December 17, 2003 - Researchers are building what they call the world's first laboratory blast simulator to study how the latest bomb-resistant building materials perform under the forces that tore apart U.S. government buildings in Oklahoma City and Nairobi, Kenya. The $9 million simulator at the University of California, San Diego is being funded by the Technical Support Working Group, a federal organization established to combat terrorism. Frieder Seible is dean of UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering and the principal investigator on the project.
December 16, 2003 - Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington and RSA Laboratories say they've discovered a way that ne'er-do-wells could bring your Internet access to a crashing halt by deluging your inbox with thousands of messages in a short period of time. Indiana University computer scientist Filippo Menczer calls this threat the e-mail cluster bomb.
December 15, 2003 - A ray of hoping for further closing the digital divide. In California, households earning under 30-thousand dollars per year are two years ahead similar households in the rest of the country when it comes to having Internet access, and using the 'Net to find health information.
December 12, 2003 - The U.S. military is using more so-called non-lethal weapons in the Iraq war. It's giving hundreds of soldiers weapons like electric taser-guns and rubber bullets. The idea is controlling crowds and civilian populations with fewer fatalities.
December 10, 2003 - Congress has passed its first SPAM bill. But one critic says when it becomes law ... we'll get MORE junk e-mail, not less. This is Future Tense for December 10th, 2003. I'm Jon Gordon.
December 9, 2003 - David Walsh runs the National Institute on Media and the Family, an organization opposed to video game violence. In his eight annual video game report card, Walsh proposes a new word, "killographic," to describe ultra-violent games like Grand Theft Auto. This year's report card surveyed students, and found that the students--boys especially--are spending more time playing Mature-rated games, without their parents' knowledge.
December 5, 2003 - A new group seeks to turn music swappers into a political force. Click the Vote is a new grassroots group that hopes to make file swapping and copyright questions major issues in the 2004 elections. Founder John Parres says the group's goal is to legalize a file swapping system that provides financial compensation for artists.
December 4, 2003 - A new survey from research and consulting firm Grunwald and Associates says that amounts to about ten percent of all kids age 6-17 who are online. And that's 3 times more kids who have their own sites since 2000. And the number is expected to keep growing rapidly.
December 3, 2003 - Sales of personal computers are up this holiday season, as people who've been holding back on PC purchases are finally taking the plunge. Powerful machines at low prices means it's a great time to be shopping, says Future Tense news analyst Dwight Silverman.
December 2, 2003 - Publishers, not music file swappers, are weakening the power of copyrights in the US. Brooklyn Law School Assistant Professor Jason Matsoni says there's one good reason so many Americans illegally download copyrighted music and other materials. It's because so many of the copyrighted items that they have encountered never should have been copyrighted in the first place.