In a poetic turn of virology, the scientist who discovered hepatitis C in 1989 has now also discovered a vaccine that will hopefully cure the now-incurable disease. More »
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The Scientist Who Discovered Hepatitis C Says He’s Now Discovered the Vaccine [Science]
caseih writes “Damaging the embedded chip in your passport is now grounds for denying you the ability to travel in at least one airport in the U.S. Though the airport can slide the passport through the little number reader as easily as they can wave it in front of an RFID reader, they chose to deny a young child access to the flight, in essence denying the whole family. The child had accidentally sat on his passport, creasing the cover, and the passport appeared worn. The claim has been made that breaking the chip in the passport shows that you disrespect the privilege of owning a passport, and that the airport was justified in denying this child from using the passport.”
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Damaged US Passport Chip Strands Travelers
Zachory Berta says that “GJ1214b is like no planet we know of.” Like Berta, part of a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics lead by David Charbonneau, his colleagues were surprised when they discovered that this planet is made mostly of water. More »
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Astronomers Discover a Planet Made Of Water [Astronomy]
Update: We incorrectly reported that an Android version was forthcoming, we’ve edited to correct our mistake — please accept our sincere apologies.
Microsoft Office for iOS gets blurrycam treatment in weird party-room originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Microsoft Office for iOS gets blurrycam treatment in weird party-room
Microsoft is continuing its video campaign specifically targeting Google. This time, the target is Google’s continued attempts to move in on Microsoft’s productivity software. Microsoft is eager to point out Google’s set of consumer-level and constantly changing features, lack of flexibility, and privacy issues. They even made a jingle! More »
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Microsoft Smacks Down Google Apps in Attack Video [Video]
What the Atrix 4G first promised, it looks like the folks at Canonical may deliver. Think back to CES 2011, when Motorola showed us a future where our phone was the only computing device we would need — only to leave us wanting when its webtop app didn’t deliver the requisite functionality for such a future. Well, it turns out Ubuntu now runs on multi-core Android devices and your handset can grant a full desktop experience when docked with a display and a keyboard. It’s a customized version of Ubuntu that plays nice with Android, the two OS’s sharing data and services while running simultaneously. So, you can still access telephony and texts from the Ubuntu environment while enjoying all the computing capabilities it has to offer, including: Ubuntu TV, virtualization tools for running Windows applications, desktop web browsers, and Ubuntu apps built for ARM. It isn’t clear exactly what hardware you’ll need to run Ubuntu on a handset, but Canonical has said it works on multi-core devices with HDMI and USB connections. We’ll get more info next week when it’s shown off at MWC, but until then you’ll have to settle for the source below and PR after the break.
Continue reading Ubuntu’s full desktop OS coming to multi-core Android devices
Ubuntu’s full desktop OS coming to multi-core Android devices originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Ubuntu’s full desktop OS coming to multi-core Android devices
Mountain Lion, Apple’s latest version of OS X, is currently in beta. However, it is in a stable enough form that some journalists were given sneak peeks over the past few days. I’ve been working with the OS for most of the last week and weekend and, as a public service announcement, I’d like to state that while Mountain Lion is a compelling upgrade to OS X it’s not currently ready for prime time.
To be fair, the worst version of OS X I ever used was an early build of Lion. This build essentially rendered my machine useless and made me cry uncontrollably when my Time Machine backups failed. Never, as they say, again.
However, being a glutton for punishment, I gave Mountain Lion a spin.
Mountain Lion installed without a hitch on a 2010 vintage MacBook Air although it refused to install on a 2006 Mac Pro – a disappointment that still burns a little. I know this old workhorse is six years old and more than capable. I’m sure there will be a fix down the line but right now there is no way to get it to install.
The OS has “grey screened” once and my install was marred by a system failure that required, literally, about 24 hours to fix. I didn’t have to sit there the whole time to fix it, but apparently one install froze, the machine locked up, and the secondary install process required a massive download. This took most of a day and night.
The most interesting improvement is the Notifications system. Not unlike Growl, Notifications sit unobtrusively in the corner for a moment and then disappear. There is a new icon in the upper right corner, next to the search glass, that allows you to see recent notifications. Growl still works fine as do most of my apps. I only noticed that QuicKeys, a text macro app, failed for the first few hours of use and then magically started up when I reset the machine.
Messages is arguably abysmal, with two odd UIs clashing with each other wildly. When you look at messages, you mostly see the huge message window. However, there is also a smaller buddy window that is a clone of iChat yet also folks in video chat and Facetime in a melange of odd queues. I’ve also had trouble syncing my conversations across devices. I would love to be able to receive, for example, iMessages that appear on my phone on the desktop and reply from either device. As it stands, the service is focused around an iMessage email address. I’d love it to work with phone numbers as well.
Mail is improved slightly as well, with a new “star” system for important messages and a VIP system for important senders. For example, you can set Mom or the significant other to a VIP and then only receive a notification when a VIP emails. MacWorld has a wildly complete look at Mail, but there’s not much different that anyone would notice except that the new Mail does not support RSS feeds.
Twitter integration worked quite well as did page sharing in Safari.
As for behind the scenes I noticed that Mountain Lion was as stable as Lion and, barring the rare catastrophic shutdown, I’m working as quickly and as efficiently on ML as I was on Lion. I never experienced Gatekeeper’s security system during my time with the OS.
Would I recommend that non-devs upgrade right now, just to “kick the tires?” Assuming you have access to a beta – for whatever reason – I’d say no. I’ve seen a number of bloggers and other tech-types mentioning they we’re upgrading but generally it’s not worth the potential headache and the agony of waiting 24 hours to see if your MBA was totally hosed thanks to an install error was enough to make me want to revert to Lion. However, Apple sent this out as a pre-release for a reason. It works quite well and the new features are actually mostly apps rather then baked-in improvements. Don’t pull the trigger yet. It’s fun to experiment but it’s also fun to have a computer that works.
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Should You Upgrade To Mountain Lion?
This is not a surprise, but a welcome confirmation for the millions of business citizens and students of the world who have already adopted Apple’s tablet as a work tool: Microsoft Office could be coming to the iPad in the next few weeks. More »
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Office for iPad Is Reportedly Imminent (Updated) [Ipad]
This is not a surprise, but a welcome confirmation for the millions of business citizens and students of the world who have already adopted Apple’s tablet as a work tool: Microsoft Office could be coming to the iPad in the next few weeks. More »
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Office for iPad Is Reportedly Imminent [Ipad]
Version 2.0 of the BlackBerry PlayBook OS is available for owners of the tablet as of today, Research In Motion announced. The update will finally add a native e-mail application to the tablet, among other new features, ten months after the tablet’s initial release.
The BlackBerry PlayBook was derided upon its release for its lack of e-mail and calendar apps without an accompanying BlackBerry smartphone to feed it that information. The new version of the OS gives users a unified inbox that can not only handle e-mail, but also messages in Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
That social network integration extends to the Calendar and Contacts apps, which can be automatically populated with content pulled from the services above. One of the most popular apps from RIM, BlackBerry Messenger, remains absent from the company’s tablet.
The PlayBook went through rounds of price cuts and deals from retailers last fall, and received a flat price cut following the release of the Kindle Fire. The base 16GB WiFi model now retails for around $200.
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BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 brings native e-mail, calendars