A new brain implant tested on rats restored lost memories at the flick of a switch, heralding a possible treatment method for patients with Alzheimer’s disease, stroke or amnesia. Such a “neural prosthesis” could someday be used to facilitate the memory-forming process and help patients remember.

The device can mimic the brain’s own neural signals, thereby serving as a surrogate for a piece of the brain associated with forming memories. If there is sufficient neural activity to trace, the device can restore memories after they have been lost. If it’s used with a normal, functioning hippocampus, the device can even enhance memory.

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With an Artificial Memory Chip, Rats Can Remember and Forget At the Touch of a Button | Popular Science

By JIMMY CARTER
Published: June 16, 2011

Call Off the Global Drug War - NYTimes.com

Want to know what it will look like when the Mars rover Curiosity blasts off from Earth later this year, then lands on Mars in 2012?

Amazing video shows new Mars rover Curiosity leaving Earth and landing on Mars

This week, Boing Boing was invited to visit NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the first and only opportunity for media to enter the Pasadena, CA clean room where NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, and other components of the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft have been built for launch in late 2011 from Florida.

NASA Mars Science Laboratory + Curiosity Rover: first look (photo gallery) - Boing Boing

The Castillo de San Marcos site is the oldest masonry fort in the United States. It is located in the city of St. Augustine, Florida. Construction was begun in 1672 by the Spanish when Florida was a Spanish territory.

This is the closest thing to a medieval castle that I've seen in North America. Its a really beautiful building.

The American narrative centers around Boston with its religious pilgrims and revolutionaries, but there is certainly something alluring about the south of the 1600s, with its walled cities, forts, artillery, sailing ships, pirates, sand, sun, and palm trees.

Castillo de San Marcos - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Landau describes what makes communications security hard, warrantless wiretapping and the role of electronic surveillance in the war on terror, the economic threats posed by electronic spying, and the risks created by embedding wiretapping into communications networks. How can we get communications security right? Landau offers a set of principles to govern wiretap policy that will allow us to protect our national security as well as our freedom.

This book references my research on lawful intercept.

Surveillance or Security? - The MIT Press

Dagmar wrote:
If Google has to have government snoops up in their business for two years over some packets that were the equivalent of wifi confetti.

The "outrage" over the wifi collection is as phoney as "net neutrality." Its a non-issue. Google knows its a non-issue. The politicians know its a non-issue. And beating that dead horse over and over again makes everybody happy, because it looks like they are "doing something" about privacy, they'll all say with a straight face that they are "doing something" about privacy, and a lot of them even believe it.

Actual privacy advocates end up burning time on this stuff. Sitting in hearings and writing pages and pages of testimony so they don't have time left over to write papers on something that actually matters. Its a diversion, and it works. And you can't say they aren't doing something about privacy. They sure are. They've done tons of work on it. They're as busy as a pack of pissed off fire ants.

But real privacy regulation that actually matters? Ain't gunna happen. Not in this country. Privacy is bad for business and bad for law enforcement and nobody else cares 'cept a bunch of wako liberal activists who are exactly the sort of idiots who fall for this kind of wifi confetti bullshit.

RE: Facebook strips more of your privacy away, by default

VSC told the students nothing... In the Fall of last year there were rumors that VSC was open to selling the 60-year-old 91.1 WRVU. There was no more news until Monday June 6th. The call sign change to WFCL popped up unexpectedly Monday morning in the FCC database. The DJs on air used the wrong station ID for most of the day because they were not informed.

Then Tuesday afternoon the DJ on air was told that there was "urgent equipment maintenance" and hurried out the door... which they then locked behind him.

You can listen to the last moments of WRVU at this link.

There is more detail along with news media links here. Its a fucking disgrace. Its transparently obvious that a bunch of people who don't like college radio saw an opportunity here to kill this station and pocket 3 million dollars in the process which they get to spend on their own projects. It a win, win for them and a travesty for music city.

Its hard for me to really express how disappointed and angry this makes me. This whole deal has been shady, from the fact that WRVU has no representation in the governing body of Vanderbilt Student Communications, to the pre-emptive registration of potential protest domain names by Vanderbilt Student Communications prior to the original announcement back in September, to the fact that the final pulling of the plug was not communicated to the public and was done during the summer when the students are away and cannot comment. Why Vandy tolerates such obvious underhandedness from its student communications leadership is beyond me.

Oh wait, its the money.

What a damn shame.

WRVU Is Dead

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YouTube - 2008 Porsche 911 Carrera S PDK at Weissach

Companies that specialise in corporate relocations said they were seeing double-digit increases in their businesses compared with the same period a year ago.

Migration plummeted during the recession and is at its lowest level since the second world war, according to the US Census Bureau.

More companies are pre-screening to weed out candidates who are locked into real estate.

InfoViewer: US job relocation activity picks up sharply