links for 2009-10-19

Aren't security rules so inconvenient and inconsistent.

"Striking a populist tone, several of President Obama’s leading advisers on Sunday issued stern warnings to Wall Street. They said big banks must not resist greater government oversight now that they have regained their financial footing through taxpayer financed bailouts."

"US researchers have found a way to dramatically increase the harvest of stem cells from adult tissue. It is a practical step forward in techniques to produce large numbers of stem cells without using embryos. Using three drug-like chemicals, the team made the procedure 200 times more efficient and twice as fast, the Nature Methods journal reported."

"SVG Web cleverly uses existing facilities on Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 to instantly enable SVG support without the user having to download any new software or plugins. Using SVG Web plus native SVG support you can now target close to 100% of the existing installed web base, today. Before SVG Web you could only target about ~30% of web browsers with SVG. Once dropped in SVG Web gives you partial support for SVG 1.1, SVG Animation (SMIL), Fonts, Video and Audio, DOM and style scripting through JavaScript, and more in about a 60K library. Your SVG content can be embedded directly into normal HTML 5 or through the OBJECT tag. If native SVG support is already present in the browser then that is used. No downloads or plugins are necessary other than Flash which is used for the actual rendering, so it's very easy to use and incorporate into an existing web site." Can you say awesome?

"The scans have been temporarily stopped for young people while legal advice is sought, said the airport." Something I guess.

"Researchers have discovered a magnetic equivalent to electricity: single magnetic charges that can behave and interact like electrical ones. The work is the first to make use of the magnetic monopoles that exist in special crystals known as spin ice. Writing in Nature journal, a team showed that monopoles gather to form a "magnetic current" like electricity. The phenomenon, dubbed "magnetricity", could be used in magnetic storage or in computing. Magnetic monopoles were first predicted to exist over a century ago, as a perfect analogue to electric charges." Very impressive research.