University researchers developing cancer-fighting beer

Genetic engineering could give Joe Six Pack anti-aging and cancer-fighting benefits

October 21, 2008 (Computerworld) Have you ever picked up a cold, frosty beer on a hot summer's day and thought that it simply couldn't get any better?

Well, you may have to think again.

A team of researchers at Rice University in Houston is working to create a beer that could fight cancer and heart disease. Taylor Stevenson, a member of the six-student research team and a junior at Rice, said the team is using genetic engineering to create a beer that includes resveratrol, the disease-fighting chemical that's been found in red wine.

In Computer World

Comment: Now this is clearly a good example of great research: you mix the finest ingredients, red wine and beer, and you get something approximate to the elixir of life. (Not that we needed another excuse to drink it… J)

"Making Internet routing scale with shim6"

Iljitsch van Beijnum, a PhD student at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, gave a very interesting talk last week here in the lab.  Iljitsch has contributed to the IETF Multihoming in IPv6 working group, and has already written two books: BGP: Building Reliable Networks with the Border Gateway Protocol, and Running IPv6.

The talk was about multihoming (one user using multiple ISPs - that's an easy way to put it) and Shim6, as an alternative technique to solve scalability issues in BGP related to multihoming and IPv6. 

It is a fact that the routing system will not be able to absorb millions of multihomers. The IETF has been dealing with this since 2001, and the outcome was Shim6. With Shim6 each user has one address per ISP, but all these addresses are hidden from the upper layers (these are inserted between IP and TCP/UDP, hence the name "shim"). This then allows hosts to move ongoing communications from one set of addresses to another. 

Most fundamental problems I've perceived in Shim6: 1) only works with IPv6; 2) both sender and receiver must "understand" Shim6 - if one of them doesn't understand they'll just communicate as usual.

Iljitsch also talked about his current work on multi-path TCP. A nice thing about his work is that he his trying to build mTCP  with changes only in the sender - that way the receiver is oblivious of the use of a "new" technique.

KDDI to launch 1Gbps fiber-optic service in Oct

KDDI Corp will launch a fiber-optic communications service with upload and download speeds each of up to one gigabit per second on Oct 1. The new service will target people living in single-family homes and low-rise apartment buildings. The traffic speeds will be the fastest in eastern Japan, up drastically from the current 100 megabits per second.

in Japan Today 

Major EU P2P research project hopes to kill traditional TV

Dutch academic Dr. Johan Pouwelse knows BitTorrent well, having spent a year of his life examining its inner workings. Now, as the scientific director of the EU-funded P2P-Next team, Pouwelse and his researchers have been entrusted with €19 million from the EU and various partners, and what they want in return is nothing less than a "4th-generation" peer-to-peer system that will one day be tasked with replacing over-the-air television broadcasts.

in ars technica

The report by Cisco (link below) is short and has some interesting figures - even if you tend to disbelieve in these forecasts, there are some nice figures from 2007 (for example although p2p file sharing traffic grew its percentage decreased from 60% to 51% due to the increase in video traffic and also an increase of web-based file sharing in some regions).

Lots of work for network researchers ahead... ;)

IP traffic to 'double' every two years

Web traffic volumes will almost double every two years from 2007 to 2012, driven by video and web 2.0 applications, according to a report from Cisco Systems.. Increased use of video and social networking has created what Cisco calls 'visual networking', which is raising traffic volumes at a compound annual growth rate of 46 per cent.

Cisco's Visual Networking Index (PDF) predicts that visual networking will account for 90 per cent of the traffic coursing through the world's IP networks by 2012.

The upward trend is not only driven by consumer demand for YouTube clips and IPTV, according to the report, as business use of video conferencing will grow at 35 per cent CAGR over the same period.

Cisco reckons that traffic volumes will be measured in exabytes (one billion gigabytes) by 2012 and will reach 552 exabytes by that time.

in iTnews

Cheap wii

If this works as it looks it's a really cool and cheap wii. :)

http://www.camspace.com/

Nokia Morph Concept

Quite cool...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX-gTobCJHs&eurl