Mar 29 2009

iPhone Accounts For 50 Percent Of U.S. Mobile Web Traffic

Every month, AdMob releases some statistics about the mobile phone market by evaluating traffic from its mobile ad network, and in the month of February, it said one of the highlights was that smartphones continue to gain significant market share of the mobile Web traffic. It said over the past six months, the smartphone share has risen to…

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Mar 29 2009

HIV Transmission Captured On Video

Technology Review has promising news on the AIDS front: researchers have captured HIV T cell transmission on video. The upshot could be new avenues of treatment. “The resulting images and videos show that, once an infected cell adheres to a healthy cell, the HIV proteins… migrate within minutes to the contact site. At that point, large packets of virus are simultaneously released by the infected cell and internalized by the recipient cell. This efficient mode of transfer is a distinct pathway from the cell-free infection that has been the focus of most prior HIV studies, and reveals another mechanism by which the virus evades immune responses that can neutralize free virus particles within the body.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mar 29 2009

Welp, The Recession’s Real… People Downgrading to Dial-up

While it’s unlikely Americans will ditch broadband for dial-up en masse, there are likely to be some people who find the to monthly fees for DSL or cable modem broadband service to be too high, when dial-up providers such as NetZero are offering new .95 service plans.

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Mar 29 2009

Good-Bye XP. Hello Windows 7

Free support for Windows XP ends on April 14th, and the Windows 7 release candidate arrives in May, coincidence? I don’t think so.

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Mar 29 2009

Why Toddlers Don’t Do What They’re Told

Hugh Pickens writes “New cognitive research shows that 3-year-olds neither plan for the future nor live completely in the present, but instead call up the past as they need it. ‘There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things adults do, but they’re just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they are doing something completely different,’ says professor Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Munakata’s team used a computer game and a setup that measures the diameter of the pupil of the eye to determine mental effort to study the cognitive abilities of 3-and-a-half-year-olds and 8-year-olds. The research concluded that while everything you tell toddlers seems to go in one ear and out the other, the study found that toddlers listen, but then store the information for later use. ‘For example, let’s say it’s cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside,’ says doctoral student Christopher Chatham. ‘You might expect the child to plan for the future, think “OK it’s cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm.” But what we suggest is that this isn’t what goes on in a 3-year-old’s brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mar 29 2009

Graphic Artists Condemn UK Ban On Erotic Comics

mdwh2 writes “Graphic artists, publishers and MPs have condemned the UK’s Coroners and Justice Bill, which will criminalize possession of sexual depictions that appear to show someone under 18 (the age of consent is 16 in the UK), as well as adults where the ‘predominant impression conveyed’ is of someone under 18, and even if they are merely drawn as being present whilst sexual activity took place between adults. The definitions could include Lost Girls, Watchmen, and South Park. The Comic Book Alliance has launched a petition against the law.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mar 28 2009

Sync and Share Virtual Machine with DropBox and Virtualbox

How to create a Virtual machine and share it on many platforms with VirtualBox and DropBox.

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Mar 28 2009

AT&T stores now offering early upgrade pricing on iPhone 3G

In the latest move aimed at helping Apple clear inventory of iPhone 3Gs ahead of new models anticipated this spring, AT&T retail stores are now offering some customers early upgrades to the Apple handset at subsidized pricing.

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Mar 28 2009

Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries

Researchers said that the spying, which infiltrated the offices of the Dalai Lama, was controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China.

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Mar 28 2009

The Beautiful, Scary Robots of Shigeo Hirose

There are plenty of robot builders, but none bring as much elegance to engineering as Shigeo Hirose. His creatures are Star Wars, Iron Giant and Dean Kamen rolled into one cybernetic maki.

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