SURGEONS announced the world’s first face transplant yesterday. A French woman who had been disfigured in a dog attack received a new nose, lips and chin from a donor. The operation reopened a debate on the ethics of facial transplants, which can be psychologically difficult for the patient.

Professor Jean-Michel Dubernard, regarded as the most eminent surgeon in France, led the operation on Sunday and Monday and was said to be delighted at the outcome. The 38-year-old patient is expected to stay in hospital for several weeks in case of infection or rejection of the donor tissue.

The partial face transplant included muscles and blood vessels from the donor, who had died at a hospital in the northern French city of Lille. Scarring of the recipient was minimised by running grafts along the edges of the nose and “naso-labial groove� between the lips and nose.

Read more…

Sony Computer Entertainment has added support for RSS (really simple syndication) and Windows Media Audio files to its PlayStation Portable with a firmware update available starting today.

The RSS support appears as a button in the PSP’s network menu alongside the existing Internet browser and LocationFree Player icons. Users can add RSS feeds from Web sites they visit by clicking on the relevant RSS feed buttons or links and then check these feeds through the RSS Channel menu. Support for podcasts is also included.

The Windows Media Audio support allows playback of WMA files through the PSP’s music menu. Certain WMA files, including WMA9 Professional, WMA9 Lossless, and copyright-protected files like those available through commercial download services, are not supported.

Caution: Upgrading firmware will disable any homebrew apps that you might currently use.

Read more…

Last night Yahoo! announced they are integrating an RSS Reader into the new Yahoo! Mail service, currently in beta and invitation-only. You can select from a list of popular feeds, such as NY Times and Salon.com, or manually enter a feed URL. It has (or will have soon) features such as ability to forward posts via email, a little “gleam” when there is updated RSS content, a “river of news” view that shows you all posts from all of your feeds from newest to oldest, and lots more.

Read more…

Firefox 1.5 has been released from beta. Mozilla has given both Firefox and Thunderbird a new home. You can now download both at Mozilla.com, which is now where GetFirefox.com points to.

What’s New in Firefox 1.5

Firefox 1.5 is the next version of our award-winning Web browser.

Here’s what’s new in Firefox 1.5:

• Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
• Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance.
• Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs.
• Improvements to popup blocking.
• Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut.
• Answers.com is added to the search engine list.
• Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and “Safe Mode” experience.
• Better accessibility including support for DHTML accessibility and assistive technologies such as the Window-Eyes 5.5 beta screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Screen readers read aloud all available information in applications and documents or show the information on a Braille display, enabling blind and visually impaired users to use equivalent software functionality as their sighted peers.
• Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.
• Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.
• New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.
• Many security enhancements.

Read a more comprehensive list on what’s new.

Scientists at Cardiff University have created machinery to drill holes as small as 22 microns across, smaller than a human hair.

The drilling is done through an electro-discharge.

The “drilling” is done with a minute electrode, which has a diameter of only 6 microns (0.006 mm).

Mr Marsh said: “You don’t use a drill at all… The electrode is an electric discharge that wears away the metal, but it produces a very regular hole which is tubular - unlike lasers which have a large external entry point.”

This new technology will be used to improve medical and electronic engineering.

After distributing podcasting tools and guidelines to their 320,000 employees, IBM is reaping the rewards of this new medium. Podcasts have led to lower phone bills and more internal communication.

One of Edwards’ favorite creations is a weekly status update from IBM’s supply chain organization. The group previously scheduled a weekly conference call with all the employees it needed to coordinate with–a conference that involved as many as 7000 people. Now, supply-chain executives upload a weekly podcast, which staffers can listen to when they want.

“It’s dramatically cheaper,” Edwards said. “Plus you don’t have thousands of people organizing their schedules around this weekly call.”

IBM released the podcasting guidelines as to go along with the blogging guidelines created last year.

IBM has also released public podcasts, such as The Future of… series that has been downloaded over 40,000 times.

The mayor of New Orleans announced that free wifi will be available throughout the Big Easy. Hardware mounted on street lights enable the entire city to be covered. The equipment was donated by Intel, Tropos Networks, and Prontos Networks.

The network will be at a mere 512KB during the state of emergency, but will be dropped to a laughable 128KB afterwards. The speed decrease is the result of a state law that restricts government-owned Internet services.

Overstock.com could soon be simply o.com if a new rule goes through this weekend, allowing for the first time since 1993 to register single-letter domains. Several single-letter domains were registered before engineers became worried the size of the database that manages all the domain names. Since then domains needed to be at least three characters.

Some think these single-letter domain names could bring in six-figures as companies vie for the simple domain names.

Matt Bentley, chief executive of domain name broker Sedo.com LLC, said single-letter “.com” names could fetch six-figure sums, and a few might even command more than $1 million from some of the Internet’s biggest companies. Yahoo Inc. applied for a trademark to “y.com” this year.

Information storage media company, Maxell, is preparing the first holographic storage discs for September 2006. Storing data on light-sensitive crystals each disc will be able to store 300GB of information. That’s over 240 hours of TV broadcasts or 1.6 million high resolution photos. Within five years that storage is expected to increase to 1.6 terabytes.

The discs are expected to retail at $100 each, no word on how much a holographic drive will cost.

This begs the question, when will the holographic iPod be coming out?

Disney is planning on sending Chronicles of Narnia content directly to the iPod. This will be the first promotional campaign to automatically sync with the iPod.

Broadband-enabled consumers can visit the site at www.narnia.com to see trailers, clips, behind-the-scenes segments and interviews on their notebook and desktop computers. Maven software will let them automatically download and synchronize trailers and clips directly to video-enabled iPods.

After its installation, the “Narnia” channel will automatically check for content updates. It also will offer options like the ability to send the link to a friend, check for movie times or buy tickets online.

The downloads do not use the iTunes store, rather it uses iTunes just for synching to the iPod. In a similiar way Odeo works. No word on whether Disney will be releasing full movies for the iPod.