Heinlein's Prophetic First Novel, Lost and Found
In 1939, after leaving the United States Navy and failing in local politics in California,
Robert A. Heinlein, then 32, decided to become a writer. He wrote a Utopian novel, "For Us, the Living," taking the title from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Two publishers rejected it, so he shelved the book and later discarded the original manuscript. Although the book has didactic elements it also allowed him to make predictions about everything from the invention of the "telautograph" (a way of leaving phone messages) to man walking on the Moon. He also foresaw a revolution in sexual freedom, publicly owned banks and a united Europe with a common currency. One prediction was particularly dire: in 2003 a surprise aerial attack destroys Manhattan and nearly 80 percent of the population.
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Police hunt for dinosaur
Reports a live dinosaur had been sighted on a volcanic island of Papua New Guinea prompted the deployment of heavily-armed police in search of the mystery creature. Villagers in the superstitious island province of East New Britain this week said they fled in terror after seeing a three-metre tall, grey-coloured creature with a head like a dog and a tail like a crocodile. They said the creature was living among thick green plants in a mosquito-ridden marsh just outside the provincial capital Kokopo, near the devastated town of Rabaul which was buried by a volcanic eruption in 1994.
Kokopo's Mayor Albert Buanga said the dinosaur would make a great a tourist attraction.
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Hubble's Most Penetrating View Yet
Astronomers using the
Hubble Space Telescope have snapped the deepest picture of space yet. The new image, which depicts the so-called
Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), captures about 10,000 galaxies, many of which formed just a few hundred million years after the big bang. The image should help scientists determine how the first stars reheated the cold, dark expanse as the universe emerged from its dark ages.
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IM FLAWD
A security vulnerability exists in Microsoft MSN Messenger. The vulnerability exists because of the method used by MSN Messenger to handle a file request. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted request to a user running MSN Messenger. If exploited successfully, the attacker could view the contents of a file on the hard drive without the user's knowledge as long as the attacker knew the location of the file and the user had read access to the file.
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File-swap 'KILLER' grabs attention,
Los Gatos, Calif.-based
Audible Magic has been making the rounds of Washington, D.C., legislative and regulatory offices for the last month, showing off technology it says can sit inside peer-to-peer software and automatically stop swaps of copyrighted music from artists such as
Mark Farina or
ColdPlay.
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