Tech Scrape

The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week:

Senator Durbin promises legislation that would force companies to protect human rights. Yesterday a leading member of Congress put pressure on Internet companies to support human rights and Internet freedom abroad. U.S. Senator Richard Durbin, the Democratic representative from Illinois and the Senate majority whip, said he plans to introduce legislation “that would require Internet companies to take reasonable steps to protect human rights or face civil or criminal liability.” An aide later said the proposed legislation had not been written, but would likely be based on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act .

The fluorescent molecule targets tumors to guide surgeons and provide pre- and post-op imaging. A new molecule designed to seek out and label cancer cells could help guide surgeons to hidden pockets of disease–a technology that could one day allow for more complete tumor removal and increase a patient’s chances of survival.

The best of the rest from Physics arXiv this week:

A new tool explores large sets of data–and might help organize the Web. “How do you take a big collection of things and make sense out of it?” asks Gary Flake , founder and director of Microsoft Live Labs , a division of the software giant that designs experimental Web tools. The problem is becoming more common, even for the average user, because the Web makes huge quantities of information readily available.

Chrome OS is ridiculously simple–and that’s why you’ll love it. Most of this article was written on a six-year-old computer running Google’s new Chromium OS.

Rodents could be an effective model for researchers looking for new hepatitis drugs. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have engineered a mouse with a mostly human liver by injecting human liver cells, or hepatocytes, into genetically engineered mice. Researchers say the mouse/human chimera could serve as a new model for discovering drugs for viral hepatitis, a disease that has been notoriously difficult to replicate and study in the lab. The team exposed the altered mice to hepatitis B and C viruses and, after treating the rodents with conventional drugs, found that the mice responded much like human patients.

The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week:

The money has helped the solar and wind industries, but hasn’t created many manufacturing jobs. In the year since it was enacted by Congress, the federal stimulus bill has helped the solar and wind markets grow in the United States, but has done relatively little to boost domestic renewable energy manufacturing.

Cells from people with premature aging disease get “younger” with the help of stem cell technology. Reverting skin cells from people with a premature aging disease back to a more embryonic state appears to overcome the molecular defect in these cells. People with the disease have abnormally short telomeres, a repetitive stretch of DNA that caps chromosomes and shrinks with every cell division, even in healthy people.