Chinese teen sells kidney to buy iPad 2

A teenager in China's Anhui province has sold his right kidney to buy an iPad 2. His mother, who knew nothing of his plans, now hopes to hunt down the criminals who disabled him, a media report said.

Seventeen-year-old Xiao Zheng had been dreaming of a new iPad 2 for a while, but the price was beyond his means.

Zheng found an agent ready to buy his kidney and travelled to Hunan province in central China to undergo surgery in a local hospital. With the 22,000 yen ($3,900) he was paid, Zheng bought a new iPad 2 and iPhone and then returned home, according to a report on the Dongfang TV channel Thursday.

'Xiao Zheng returned home with a computer and a new Apple phone. We do not have the money for such expensive gadgets. At first, he did not want to tell me where he got that much money from. Later he confessed he had sold his right kidney to buy these things,' his mother told the channel.

After she learned the truth, Zheng's mother travelled with her son back to the hospital, only to discover that the operating theater had been rented out for commercial use to a businessman from Fujian province. Several attempts to reach the agents failed, as their phones were switched off.

Zheng's health is deteriorating day by day, and his mother said she hopes she will be able to find the criminals who disabled her son.

Source: IANS/RIA Novosti

WHO says cell phone use can cause brain cancer

LONDON - Using a mobile phone may increase the risk of certain types of brain cancer in humans and consumers should consider ways of reducing their exposure, World Health Organisation (WHO) cancer experts said on Tuesday.

A working group of 31 scientists from 14 countries meeting at the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said a review of all the available scientific evidence suggested cell phone use should be classified as "possibly carcinogenic".

The classification could prompt the U.N. health body to look again at its guidelines on mobile phones, the IARC scientists said, but more research is needed before a more definitive answer on any link can be given.

The WHO had previously said there was no established evidence for a link between cell phone use and cancer.

"After reviewing essentially all the evidence that is relevant ... the working group classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans," Jonathan Samet, chair of the IARC group, said in a telebriefing.

He said some evidence suggested a link between an increased risk for glioma, a type of brain cancer, and mobile phone use.

The decision comes after a study published last year which looked at almost 13,000 cell phone users over 10 years found no clear answer on whether the mobile devices cause brain tumours.

The decision has been keenly awaited by mobile phone companies and by campaign groups who have raised concerns about whether cell phones might be harmful to health.

Use of cell phones use has increased dramatically since their introduction in the early-to-mid 1980s. About 5 billion mobile phones are currently in use worldwide.

Source: Reuters

Green energy to slash power use of computers

Many experts are looking to slash soaring energy use by ever more powerful computers, data centres and mobile devices.

University of Washington researchers have created a system, called EnerJ, that reduces energy consumption in simulations by up to 50 percent, and potentially by as much as 90 percent.

'We all know that energy consumption is a big problem,' said Luis Ceze, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, who led the study.

'With our system, mobile phone users would notice either a smaller phone, or a longer battery life, or both. Computing centres would notice a lower energy bill.'

The basic idea is to take advantage of processes that can survive tiny errors that happen when, say, voltage is decreased or correctness checks are relaxed, according to a Washington statement.

Some examples of possible applications are streaming audio and video, games and real-time image recognition for augmented-reality applications on mobile devices.

'Image recognition already needs to be tolerant of little problems, like a speck of dust on the screen,' said co-author Adrian Sampson, doctoral student and Ceze's colleague.

Some experts believe we are approaching a limit on the number of transistors that can run on a single microchip.

The team's approach would work like a dimmer switch, letting some transistors run at a lower voltage.

Other ways to use hardware to save energy are lowering the refresh rate and reducing voltage of the memory chip. Simulations of such hardware show that running EnerJ would cut energy by about 20 to 25 percent, on the average.

For one programme, the energy saved was almost 50 percent. Combining the software and hardware methods, researchers believe, could cut power use by about 90 percent.

These findings will be presented next week in San Jose at the Programming Language Design and Implementation annual meeting.

Source: IANS