This telephone may look like it escaped from Alexander Graham Bell's living room, but under the hood the DialupPC is an all-digital, VoiP-ready special, circa 2004. Built by modder Dean Liou of Envador.com for an Intel-sponsored event in Dallas.Photo: Dean Liou
A HOTEL bar in Arlington, Virginia, 23 October 2008. A group of computer security experts has spent the day holed up with law enforcement agencies. It is an annual event that attracts the best in the business, but one the participants like to keep low-key - and under the radar of the cybercriminals they are discussing. 
Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin joined the Boston Pops at Boston's Symphony Hall on Thursday for a performance of four movements from Gustav Holst's The Planets to provide a helpful reminder.
The World Health Organization has declared H1N1 swine flu an official Level 6 pandemic - in the WHO's rating scheme. This means the world's vaccine industry will be rubbing their hands with glee because they can now switch from making vaccine for ordinary flu to pandemic vaccine, where the big money is to be made. However companies are not likely to change production until they have finished their current production run of ordinary flu vaccine in July or August. That will be the case, even though that vaccine will be useless if swine flu behaves like previous pandemics and replaces the current, ordinary flu viruses. After all, it doesn't make financial sense to hang onto surplus stock when there are eager customers out there willing to buy it, whether it's effective or not.
The WHO's declaration of level six activates a slew of government pre-orders for pandemic vaccine. These will take precedence over recent orders for H1N1 vaccine. Countries that don't have pre-orders will face delays or increased charges, following the normal commercial process of supply and demand drives price.
The WHO cautioned against over-reaction, as most cases of H1N1 have so far been relatively mild. The organisation had been under pressure not to declare a pandemic for such a mild virus but the pharmaceutical companies have been lobbying hard.
Unfortunately, the WHO officials have insisted that a flu pandemic is defined by how fast a novel flu virus spreads, and who it affects, not necessarily how severe it is. This is partly because the same virus can be mild in some people and severe in others, and partly because it can evolve.
Historically, in 1918, the last pandemic H1N1 started out mild, but its second wave was much more severe. There were sound reasons for this, whereby the virus latched onto the antiodies that had been created by the first outbreak and this allowed them easy access to disabling the immune system of victims.
This virus affects young people
Pandemic flu can also kill healthy young adults, not the very young and old like ordinary flu. "Approximately half the people who have died from this H1N1 infection have been previously healthy people," Keiji Fukuda, head of flu at the WHO, said on Tuesday, adding this had given the organisation "the most concern" but again, the causes are known and predictble.
"It is of greatest importance to continue surveillance of the virus worldwide," David Heymann, the deposed head of health security at the WHO. "Science cannot predict what course this virus will take as it continues to spread in humans." maybe that's why he was removed from office.
The population deserves answers and solutions to these problems and not to be used as guinea pigs and an ever-increasing source of revenue for the exploitation of pharmaceutical companies, allegedly. Discuss!
A rare insight into the folk beliefs of 17th-century Britons has been gleaned from the analysis of a sealed "witch bottle" unearthed in Greenwich, London, in 2004. Witch bottles were commonly buried to ward off spells during the late 16th and 17th centuries, but it is very rare to find one still sealed.
"So many have been dug up and their contents washed away down the sink," says Alan Massey, a retired chemist formerly at the University of Loughborough, UK, who has examined so-called "magical" artifacts and was asked to analyse the contents of the bottle. "This is the first one that has been opened scientifically."
During the 17th century, British people often blamed witches for any ill health or misfortune they suffered, says Massey. "The idea of the witch bottle was to throw the spell back on the witch," he says. "The urine and the bulb of the bottle represented the waterworks of the witch, and the theory was that the nails and the bent pins would aggravate the witch when she passed water and torment her so badly that she would take the spell back off you."
The salt-glazed jar was discovered 1.5 metres below ground by archaeologists from The Maritime Trust, a Greenwich-based charity that preserves historic sailing vessels. When it was shaken, the bottle splashed and rattled, and an X-ray showed pins and nails stuck in the neck, suggesting that it had been buried upside down.
Further computed tomography scans showed it to be half-filled with liquid, which later analysis showed to be human urine. The bottle also contained bent nails and pins, a nail-pierced leather "heart", fingernail clippings, navel fluff and hair. The presence of iron sulphide in the mixture also suggests that sulphur or brimstone had been added.
"Prior to this point, all we really knew about what was in witch bottles was what we read from documents from the 17th century," says Brian Hoggard, an independent expert on British witchcraft who helped analyse the bottle. These texts suggest "recipes" for filling a witch bottle, but don't tell us what actually went into them.
Sulphur is not mentioned in any recipe Massey has seen, although a previously discovered bottle seemed to contain the remains of some matches, he says. "If you think about where sulphur came from in those days, it spewed out of volcanic fumaroles from the underworld. It would have been the ideal thing to [kill] your witch, if you wished to."
Demographic distinction of urine analysis
Further analysis of the urine showed that it also contained cotinine, a metabolite of nicotine, suggesting that it came from a smoker, while the nail clippings appear quite manicured, suggesting that a person of some social standing created the bottle.
The only difference between these two faces is their degree of contrast. Yet one appears female and the other male. That's because female faces tend to have more contrast between the eyes and mouth and the rest of the face than male faces.
Richard Russell, the Harvard University neuroscientist who created the illusion, has previously found that increasing the contrast in female faces makes them more attractive. Conversely, reducing contrast makes a male face easier on the eyes.
Visit the Visual Illusion of the Year (2009) Competition and see if you have won
FEAR changes how we see things, enhancing our ability to identify blurry shapes but impairing our perception of fine details. This may help us to escape threats. Looking at a fearful face, which activates the brain in a similar way to feeling fear, enhances sensitivity to visual contrast, but whether it improves vision across the board wasn't clear. So Bruno Bocanegra and René Zeelenberg at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, showed people pictures of faces with either fearful or neutral expressions, followed by a "blob" covered in stripes of varying thicknesses.
Those shown a fearful face were better at identifying whether thick stripes were vertical or slightly tilted and worse at identifying the orientation of thin stripes than those shown neutral faces (Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02354.x).
This response may have evolved because coarse-grained features, which enable you to evaluate movement and distance, better aid survival in scary situations than fine details. "You don't care whether the object has wrinkles, you care whether its movement is threatening," Bocanegra says.
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