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Half-Male, Half-Female Fowl Explain Birds' Sex Determination

Kanan excerpts from a BBC report out of Scotland: "A study of sexually scrambled chickens suggests that sex in birds is determined in a radically different way from that in mammals. Researchers studied three chickens that appeared to be literally half-male and half-female, and found that nearly every cell in their bodies — from wattle to toe — has an inherent sex identity. This cell-by-cell sex orientation contrasts sharply with the situation in mammals, in which organism-wide sex identity is established through hormones." Kanan also supplies this link to some pictures of the mixed-cell birds.

Bill To Ban All Salt In Restaurant Cooking

Felix Ortiz, D-Brooklyn, introduced a bill that would ruin restaurant food and baked goods as we know them. The measure (if passed) would ban the use of all forms of salt in the preparation and cooking of food for all restaurants or bakeries. While the use of too much salt can contribute to health problems, the complete banning of salt would have negative impacts on food chemistry. Not only does salt enhance flavor, it controls bacteria, slows yeast activity and strengthens dough by tightening gluten. Salt also inhibits the growth of microbes that spoil cheese."

T-Mobile's First HSPA+ Modem Goes On Sale Sunday

T-Mobile announced that the webConnect Rocket USB Laptop Stick, the first HSPA+ device for the US, will be available beginning on Sunday, March 14. The device was originally announced at MWC in February. HSPA+ is interesting because it could enable 4G LTE-like speeds using existing 3G infrastructure and according to a hands-on, it smokes Wi-Max. Right now, it's still just for Philadelphia, although we should see several major cities light up with HSPA+ on both coasts well before the end of 2010."

Darkworks SDK transforms 2D games into 3D games, no 3D TV required

Well, wouldn't you know it? 3D seems to be the topic of conversation here at GDC , and Paris-based Darkworks is making a splash by announcing the availability of its TriOviz for Games SDK. In short, this magical software concoction is a post-process effect that allows standard 2D games to be transformed into 3D masterpieces... and you don't even need to buy a 3D television. We were briefed on the tech here at the show, and we're told that the magic happens in ...

JooJoo hits the FCC, reveals NVIDIA Ion, 3G card

Well well. We'd always suspected that the JooJoo tablet was hiding something extra to run HD video and Flash, and it's just hit the FCC with full documentation and a teardown confirming that there's an NVIDIA Ion GPU paired with an Atom N270 packed inside. We're also seeing a 3G card in there, although it's unclear whether it'll be active or installed at launch --

EMI Cannot Unbundle Pink Floyd Songs

Before the advent of iTunes and MP3s, EMI and Pink Floyd entered into a contract which stated that EMI could not unbundle individual songs from their original album settings. This was insisted upon by the members of Pink Floyd, who wanted to retain artistic control of their works, which they considered 'seamless' pieces of music. However, with the advent of digital downloads, EMI has been selling individual songs through its online store. Pink Floyd sued, claiming EMI was violating the contract, whereas EMI said the contract only applied to physical albums, not Internet sales. Judge Andrew Morritt backed the band, saying the contract protected 'the artistic integrity of the albums.' Judge Morritt also ruled EMI is 'not entitled to exploit recordings by online distribution or by any other means other than the complete original album without Pink Floyd's consent.'"

Multitasking in for iPhone 4.0?

The latest word on the iPhone is that the 4.0 OS will finally have honest-to-goodness multitasking. This could hopefully lead to things like a real chat client, and dangerous battery consumption. I still hope it's true.

The 10 Most Absurd Scientific Papers

It's true: 'Effects of cocaine on honeybee dance behavior,' 'Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time,' and 'Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?' are all genuine scientific research papers, and all were genuinely published in journals or similar publications. Wired's presentation of a collection of the most bizarrely-named research papers contains seven other gems, including one about naval fluff and another published in The Journal of Sex Research."

PlayStation Move: everything you ever wanted to know

Sony dropped a lot of knowledge on us yesterday, at long last replacing rampant speculation with some cold hard facts -- and even a name! -- for its new PlayStation motion controller. The PlayStation Move is being described as a "platform" and a "virtual console launch" by folks at Sony, and we think they mean it, so prepare for a motion-controlled ad war later this year, as Microsoft and Sony set themselves up for a real three-way fight with Nintendo for your physical living room activity of the gaming variety. While some of the high-level Wii-like functionalitie ...