700th Post!

NASA Dispels Internet Rumors About Life On Mars: Officials caution against rumors, conspiracy theories, and speculation as interest grows and the Phoenix Mars Lander continues to collect specimens from the Red Planet.

Hackers: Uncle Sam Wants You

At Black Hat, agencies including the FBI, US-CERT, and the military make the pitch for assisting in the U.S.'s fight against cybercrime and cyberwar.


Engineers John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Yonggang Huang of Northwestern University, Chicago have created an electronic eye-shaped camera that uses a new class of electronics technology that can conform to almost any shape of a human eye. The new retina-like camera sensor uses flexible photosensitive pixels.

Aug. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Harvard University scientists have made lines of stem cells, able to turn into any other cell in the body, from bits of skin or blood of 10 patients with genetic diseases including muscular dystrophy and juvenile diabetes.

The findings will help researchers decipher the workings of these diseases, enabling them to study what happens as cells that carry a condition's genetic seeds develop and age. The lines will be made available for a ``nominal fee'' to researchers around the world, the Harvard scientists said.

Teams at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created the lines using a technique that reprograms cells to give them the same power as those from embryos to become any of the roughly 210 cell types in the body. Their advance was described in a paper appearing today in the journal Cell.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - More than 80 percent of Americans think the U.S. health system needs either fundamental change or a complete overhaul, according to a survey released on Thursday.

Salmonella Is Tested To Fight Cancer Cells

Scientists have developed a procedure which may help end the need for transplant patients to rely on powerful anti-rejection drugs.