I realize that some of these stories are kind of old, but in my defense I work a lot.

Scientists at the Tokyo University of Science announced earlier this month that they had grown a replacement tooth for an adult lab mouse. While this doesn’t sound like much given that rodent teeth grow continually through the creature’s life, they accomplished this task by engineering mouse cells to grow teeth and transplanting them into the socket of an extracted tooth. The tooth grown was fully functional, and seemed to have all of the nerve connections, structural integrity, and usability …

Wireless networking is a neverending headache for system and network admins, and not just because some makes and models of access points are so flaky, the could have come out of a box of cereal. When you crank up an RF transceiver, the signals go everywhere, which means that people outside of a building can at least see some traffic beyond the walls, and sometimes beyond the property line. I don't think that I have to go into what a security threat this is... normally, you can use a Faraday cage to contain the signals, but building such a construction …

Wireless net.access is not yet ubiquitous, but it's pretty common and becoming moreso every day for a variety of reasons. Net.access is definitely in enough demand that a lot of places sell wireless access to whomever is willing to pay for it. If you're lucky, you'll get a good price on an hourly rate or a daypass, but if you're not you'll get reamed on the price of daily access (I remember one hotel I stayed at in Florida that demanded $30us per day for 802.11b access). This has angered some people to the point at which …

If you turn on the Xscreensaver module called Sonar while you're running a packet monitoring application (such as TCPdump), people are less likely to think you're doing anything shady, because "Only hacker tools don't have GUIs." Always hack your shell's personal configuration file (~/.bash_profile, for example) to change your shellprompt if you use GNU screen. That way you can tell what shells you've left open are single-access shells and which shells are multiplexed through a single connection with screen. It can get confusing sometimes. Because a shell run inside a GNU screen metaterminal sets an environment variable called $WINDOW …

Intel has released an implementation of the draft 802.11n wireless networking protocol for laptops and other portable devices. 802.11n has five times the maximum data throughput of 802.11g, topping out at 270 megabits per second. On top of that, their 802.11n chipset uses less power than the other wi-fi implementations out there, which can give laptops an extra hour of runtime on battery, which is a huge selling point.