John Seigenthaler, former administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, has a bone to pick with Wikipedia.

In an op-ed in USAToday Seigenthaler takes the community-authored encyclopedia to task for running a biography of him that falsely accused him of being a suspect in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.
The charges remained up on the site for months before Seigenthaler got them removed. The claims were posted anonymously on the encyclopedia, and while he was able to trace the author's IP address to a customer of BellSouth Internet, the company said it would not disclose the name without a subpoena, Seigenthaler wrote.
"And so we live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research--but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects," he wrote in the essay. "Congress has enabled them and protects them."

Wikipedia slander?

The wheels have been set in motion for the first rewriting of the GNU General Public License (GPL) in more than 15 years, with the release of a document specifying the process and guidelines of the historic revision.
The most important licence for free and open source software, the GPL underpins nearly three quarters of free software programs.
The first draft up for discussion will be presented at the International Public Conference for GPL v3 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on 16 and 17 January 2006. This will be followed by a period of response and redrafting from the community to create a second draft in the summer and a final draft in the autumn. The finished GPL v3 is scheduled to appear in the spring of 2007.

Wheels in motion for GNU General Public License v3...

Laser light has been used to remotely control gene therapy in rats. This mechanism will help make gene therapy more effective by allowing the precise time and location at which new genes are activated to be controlled, meaning specific tissues can be targeted while healthy tissues are left alone.
Lasers have been used in the past to perforate cells for gene therapy in cultured cells. But the new research – activating marker genes in the eyes of rats – is more sophisticated and the first time lasers have been used for gene therapy in live animals.
Kazunori Kataoka, at the University of Tokyo, Japan, and colleagues developed a photosensitive molecular complex that could be activated in rats’ eyes by irradiating them with visible light from a low power laser.
The synthetic complex is designed to deliver foreign DNA by carrying

Laser activates gene therapy in rats’ eyes

Hwang Woo-Suk, South Korea’s cloning pioneer, has resigned from his official posts, taking responsibility for ethical violations by his team during landmark research to grow human embryonic stem cells from a cloned embryo.
Hwang said on Thursday that junior researchers in his team had donated their own eggs without his permission. The donation of eggs carries a small risk and ethical rules forbid junior members of teams doing so, to avoid the possibility of coercion. Hwang also said that other women were paid for eggs used in his breakthrough project, also without his knowledge.
He admitted that he had lied when ethical questions began to surface in 2004 about the origin of the supply of human eggs available to his researchers

Cloning pioneer admits ethical violations and quits....

A computer disc about the size of a DVD that can hold 60 times more data is set to go on sale in 2006. The disc stores information through the interference of light – a technique known as holographic memory.
The discs, developed by InPhase Technologies, based in Colorado, US, hold 300 gigabytes of data and can be used to read and write data 10 times faster than a normal DVD. The company, along with Japanese partner Hitachi Maxell announced earlier in November that they would start selling the discs and compatible drives from the end of 2006.

Holographic-memory discs may put DVDs to shame...

A dense bed of light-sensitive bacteria has been developed as a unique kind of photographic film. Although it takes 4 hours to take a picture and only works in red light, it also delivers extremely high resolution.
The “living camera” uses light to switch on genes in a genetically modified bacterium that then cause an image-recording chemical to darken. The bacteria are tiny, allowing the sensor to deliver a resolution of 100 megapixels per square inch.

Living camera uses bacteria to capture image

A 122-year-old dairy equipment company has used embedded Linux in a robotic cow-milking system (the system is robotic, not the cows). The Voluntary Milking System (VMS) allows cows to decide when to be milked, and gives dairy farmers a more independent lifestyle, free from regular milkings, the company says.

Device Profile: DeLaval Voluntary Milking System

NEWSPAPERS editors were threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act last night if they published details of a conversation between Tony Blair and George Bush in which the President is alleged to have suggested bombing al-Jazeera, the Arab news network. Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, informed newspapers editors including that of The Times that “publication of a document that has been unlawfully disclosed by a Crown servant could be in breach of Section 5 of the Official Secrets Act.”

The Blair Government has obtained court injunctions against newspapers before but it has never prosecuted editors for publishing the contents of leaked documents.
Under a front-page headline “Bush plot to bomb his ally” in the Daily Mirror yesterday, a secret minute of the conversation in April 2004 records the President allegedly suggesting that he would like to bomb the channel’s studios in Doha, capital of Qatar. Richard Wallace, the Editor of the Daily Mirror, said last night: “We made No 10 fully aware of the intention to publish and were given ‘no comment’ officially or unofficially. Suddenly 24 hours later we are threatened under Section 5.”

Editors are threatened over TV station bombing claim...

For the third time in recent months, a federal judge has balked at allowing government investigators to track a citizen via cell phone in real time without agents showing probable cause.
Andrew J. Peck, a magistrate judge with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, asked the Justice Department to clarify its arguments after learning that a Long Island magistrate judge initially denied a similar request in August.

Judges Reject Cell-Phone Tracking

If recent research at Vanderbilt University bears fruit, we might not need light bulbs anymore.
Vanderbilt chemists have discovered a way to create white light with extremely tiny crystals. They say those "nanocrystals" could be used with light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, the devices often used to illuminate your alarm clock's digital display, your cell phone or your car's brake lights with what's known as solid-state lighting.

Vanderbilt discovery could spark a revolution in lighting...