In January, Skyhook Wireless Inc. announced that Apple would use Skyhook’s WiFi Positioning System (WPS) for its popular Map applications. The WPS database contains information on access points throughout the world. Skyhook itself provides most of the data in the database, with users contributing via direct entries to the database, and requests for localization.

ETH Zurich Professor Srdjan Capkun of the Department of Computer Science and his team of researchers analysed the security of Skyhook’s positioning system. The team’s results demonstrate the vulnerability of Skyhook’s and similar public WLAN positioning systems to location spoofing attacks.

Varanus komodoensis, the fearsome Komodo dragon, is the world's largest living lizard and, with 60 razor-sharp serrated teeth, can take on very large animal prey.

A new international study has revealed how it can be such an efficient killing machine despite having a wimpy bite and a featherweight skull - clever engineering.

The Komodo dragon grows to an average length of two to three meters and weighing around 70 kilograms. The reptile's unusual size is attributed to island gigantism, since there are no other carnivorous mammals to fill the niche on the islands where they live. As a result of their size, these lizards are apex predators, dominating the ecosystems in which they live.

Researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center report that a restricted-calorie diet inhibited the development of precancerous growths in a two-step model of skin cancer, reducing the activation of two signaling pathways known to contribute to cancer growth and development, while an obesity-inducing diet activated those pathways.

Epithelial cancers arise in the epithelium - the tissue that lines the surfaces and cavities of the body's organs. They comprise 80 percent of all cancers.

"Calorie restriction and obesity directly affect activation of the cell surface receptors epidermal growth factor (EGFR) and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1R)," said first author Tricia Moore, a graduate student in M. D. Anderson's Department of Carcinogenesis. "These receptors then affect signaling in downstream molecular pathways such as Akt and mTOR.

A study by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, in collaboration with the Charite University Hospital and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin says that several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted by unconscious activity in the brain.

The researchers from the group of Professor John-Dylan Haynes used a brain scanner to investigate what happens in the human brain just before a decision is made. "Many processes in the brain occur automatically and without involvement of our consciousness. This prevents our mind from being overloaded by simple routine tasks. But when it comes to decisions we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings."

Even in new designs, it's not a bad idea to see how old Mother Nature does it. Using that principle, a group of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory is mimicking bacteria to synthesize magnetic nanoparticles that could be used for drug targeting and delivery, in applications such as magnetic inks, high-density memory devices and magnetic seals in motors.

Commercial room-temperature synthesis of ferromagnetic nanoparticles is difficult because the particles form rapidly, resulting in agglomerated clusters of particles with less than ideal crystalline and magnetic properties. Size also matters. As particles get smaller, their magnetic properties, particularly with regard to temperature, also diminish.

A team of European scientists has triggered electrical activity in thunderclouds for the first time - deliberately.

They did it by aiming high-power pulses of laser light into a thunderstorm. Next, they say, could be man-made lightning.

At the top of South Baldy Peak in New Mexico during two passing thunderstorms, the researchers used laser pulses to create plasma filaments that could conduct electricity akin to Benjamin Franklin's silk kite string. No air-to-ground lightning was triggered because the filaments were too short-lived, but the laser pulses generated discharges in the thunderclouds themselves.