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Japan’s Ricoh Co. said Thursday it will be ready to supply an optical component that reads both HD DVD and Blu-ray discs next year — a move that could diffuse the battle between rivals Toshiba and Sony over next-generation DVD formats.

Toshiba Corp. and its allies have been pitting the HD DVD format against Blu-ray, an alternative standard pushed by Sony Corp., raising fears of a repeat of the VHS-versus-Beta battle over the format for video tape recorders in the early 1980s.

Both HD DVD and Blu-ray technology can deliver dazzling high-definition video and can store much more data than today’s DVDs, but their differing hardware is incompatible.

Tokyo-
based Ricoh’s new component, however, uses a diffraction plate designed to adjust the laser so that light focuses on the proper position for each disc format, allowing a drive to read all formats, according to company spokesman Satoshi Aoki.

”Ricoh is the first in the world to announce this hybrid technology,” Aoki said. ”We believe it’s groundbreaking.”

The component will initially only read discs, though Ricoh hopes to improve its laser strength so it writes on all disk formats, according to Aoki.

The office equipment maker is presenting the technology at the International Optoelectronics Exhibition outside Tokyo, which kicked off Thursday.

The company will be ready to deliver components to electronics makers by the end of 2007, Aoki said.

We know that it shouldn’t come as a shock anymore when researchers announce new storage technologies that promise to hold tantalizingly large amounts of data, but we were still pretty stoked to learn that a recent breakthrough at Harvard Medical School may eventually lead to DVD-size discs whose capacities approach an eye-popping 50TB.

Unlike traditional optical or magnetic solutions, the disc developed by Professor V Renugopalakrishnan and his colleagues is coated with thousands of light-activated proteins called bacteriorhodopsin which are found in the membrane of a particular salt marsh microbe — and which temporarily convert to a series of intermediate molecules when exposed to sunlight.

That property allows the proteins to act as individual bits in a binary system, but since they have a tendency to return to their grounded state after mere hours or days, Renugopalakrishnan and his team modified the requisite microbes’ DNA to produce proteins capable of maintaining that intermediary state for several years. Unfortunately we won’t see this technology come to market anytime soon, and even when it does, 50TB capacities will still be a ways off, so it looks like we’ll have to settle for those disappointing 200GB Blu-ray discs for the foreseeable future.

FLAGSTAFF – Family members of a stillborn baby apparently placed the little girl’s body in a box in a tree as part of a traditional American Indian burial ritual, Coconino County sheriff’s officials said.

The discovery of the body by a hiker Saturday afternoon near Forest Hills, about 130 miles southeast of Flagstaff, touched off an investigation by detectives.

The hiker spotted the box in a tree, prodded it and the blanket-wrapped body fell out.
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Sheriff’s Lt. Rex Gilliland said detectives have now ruled out foul play. The county medical examiner traced the child through a medical bracelet and discovered she had been stillborn at John. C. Lincoln hospital in Phoenix in April.

Gilliland said investigators are still trying to determine if any laws were broken. The mother, who has not been identified, had a funeral home prepare the body.

A family member “made the statement that the infant was laid to rest in the old, traditional ritual of their culture,” Gilliland said.

When it comes to gaming monitors, performance is everything, so Asus was off to a good start by endowing its new 19-inch PG191 LCD with a zippy 2-millisecond response time.

However, we’re not sure that it was also a good idea to build two speakers and a subwoofer into this unit; although they do lend the monitor a rather, um, distinctive look, it would seem that most consumers who are really into their gaming already own a set of dedicated speakers — and probably a 5.1 or 6.1 setup — which perform better than the ones Asus is offering here.

Also, part of the package is a built-in 1.3 megapixel camera, which may indicate that the company is actually targeting wannabe-gamers with this model — folks who envy the rockstar lifestyle portrayed by Fatal1ty and friends, but who have yet to begin accessorizing their own PCs.

Rounding out the specs are your standard 1,280 x 1,024 resolution, 800:1 contrast ratio, and 320cd/m2 brightness, along with a DVI port, in-game video capture software, and special audio/video settings designed to enhance gameplay. No word yet on pricing or availability, but if the speakers and camera add too much loot to the bottom line, we can’t imagine that many real gamers will be interested.

Trees could be growing in the Antarctic within a century because of global warming, an international scientific conference heard.

With carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere set to double in the next 100 years, the icy continent could revert to how it looked about 40 million years ago, said Professor Robert Dunbar of Stanford University.

“It was warm and there were bushes and there were trees,” he told some 850 delegates in the Tasmanian capital Hobart, the national AAP news agency reported.

The delegates are attending the combined meetings of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research and the Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs.

Dunbar said climate experts were predicting a doubling of the levels of carbon dioxide by 2100, “but it actually looks like it’s going to come sooner unfortunately.”

Scientists blame greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, for causing rising temperatures worldwide.

ST-JEAN-SUR-RICHELIEU, QUE. — Managers at a local Wal-Mart forced employees to search the store after it received a bomb threat, Radio-Canada reported Monday.

Some 40 nervous employees searched the store for an hour last Thursday, said Mailie Fournier, a former employee of the store. They were accompanied by six police officers.

Several employees, whose jobs don’t include security, found the experience traumatic, said Mr. Fournier.

The incident prompted Quebec workplace health and safety board to investigate.

Wal-Mart said it simply wanted to help police conduct the search.

According to police, the store didn’t violate any laws and only had an obligation to evacuate the store if a suspicious object was found.

Customers in the store about 60 kilometres east of Montreal were, nonetheless, asked to leave the premises.

Nothing suspicious was found.

FORT PIERCE, Fla. — A convenience store clerk is being held without bail for allegedly attacking a boy in Fort Pierce for not buying a yo-yo, according to police.

Amar Shreiteh is charged with attempted murder and false imprisonment. Police say he was working at the store Monday morning when 14-year-old Jeremius Howard came in with his sister.

As the girl browsed for snacks, Howard played with a yo-yo.

After she paid for the items, Howard put down the toy and tried to leave the store. Police say Shreiteh demanded the boy pay for the yo-yo, but Howard told him it was already opened and he didn’t want it. Shreiteh then reportedly punched the boy.

Police say he pulled Howard behind the counter and stabbed him on the back of his arm with a butcher knife.

Another clerk tried to stop Shreiteh and suffered a serious wound to his right forearm.

The teen was treated and released.

People who took an illegal drug made from mushrooms reported profound mystical experiences that led to behavior changes lasting for weeks — all part of an experiment that recalls the psychedelic ’60s.

Many of the 36 volunteers rated their reaction to a single dose of the drug, called psilocybin, as one of the most meaningful or spiritually significant experiences of their lives. Some compared it to the birth of a child or the death of a parent.

Such comments “just seemed unbelievable,” said Roland Griffiths of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, the study’s lead author.

But don’t try this at home, he warned. “Absolutely don’t.”

Almost a third of the research participants found the drug experience frightening even in the very controlled setting. That suggests people experimenting with the illicit drug on their own could be harmed, Griffiths said.

Viewed by some as a landmark, the study is one of the few rigorous looks in the past 40 years at a hallucinogen’s effects. The researchers suggest the drug someday may help drug addicts kick their habit or aid terminally ill patients struggling with anxiety and depression.

It may also provide a way to study what happens in the brain during intense spiritual experiences, the scientists said.

Funded in part by the federal government, the research was published online Tuesday by the journal Psychopharmacology.