A hacked page on PBS’s site announces the perpetrators.

What’s the News: On Sunday night, PBS found itself the victim of a cyber attack by the group LulzSec, which hacked PBS’s site in retaliation for a Frontline episode about WikiLeaks whose tone they found unfavorable. The first evidence? A post on the NewsHour blog alleging that rapper Tupac Shakur, who died in 1996, was still alive and well in New Zealand. PBS responded quickly, but as late as Monday night at about 5:50 pm, according to Boing Boing, LulzSec still had access to the site. Their motivation, the group says in an interview with Forbes, is a mixture of “lulz and justice.”

(more…)

What’s the News: Your phone can now be a credit card, thanks to Google Wallet, announced yesterday with great fanfare. With this system, when you swipe your phone over a sensor, a near-field communication (NFC) chip gives the merchant your credit card information. You punch in your PIN, and: cha-ching.

Google has partnered with 20,000 companies who will take payments this way, including Macy’s, American Eagle, and Subway.

(more…)

Since before the Great Pyramid of Giza was enumerated as a wonder of the world two millennia ago, people have pored over the mysteries of these vast tombs. Now, modern technology is helping researchers glean new insight into the pyramids, revealing them from far above and exploring them from deep within.

Satellite images have revealed 17 “lost” pyramids and thousands of ancient tombs and settlements in Egypt, according to a BBC News report. Using a new imaging technique, researchers could pick out the outlines of ancient buildings buried under the surface.

(more…)

What’s the News: Metamaterials could improve wireless power transfer, letting us one day charge our devices without the hassle of cords and wires, says a study published last week in Physical Review B. While wireless power transfer already works to for tiny amounts of energy, metamaterials could theoretically be used to safely and efficiently boost the technique to handle more power, such as microwaves and lasers.

(more…)

The spam ecosystem.

What’s the News: Every day spammers are thinking up new ways to offer you “vIaGrA,” whether you have any interest or not, and spam filters have a tough time keeping up. Researchers studying what they call the “spam ecosystem” have outlined the processes and services spammers use in committing their nefarious deeds—going as far as to actually buy stuff in order to identify what banks they use—in hopes of finding new bottlenecks where regulators can disrupt spammers’ business model. Their findings? Hit ‘em where it hurts: their bank accounts.

(more…)

What’s the News: Smart clothes might soon be coming into bed with you. A company is developing shirts endowed with a chip that senses the changes in breathing that accompany shifts in sleep phase, to help people track how variables like exercise, coffee intake, and stress affect their sleep.

(more…)

What’s the News: Google’s self-driving cars have been generating buzz lately, with the news that the company has been lobbying Nevada to allow the autonomous vehicles to be operated on public roads. But it remains to be seen whether hordes of self-driving cars really going to work in the real world.

(more…)

What’s the News: Virgin Galactic’s plans for taking tourists into space have inched closer to fulfillment: earlier this month, the company’s SpaceShipTwo successfully demonstrated the technique, called “feathering,” that will allow the ship to reenter Earth’s atmosphere. In this video, you can watch the ship, designed to behave like a badminton shuttlecock, tip and roll as the pilot flips the craft’s tail to a 65 degree angle, which will brake SpaceShipTwo while it’s still high in the atmosphere. This means the ship will descend slowly enough to keep from igniting as it reenters.

(more…)

What’s the News: Tiny turbines that fit inside human arteries could produce enough energy to power pacemakers and other implantable devices, according to preliminary tests by Swiss researchers presented at a conference earlier this month. The turbine would essentially serve as a tiny generator, gathering power from blood rushing by after it’s been pumped by the heart. This power source could be a boon for medical devices that currently require batteries or cables for power. Unfortunately, the turbulence these turbines create would likely cause blood clots, which could lead to heart attack or stroke—an extremely dangerous side effect that makes having to replace a battery not seem so bad.

(more…)

What’s the News: A new type of ear bud hacks the ear’s reflexes, reducing its natural damping so you don’t have turn the volume up so high to get your jam on. It also cuts down on all that unsightly “leathering” on your eardrum…

(more…)

Not so helpful after all.

What’s the News: City lights are more than a pretty sight from the air—they’re also a good way to tell how a country’s economy is doing, some economists say. Over the past decade, deducing a country’s gross domestic product from how much it glows in nighttime satellite images, a factor called luminosity, has become quite the econ fad. But as clever as it sounds, luminosity isn’t as helpful as you’d think, a new study says. Only in countries that are such a disaster that gathering reliable statistics is impossible is the glow a better approximation of GDP than you’d get with traditional measures.

(more…)

With VizWiz, the blind can take a picture, ask a question, and get an answer back from a real person in seconds.

What’s the News: With the web as their eyes, the blind will able to read menus, identify canned foods, and tell whether that park has any free benches without having to walk over. That’s the vision of a team of computer scientists behind an iPhone app called VizWiz, which lets people take a photo of whatever’s perplexing them, record a question like “What denomination is this bill?” and send it off to real people online who’ll respond in a matter of seconds with “That’s a 20.”

(more…)

What’s the News: The next generation of bomb detectors may come from an unusual source: bee venom, the stuff that hurts like all get-out when you get stung. A team of researchers at MIT have used fluorescent carbon nanotubes and venom proteins called bombolitins that bind to single molecules of explosives like TNT to create an exquisitely sensitive detector.

(more…)

What’s the News: The helicopter that crashed during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound earlier this week was a stealth design that the US government had kept secret, according to aviation experts. The military is still keeping mum and the SEALs—keeping with protocol—burned the aircraft after it went down. But information gleaned from photos of the surviving tailboom (the part that holds the rear rotor) and clues from other stealth aircraft suggest the helicopter was an H-60 Blackhawk, heavily modified to escape radar detection and fly more quietly—explaining why Pakistani air forces didn’t detect the helicopters.

(more…)

What’s the News: Researchers have simulated the symptoms of schizophrenia using a language-learning computer program, in a recent study published in Biological Psychiatry. The computer started showing schizophrenia-like symptoms when it was set to learn too much and forget too little. This study lends support to the hyperlearning hypothesis, that the brains of people with schizophrenia have trouble forgetting or filtering out irrelevant information.

(more…)