The faster-than-light particles detected by scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in September 2011 might not have actually been moving that fast after all, according to multiple reports on …

Poisoned Apple Supplier Workers Publish Letter Requesting Reform

For all the recent reports surrounding the harsh working conditions at the Chinese factories where Apple’s iPad and iPhone are assembled, it’s worth recalling an older problem: Back in February 2011, Apple admitted — and the New York Times further detailed — that 137 workers at an Apple supplier factory in Suzhou, China, suffered serious injuries from handling n-hexane, a toxic cleaning agent used to wipe off iPhone screens.

“Some workers said they were hospitalized for months with what doctors told them was nerve damage,” the Times reported, with one, a 27-year-old named Jia Jing-Chuan telling the newspaper that the nerve damage made him “hypersensitive to cold,” requiring him to wear winter clothes indoors.

Now Jia Jing-Chuan and another worker, Guo Rui-Qiang, have published a letter asking users to sign an online petition demanding Apple reform the conditions at supplier factories. The letter was posted on the website of SumofUs, an advocacy organization behind the new petition and behind one previously submitted in print to six Apple stores around the globe, also calling for supplier labor reform.

Nightline’s Tour of Foxconn Factory Reveals Little New Information

The crew of ABC News “Nightline” was given exclusive access by Apple to investigate two Chinese factories of the giant Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn, where the bulk of Apple’s iPad and iPhone devices are assembled, along with devices from leading competitors Sony, Amazon and HP.

Apple invited Nightline to the plants amidst a flood of negative PR, following multiple suicides by workers at the factories in 2010 and more recent reports of inhumane and dangerous working conditions.

Facing increasing online and physical protests from workers’ rights advocates, Apple on February 13 announced it had commissioned a third-party audit of by a trade group, the Fair Labor Association (FLA), to review the factories. Within a day of beginning the audit, the association’s president called the facilities “way above the average of the norm” for China.

The Nightline episode appears to be another part of Apple’s strategy to rehabilitate its image, as ABC News reporter Bill Weir admits it was “around this time when Apple called me.”

How Hubble’s Steam Planet Discovery Helps Us Understand The Universe

In the wake of NASA’s announcement on Tuesday that scientists had identified a remarkable planet made up primarily of steam using the Hubble Space Telescope, the leader of the project, Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, took the time to describe the planet in greater detail to TPM.

Firstly, to dispense with the burning question on everyone’s minds: There’s almost no chance of life on GJ 1214b, located 40 light years away from Earth, orbiting a red dwarf star in the constellation Ophiuchus. GJ 1214b is simply too close to its star — just over a million miles away — and thus too hot, as Berta explained.

“The coolest temperature you can find on the planet is about the temperature of a hot oven,” Berta told TPM via email. “That’s too hot for the complex molecules of life to survive. It would be like putting a beautiful green, leafy plant into an oven and baking it at 450F for a billion years, it just wouldn’t work! If the planet were about 4 times as far away from its star as it is, it could be cool enough that maybe we could start talking about life surviving and thriving on it.”

Berta’s team theorizes that the planet formed further out from its star and moved steadily closer over eons, baking.

Hubble Discovers Steam World ‘Like No Planet We Know Of’

Updated 10:30 am ET, Wednesday, Feb. 22

Using NASA’s famed Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have determined that an alien world located just 40 light years from Earth is unlike anything previously found before: A world composed primarily of steam.

The planet, known officially under the unflattering moniker GJ 1214b, “is like no planet we know of,” said Zachory Berta a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in a release announcing the discovery of the planet’s strange composition, adding: “A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water.”

GJ 1214b was first sighted in 2009 by the Harvard MEarth Project’s ground-based telescopes located near Amado, AZ. However, it took Hubble’s relatively new Infrared Wide Field Camera 3 to establish a closer view of the planet, revealing that it likely contains a dense atmosphere of water vapor.

Cookiegate: Google Taking Heat For Tracking Users Online

There’s been a firestorm of controversy brewing over the past few days after a Web researcher at Stanford University discovered Google and several other major online advertising companies were surreptitiously circumventing the default security settings on Apple’s Safari web browser to allow them to track users’ interactions online.

As Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student of computer science and law at Stanford, explained, Apple’s Safari browser — found on all Mac computers, the iPhone and the iPad — is unique among competitors in that it ships with default privacy settings that block all third-party “cookies,” from being installed on a user’s device.

Browser “cookies” are small files that websites and services install on users computers in order to store information related to a particular user’s browsing experience — such as the items they’ve put in an e-shopping cart, for example. Although Safari allows some cookies, such as those related to filling out online forms, it blocks those that are “third party” — cookies that don’t come from the same web address that the user is currently viewing. Many ad companies install cookies on users’ machines to see if they’ve clicked on ads or not and keep track of other web browsing habits to enable personalized advertising options.

In Fight Against Global Warming, U.S. Declares War On Cook Stoves

Updated 1:00 pm ET, Tuesday, Feb. 21 TINA CASEY The U.S. has joined with five other countries in a first-of-its-kind international effort to slow the pace of global warming by targeting three greenhouse emissions, one of which is black carbon…

Anonymous Denies It Is Pursuing Power Outage Attacks

The National Security Agency is concerned that hackers operating under the banner Anonymous could, over the next two years, achieve the capability to stage a cyberattack that would produce a power outage, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

The director of the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander, has warned the White House and other government officials about his agency’s concerns that Anonymous could attain this power by 2014, according to the Journal, which cites unnamed sources “familiar with the gatherings.”

However, the report is scarce on some important technical details — such as just how such an attack could theoretically be carried out and how Anonymous would go about procuring the necessary information and access to make it happen.

Alta Devices, Maker of Highest Efficiency Solar Panel, Working With Military

Alta Devices, the company that recently set the record for the highest efficiency solar panel ever certified by the U.S. government, is working to supply the U.S. military and defense contractors with its high-tech flexible solar panels, the company revealed exclusively to TPM.

Alta Devices President and CEO Christopher Norris told TPM in a telephone interview that the company has just begun working on demonstrating its equipment in a “small pilot line” of solar panels at the company’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, but that it already had spurred great interest from industry and government.

The small pilot line will produce about 2 megawatts of power, Norris told TPM, enough to power about 600 homes. But comparing Alta’s panels to standard fossil fuel power plant alternatives is a bit misleading, because the company isn’t looking to replace fossil plants or fuel sources, but rather go where they cannot.

“For some reason, solar has gotten into a trend of competing with fossil fuel plants head on,” said Norris, “We don’t think that’s necessarily the best use of solar, and certainly not our solar. We’re focusing on places where where solar is not and where electricity itself is not.”

Rivals Sprint And AT&T Both Like Payroll Tax Cut Deal

The last-minute compromise reached by House and Senate leaders on Thursday to extend the payroll tax cut for another year was achieved partially by having both sides agree to pay for the cut by auctioning off $22 billion worth of licenses to the wireless spectrum — the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum over which radio waves and data can be transmitted.

The licenses, which are issued by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), are currently held by national TV broadcasters.

But many of them have gone unused in recent years as broadcasters have switched over from analog to digital broadcasting, as they were mandated by Congress to do no later than June 2009.

“As Wi-Fi plays an increasingly important role in the spectrum ecosystem, the economic benefit created by unlicensed spectrum is estimated at up to $37 billion a year,” said FCC Chair Julius Genachowski, in a statement before the House on Thursday. The FCC has pressured TV broadcasters to give up unused spectrum for years.