For everything from family to computers…
It’s about time we started prosecuting these money-hungry corporations (I mean “people”, NOT!) to do better practices!
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Citigroup will pay $158 million to settle charges that its mortgage unit defrauded the Federal Housing Administration by inaccurately claiming that certain mortgages were eligible for government insurance, government officials announced Wednesday.
This little chameleon is one of four miniature lizards identified in Madagascar, adding to our growing list of amazingly teeny animals. The one on the match in this picture is a juvenile, but even the adults max out at 30 millimeters. They’re the smallest lizards in the world, and some of the smallest vertebrates found to date.
The Lilliputian lizard is near the lower limits of size in vertebrate animals. Learning about how these creatures live can put some constraints on animal morphology – if your species has eyes, a backbone and a brain, there’s likely a limit to how little you can get. A different group of field biologists just announced the world’s smallest frog, and they claim it is the smallest vertebrate in the world, knocking a tiny Indonesian fish off the pedestal of puniness.
The chameleons are related to other Madagascan lizards, but DNA analysis showed they have enough genetic differences to count as distinct species, according to the researchers who found them, led by Frank Glaw of the Zoological State Collection of Munich. The animals live in leafy undergrowth in Madagascan forests.
Tiny and camouflaged – how did they find these guys? Most of the lizards were collected at night, when they typically climb up into the underbrush to roost. The field biologists used torches and headlamps to spot the sleeping lizards, according to their paper.
The paper appears in the open-access journal PLoS One.
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
Like Jeremy Lin, Wat Misaka is an Asian-American who became an unlikely basketball star; he also played for the Knicks. But he did it in the 1940s.
from News
The Syrian government is now nearly two weeks into its bombardment of the city of Homs. The U.N. says at least 300 civilians have been killed. The offensive might have gone unreported had it not been for the activists and citizen journalists who are risking their lives to tell the stories.
from Morning Edition
Twitter, did you learn nothing from Path’s recent kerfuffle? Customers do not like it when you remotely store their personal information, especially without telling them. More »
from Gizmodo
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said today that it will not approve LightSquared’s proposal to build a national 4G-LTE network, after testing showed that the network would interfere with most existing GPS devices.
The decision came swiftly after the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) today warned the FCC that “LightSquared’s proposed mobile broadband network will impact GPS services and that there is no practical way to mitigate the potential interference at this time.” The FCC responded by indefinitely suspending LightSquared’s conditional waiver to operate the network, the Washington Post and others are reporting. The FCC will also issue a public notice on Wednesday seeking comment on the NTIA’s conclusions. The conditional waiver had been issued in January 2011.
LightSquared proposed to build an open-access, wholesale wireless broadband network integrating satellite and terrestrial technology, but government testing showed that the network would harm performance of 75 percent of GPS devices. GPS makers and the airline industry (which is building a GPS-based navigation system) were among numerous groups objecting to the plan, raising pressure on the FCC to block it. LightSquared can still fight on, but the NTIA recommendation and subsequent FCC decision dramatically reduce its chances of final success.
LightSquared controls spectrum originally intended for satellite communication, and wants approval to use it for terrestrial broadband service. The spectrum is adjacent to that used by GPS, and GPS makers complain the LightSquared signals will be so powerful they would cause widespread jamming of GPS devices. LightSquared has long insisted that the problem lies with the GPS community, which should have to redesign its receivers.
LightSquared has renewed its bitter complaints that the GPS industry has become “too big to fail” and is being protected by government even though its receivers often don’t filter frequencies properly and “listen” on adjacent spectrum, including that now held by LightSquared.
“You can get a cell phone for free with a two-year contract that is more resilient to GPS interference than what’s being installed in today’s commercial airliners,” the company said, though it pledged to keep working on a solution.
“This proceeding has revealed challenges to maximizing the opportunities of mobile broadband for our economy,” the FCC said in a statement. “In particular, it has revealed challenges to removing regulatory barriers on spectrum that restrict use of that spectrum for mobile broadband. This includes receivers that pick up signals from spectrum uses in neighboring bands. There are very substantial costs to our economy and to consumers of preventing the use of this and other spectrum for mobile broadband. Congress, the FCC, other federal agencies, and private sector stakeholders must work together in a concerted effort to reduce regulatory barriers and free up spectrum for mobile broadband. Part of this effort should address receiver performance to help ensure the most efficient use of all spectrum to drive our economy and best serve American consumers.”
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from Ars Technica
Even if it’s only for lung cancer, this is huge if proven successful!!!
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A startup says its test can distinguish between subtypes of lung cancer.
Someday soon a breath test could do more than just tell if you’ve been drinking. Metabolomx, a startup in Mountain View, California, recently completed a clinical trial that shows that its breath test can spot lung cancer with 83 percent accuracy and can also distinguish between several different types of the disease, something that usually requires a biopsy. The accuracy of the test matches what’s possible with low-dose computerized tomography imaging of the lungs.
from Tech Review