Originally published on Fri January 25, 2013 6:13 pm
The agency charged with finding French alternatives to foreign-language terms has put an end to the word "hashtag" in France.
From now on, reports Fast Company, the Générale de Terminologie et de Néologie has decided "mot-dièse" (that's MO-dee-YEZ for those of you who are not Francophiles) is the new hashtag.
Researchers at Rice University in Houston have discovered a cheap source of the wonder material graphene: baked goods. Marc Abrahams, editor and co-founder of The Annals of Improbable Research, talks about how to transform a box of Girl Scout cookies into $15 billion worth of graphene--in theory, at least.
Originally published on Fri January 25, 2013 1:00 pm
Reporting in Nature, researchers write of encoding a variety of files--jpg, mp3, txt and pdf--in strands of DNA. Lead author Nick Goldman says DNA is extraordinarily long-lasting, compared to today's hard drives and magnetic tapes. And if all the world's information were written in DNA, he says, it would fit in the back of a station wagon.
This Boeing 787 battery case was damaged in a fire in Boston earlier this month. The state-of-the-art aircraft is still grounded, as the investigation of the fire's cause continues.
Credit Mark Wilson / Getty Images
National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Deborah Hersman speaks as NTSB Aviation Safety Director John DeLisi looks on during a news briefing on the Boeing 787 investigation Thursday.
Federal safety investigators remain perplexed by what caused a battery on a Boeing 787 to burst into flames earlier this month in Boston. All of the 787s are grounded worldwide after problems with the new airliner also surfaced in Japan.
At a briefing Thursday, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board said it could be a long time before the plane dubbed the Dreamliner is cleared to fly.
Originally published on Fri January 25, 2013 11:02 am
If you thought 140 characters of text was too short, try grabbing your Twitter followers' attention with six-second videos. Six seconds.
Twitter on Thursday launched the video app Vine, which allows users to shoot brief videos and directly tweet them. The social media company acquired the video-sharing startup last fall, according to All Things D.
A wave of racist tweets prompted a Jewish student organization to file a lawsuit asking the American company Twitter to reveal the identities of users sending anti-Semitic tweets. Twitter says data on users is collected and stocked in California, where French law cannot be applied.
A French judge will decide this week if Twitter must hand over the identities of users sending anti-Semitic tweets. The case, brought against Twitter by a Jewish student organization, pits America's free speech guarantees against Europe's laws banning hate speech.
The controversy began in October, when the French Union of Jewish Students threatened to sue Twitter to get the names of people posting anti-Semitic tweets with the hashtag #unbonjuif, or "a good Jew."
Lots of companies make products that don't have much in common, but AeroVironment specializes in two products that are very different — electric vehicle chargers, which keep cars like the Nissan Leaf on the road, and military drones. The Los Angeles-area firm is a leading manufacturer of small unmanned aircraft.
Originally published on Mon January 21, 2013 5:24 pm
Laura Sydell gives a look ahead to the week in tech news. She covers the launch of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's latest website and the rollout of what Facebook is calling its "graph search."
