Two students at Carnegie Mellon University have developed free software that helps verify the authenticity of Web sites to avoid “man-in-the-middle” attacks, which reroute Web traffic to unauthorized computers, according to the Associated Press.

The software, designed by a computer-science senior and a third-year graduate student, works as a Firefox extension that is compatible with the latest version of the browser. The software can be downloaded free from the university’s Web site.

The program gives users extra help in verifying whether the Web site they’re about to visit is authentic or bogus. Although most browsers already warn users when a site displays a dubious security certificate, some users...

Proteopedia, a new collaborative Web site, is offering not only text descriptions of proteins and other biomacromolecules related to biological functions and disease, but also interactive 3-D images.

On the Web site, the 3-D images come with a descriptive text that contains hyperlinks. Clicking on the links changes the images to display what is being explained in the text. This format aims to make the complex structural information comprehensible to everybody.

Proteopedia’s seed material is the entries on each of the more than 50,000 records in the Protein Data Bank. Members of the scientific community are encouraged to register to be able to edit and expand existing pages, or create new ones.

The wiki Web resource was developed by researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel, the...

Amazon is considering entering the student textbook market with a new version of its Kindle e-book reader, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Most publishers now offer electronic versions of their textbooks, but so far there’s not an attractive enough e-book reader, and Amazon aims to fill that void. The college-oriented new model might be larger and include student-friendly features, such as allowing making annotations, according to a technology blog.

Amazon officers also said the high Kindle sales estimates calculated by TechCrunch—a...

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a software program that allows people who are deaf in the U.S. to communicate in real time through cellphones using sign language.

Currently the deaf in the U.S. use text messages to communicate via cellphone. The low bandwidth of the standard American network, together with the limited processing power of cellphones, do not allow video encoders to produce video with enough quality for intelligible sign language conversations. In countries with cellular networks that allow better data transmission, such as Sweden and Japan, deaf people can already communicate using sign language via video on the cellphone.

Video is much better than text-messaging because it’s faster and it’s better at conveying emotion, said Jessica DeWitt in a news...

Following in the footsteps of the National Institutes of Health, which now demands researchers who received funding from it to deposit their results in the institutes’ online archive within 12 months of publication, the European Commission has launched a pilot project to provide open access to E.U.-financed research findings.

The project the Commission announced today will give total online access to E.U.-funded research results after an embargo period of between 6 and 12 months. This pilot, which will run until the end of 2008, will cover about 20 percent of the research financed with the 50 billion euro budget of E.U.‘s 7th Research Framework Program.

With this measure, the European Commission wants to make sure that the results of the research it finances “are disseminated as widely and effectively as possible to guarantee maximum...

Whenever you have to share digital files, think of the Internet: do it locally. Researchers at the University of Washington and Yale University have found that sharing files through peer-to-peer networking with neighbor computers instead of with far-away machines relieves pressure on the Internet-service provider by as much as five times and speeds up the transfer by 20 percent.

Besides being widely used for murky purposes, P2P is used by several media outlets to deliver legal video content and movies. Around 50 percent to 80 percent of all Internet traffic is generated by bandwidth-greedy P2P exchanges, and it is expected to grow, putting strain on Internet-service providers.

To solve this problem, the researchers propose a system they have dubbed P4P, which consists of sharing files preferentially with nearby computers. The researchers calculated that the...

PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine’s online database, is now indexing videos from The Journal of Visualized Experiments. According to the publication’s official blog, JoVE is “the first video-journal to ever be accepted for publication in PubMed.”

The online, open-access journal publishes videos of experiments and protocols in the biological and life sciences and offers its video-articles to science bloggers to illustrate their posts.

The journal managers say that PubMed’s decision is an “official acceptance” of the scientific community of new forms of communication.

“Overall, it will increase the interest of the scientists to communicate their findings in video, making biological sciences more...

Four projects from researchers at more than a dozen universities and other research institutions have been awarded $10-million grants in the first edition of a competition that aims to expand the frontiers of computing. The initiative, Expeditions in Computing, has been promoted by the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation.

The winning team from Princeton University, Rutgers University, New York University, and the Institute for Advanced Study aims to solve longstanding problems of computing. A joint project of Cornell University, Bowdoin College, the Conservation Fund, Howard University, Oregon State University, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which brings together computer scientists, mathematicians, economists, biologists, and environmental scientists, wants to develop a new field of computational...

Does extra homework help students achieve better scores on math tests? It works differently depending on the kind of student, a study from researchers at the State University of New York at Binghamton and the University of Nevada has found.

In a paper published in the July issue of The Econometrics Journal, the researchers said that giving additional homework is most effective for high and low achievers, but it has a lesser impact on the math test scores for average achievers.

Pushing high-achieving students harder might be beneficial for them, as well as giving extra homework to low-performing pupils who might have been not challenged enough, the researchers found.

“But for the average achieving classes, who may have been given too much homework in an attempt to...

To help authors navigate the policies of journal publishers, who often demand exclusive rights to material, and a federal agency that demands the material be made publicly available, the Association of Research Libraries has released a report on how to comply with the policies of 12 publishers.

The report focuses on the requirements of the recently revised National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy. NIH now requires those authors who received grants from them to deposit their articles in PubMed Central, the institutes’ online archive, within 12 months of publication.

The report, “PubMed Central Deposit and Author Rights”, has been written by Ben Grillot, a second-year law student George Washington University, who concentrated on the differences between the terms and procedures of deposit of the work, the length of embargoes, and the rights of the...