science
Microsoft to appeal $106 million VirnetX patent verdict
VirnetX , a software corporation founded in 2005, has prevailed in a patent-infringement lawsuit accusing Microsoft of willfully infringing on two patents for automatic and secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology. The Texas jury recommended an award of $105.75 million, which is less than half of the $242 million that VirtnetX asked for. Still, the verdict was a very positive one for VirtnetX.
Continue reading »Ars Premier now available in $5 month-to-month subscriptions
Last week was an important waypoint here at Ars. It has been just over six months since we launched version 2.0 of our Ars Premier Subscriptions . There’s been a steady stream of new subscribers each day, and the program is outperforming our wildest expectations.
Continue reading »MRI’s successes put the brain on trial
A typical neuroscience paper (or a typical report on one) is a laundry list of structure:function relationships between brain regions and the mental tasks they perform. The amygdala deals with registering rewards, the hippocampus handles memory, and so on. These relationships have been the result of over a century of work, starting with rare cases of brain injury and building through modern medical imaging, which can detect ever-smaller lesions and associate neural activity with specific cognitive processes.
Continue reading »Europe outsourcing CO2 emissions to developing economies
China is now the largest emitter of CO 2 on the planet, as it powers a large industrial base primarily through the use of coal-fired power plants. However, many of those goods are immediately shipped overseas, often to the US and EU, which generate and use power far more efficiently. A new paper, which will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science , now takes a look at the impact of outsourcing these carbon emissions by tracking CO 2 based on a product’s point of use.
Continue reading »Behavioral efforts, not money, will drive energy efficiency
When it comes to reducing carbon emissions, most of the attention has focused on new technologies like renewable power and electric vehicles, as well as their associated costs. But study after study shows that we can save both energy and a significant amount of cash through the use of energy efficiency technology that’s already on the market. A Policy Forum in today’s issue of Science suggests that the bottleneck isn’t so much technological or economic as it is behavioral, and argues that the US needs to start performing tests of behavior-oriented programs.
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