Tech & Science

Exiled Russian businessman and President Putin's critic Boris Berezovsky dismissed the latest accusations by Moscow in the Litvinenko poisoning case as moving beyond absurd into the realm of science fiction. Mr. Berezovsky was reacting to the Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office announcement on Wednesday that it suspected Israel-based former Russian oil billionaire Leonid Nevzlin might be involved in the death of Alexander Litvinenko, who died in a London hospital on November 23 from exposure to the highly toxic radioactive substance polonium-2

On December 22, 2006 Microsoft has announced that it has extended its warranty for all Xbox 360 video game consoles to one year in the United States. While this one year warranty applies to all Xbox 360 software as well, Xbox 360 accessories will still carry their original 90 day warranty. According to a statement by Microsoft: "Customers that experience hardware issues with their Xbox 360 within one year of purchase will have their consoles repaired at no cost. Moreover, the new warranty policy is retroactive, so consumers that may have alre

Hewlett-Packard (HP), the world's largest information technology corporation, is in trouble in France due to alleged monopolist behavior. In France and abroad, the corporation commonly bundles its PCs with Microsoft's Windows operating system, without giving the consumer the choice of an alternative operating system, such as the 'free' operating system GNU/Linux. Union Fédérale des Consommateurs-Que Choisir, a French consumer group, along with two French retailers, sued HP, alleging that it was violating a French law that prohibits linking

Professor Stephen Hawking today concluded his eight-day visit to Israel and Palestine. The visit was organised by the British Embassy and the British Council. The world-famous scientist and best-selling author of A Brief History of Time embodies the UK's scientific excellence and his visit has promoted Britain as the international partner of choice in science and technology collaboration. Professor Hawking met with teenage scientists in an event organised by the British Council at the Bloomfield Museum of Science in Jerusalem on Sunday 10 Dec

__NOTOC__ On December 7, BBC News reported a story about Dr James Anderson, a teacher in the Computer Science department at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. In the report it was stated that Anderson had "solved a very important problem" that was 1200 years old, the problem of division by zero. According to the BBC, Anderson had created a new number, that he had named "nullity", that lay outside of the real number line. Anderson terms this number a "transreal number", and denotes it with the Greek letter . He had taught this

Microsoft's subscription-based MSN Explorer Internet browser left many of its users frozen out beginning on Friday of last week. Launching the application brought the user to a window stating that the software encountered a problem and had to be closed. The Internet Explorer browser software bundled with the Windows operating system remains operable, along with other non-MSN software. Subscribers to MSN are still able to retrieve e-mail by accessing their Hotmail account. Telephone support wait times to resolve the connectivity problem with t

Internet service provider (ISP) and telephone provider, Orcon Internet Limited, is going to start to provide television channels via super-fast broadband right to the customers television set. The service will be rolled out sometime next year after Telecom New Zealand has opened its lines to the competitors. The high speed internet Orcon wishes to use is called VDSL2+ which is able to go 100 megabits per second; this is an upgrade of Telecom's current technology, ADSL 2+. The new technology will be able to be installed when the government has

NASA's Cassini Spacecraft has captured images of a massive hurricane on the planet Saturn. The storm is located on Saturn's south pole. This type of event has never been observed on another planet except for Earth. "It looks like a hurricane, but it doesn't behave like a hurricane. Whatever it is, we're going to focus on the eye of this storm and find out why it's there," said Doctor Andrew Ingersoll, a member of Cassini's imaging team at the California Institute of Technology located in Pasadena. The storm is approximately 5,000 miles across

In a conscience vote last night, Wednesday, parliament decided that the alcohol purchasing for New Zealanders will not be raised to 20 but instead will stay at the current age of 18. The vote was 72-49 with the noes as the majority, a conscience vote is where the individual Member of Parliament (MP) votes instead of the party and their policies. The bill was brought before Parliament with the intent of placing the drinking age back at 20 following its lowering to 18 in 1999. It was first drafted by Matt Robson of the NZ Progressive Party, an

A new study released by Christchurch researcher from the Christchurch School of Medicine and Health Sciences, David Fergusson, shows that "substantional benefits" come from a circumcision, a baby boy having his foreskin removed. Mr Fergusson said that the rate of sexually transmitted diseases is halved due to circumcision, even after accounting for the amount of sex partners, unprotected sex and their family background. "Circumcision also reduces the risk of transmitting HIV and the incidence of urinary tract infections." The report, which wa

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced today the release of the first version of gNewSense, a new GNU/Linux distribution based on both Ubuntu and Debian. The goal of the newly created distribution is to offer an operating system which is 100% proprietary software free. Generally, GNU/Linux distributions comes with proprietary software such as kernel drivers (eg. NVIDIA and ATI card drivers), the Opera web browser or the VoIP Skype software among others. According to its developers: “From a philosophical perspective we wanted to crea

On November 13, Torontoians will be heading to the polls to vote for their ward's councillor and for mayor. Among Toronto's ridings is Etobicoke Centre (Ward 3). One candidate responded to Wikinews' requests for an interview. This ward's candidates include Doug Holyday (incumbent), Peter Kudryk, Lillian Lança, and Ross Vaughan. For more information on the election, read Toronto municipal election, 2006. Lillian Lança 53-year-old Lillian Lança is an Office Assistant, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Faculty of Arts and Science, Univer