."

Mr Glaser expressed disappointment at the turn of events.

"As a company with a nearly 15 year track record of innovation that's both great for consumers and fully respectful of intellectual property, we're disappointed that the movie studios thought they had to file lawsuits," he wrote in his blog.

"We began active discussions with the studios even before we announced RealDVD and up until last night were optimistic that we could find common ground with them without having to resort to the legal system," he added.

The studios suing the firm are Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Disney and Warner Bros.

The MPAA is currently prohibited from commenting on the case.

RealNetworks is no stranger to controversy. In 2004 Apple accused it of "hacker tactics" when it claimed to have found a way for non-Apple endorsed music tracks to be played on an iPod.