- Scientists restore brain function with synthetic cerebullum
Slashdot linked to this fascinating New Scientist article that reminds me very strongly of the memory implant story for a little while ago. There is good reason as the similarities are substantial in how they went about their experiments and the proof their prosthetic worked. The difference is where this work stands out, that past work on devices interfaced to the brain have worked largely in one direction, sending signals into the brain. This research demonstrates success in dispatching signals back out and having the rest of the body behave appropriately. - Implications of Amazon’s cloud powered browser
Zonker at ReadWriteWeb has a nice bit of technical and policy analysis of Silk, a component of Amazon’s series of newly announced Kindle devices. The idea of assembling pages on a server isn’t new, Opera’s mobile edition did something very similar for much the same reason. I am concerned at the emphasis on EC2 and AWS, that the crossing of spheres of influence between consumer devices and platform as a service may have undesirable ramifications down the road. The privacy and security concerns really are just the tip of the potential iceberg. - Sesame Street introduces STEM focused material in its new season
Meredith Woerner at io9 was just one of a few people to pick up this story, a response to the increasingly common concerns about the STEM education in this country, STEM standing for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. From the description, this could bring a fun Mythbuster-esque element to the venerable TV show and the producers and creators deserve a lot of credit for evolving the show to stay relevant. All the same it bothers me on some level that it has come to this, that muppets need to pick up the slack in this area of education. - A positive retrospective on LibreOffice’s first year since forking from OOo, Ars Technica
- Secret memo reveals which telecoms store your data the longest, Ars Technica
- Firefox 7 released including first results of efforts to shrink memory usage, Webmonkey at Wired
- Researchers demonstrate new ‘FeTRAM’ memory, Purdue via Slashdot
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