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The work of a Stanford ant biologist, and a computer scientist have found that harvester ants on the hunt for food, use a similar method to that of the protocols used to control traffic on the Internet.

Deborah Gordon, a biology professor at Stanford, have been studying ants for more than 20 years. When Gordon discovered how the harvester ant colonies were sending out more ants to get food, she called in Balaji Prabhakar, who is a professor of computer science at Stanford, who is an expert on how files are transferred on a computer network.

At first, he didn't know why Gordon had called him, as ants had nothing to do with his field, but the next day, he realised:

Waiting for the next Samsung smartphone or tablet? Well, you could be waiting just a bit longer than expected due to Apple's decisive win over Samsung on Friday. Since Samsung was found to be infringing on basically every single patent Apple asserted, Samsung will likely redesign phones and tablets that are currently in the works to avoid being sued again.

"The verdict is worse for Samsung than what many had anticipated, and it will have to change some products in its pipeline," Chang In Whan, president of Seoul-based KTB Asset Management Co., said. "There could be delays in developing and releasing new models, which together with a potential sales ban could weigh on corporate value."

However, a spokesman for Samsung has said that the verdict won't affect the current product launch schedule. Being forced to do things that are radically different from Apple could, in the end, wind up better for Samsung and the consumer market as a whole. If they have to reinvent the UI or physical design of the phone, they may come up with something far superior.

Here's a bit of a weird one, and a sign of the changing times. A park in Israel is designed to teleport visitors back to ancient biblical times so that they can see how people of the Old Testament lived. Now, the donkeys that are used for transportation have been outfitted with Wi-Fi hotspots, something I'm pretty confident they didn't have back then.

The device is hung from the donkey's neck like a feedbag and provides wireless Internet access so users can surf the web, update Facebook and Twitter, or send e-mails to family and friends. "You take some pictures, you want to change your picture on Facebook - you can do it," Goldberg, the park manager, said.

Peter Scherr, a visitor from New York: "It has been used as a working animal for 5000 years," he learned, reading from a Wikipedia page on his iPad. "There are more than 40 million donkeys in the world. That's a lot of donkeys!"

Your broadband Internet connection may get a little bit more expensive if the FCC goes ahead with a plan to tax it. Right now, the FCC has asked for comment on several different proposals designed to raise money for the Connect America Fund, a fund used to bring broadband access to rural Americans, and a tax is among the proposals.

AT&T, Sprint, and Google have all supported the tax, likely because it would increase their revenues. The tax would be similar to the fee already paid on landlines and cellular phones. This fee goes to the Universal Service Fund, a fund that was designed to ensure every person in America had access to phone service.

"Today we propose three goals for contribution reform: efficiency, fairness, and sustainability," Genachowski, chairman of the FCC, said. "And we underscore that any reforms to the contribution system must safeguard core Commission objectives, including the promotion of broadband innovation, investment, and adoption."

Apple currently have the new iPhone close to release (if all rumors, and their event is to be believed to be the launch event for the iPhone), a smaller, 7.85-inch iPad and now a newly redesigned iPod touch coming out.

GizChina is reporting with photos of what they're calling a new case for the next-gen iPod touch, showing a less-tapered design. The case shows off a wider rear camera hole, which could be just big enough to allow an LED flash to be added. There's still the "mystery hole" that the Macotakara report noted on, which is located in the lower corner of the rear shell versus the center.

Flash Memory Summit 2012 - It really didn't matter where you were standing at Flash Memory Summit, within ten feet was a product with either LSI or LSI SandForce silicon.

For years, LSI has played a significant role in several markets, video processing, encoding and so forth, but their largest presence has been enterprise storage. SandForce, before joining LSI was known for their consumer SF-1200 and SF-2200 controllers, but these products were created from their enterprise counterparts, SF-1500 and SF-2500. The enterprise SandForce parts were successful on their own, but by adding three letters to the SandForce name, LSI SandForce flash processor units are now displacing the competition from the enterprise sector.

These are not DDR3 DIMMs, they are Viking SATADIMMs using LSI SandForce SF-2500 Series FPUs. These products draw power from the DRAM bus, but are enterprise SSDs in an innovative form factor that allows for unprecedented scalability.

It looks as though some specs and images have leaked of HTC's upcoming Proto handset. The photos show off the Proto's change to HTC's usual chassis that the One series sports.

The picture above shows off a matte black finish, with capacitive Android navigation buttons. As you can see, there's no front-facing camera, so it looks like we won't be doing any video calling or 'selfies' for the social network of your choice. HTC's Proto sports Beats Audio branding, which means the company seems to still be working with Beats, for now.

The Proto should be close to the One V when it comes to its innards, expecting to sport a 4-inch WVGA screen, 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, and a Snapdragon dual-core 1GHz processor. It should measure in at 9.62mm in thickness.

I'm sure most of our readers have been following the legal proceedings in the Apple v Samsung lawsuit. Yesterday, Apple was awarded just over $1 billion in damages for Samsung willfully infringing on their patents. However, Apple's Tim Cook says in a memo to employees that it wasn't about the money, it was "about values."

The memo, sent to Apple corporate employees, is an interesting read:

It's a sad day for the space community. Pioneer astronaut Neil Armstrong has passed away at age 82. For those of you who don't know who Neil Armstrong is, a little back-story is in order. Armstrong commanded the Apollo 11 mission, the first space mission of any country to land humans on the moon.

Once on the surface of the moon, he spoke the famous words that will forever be used to describe a great achievement that advances science for the better of the world: "That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind." Armstrong was one of only 12 Americans to ever set foot on the moon.

His family reported the death at around 2:45PM ET and issued the following statement:

Hot on the heels of their loss to Apple in their patent case, Samsung have unveiled a teaser video for their upcoming Windows 8 hybrid device. The video below shows off some of the upcoming features of the Windows 8-based device.

The video is quite the tease, with just mere seconds of glimpses of the device itself. Samsung have used images of clockwork solar systems, Old Master diagrams, and mathematical formulae, to tease their upcoming product. Samsung uses all of this, and calls it an "evolution of technology".

The device looks to be similar to current notebooks, sporting a headphone port and other inputs that are usually found on tablets on its upper edge. Things like an USIM slot, a microSD reader, and USB port. There was a Series 5 Hybrid Samsung device shown off earlier this year, featuring a detachable 11-inch, 1080p tablet screen that magnetically connected to a keyboard dock.

American Airlines Flight 1318 - High in the skies, somewhere between Dallas and Indianapolis we would like to interrupt your morning with this special announcement.

Just moments ago we received confirmation that Kingston has released firmware version 5.0.3, AKA The TRIM FIXING FIRMWARE, for the HyperX and HyperX 3K!!!!!!!!!

Using Kingston's Toolbox, a free SSD utility located on the Kingston's support website, HyperX and HyperX 3K owners will be the first to gain access to the new firmware that fixes TRIM in Windows.

Flash Memory Summit 2012 - Micron was demonstrating their newest Micron-designed PCIe SSD controller at the Flash Memory Summit. This controller has allowed Micron to develop the P320h standard PCIe SSD, but also take a new approach to PCIe SSDs.

There are two approaches, the standard SSD that plugs into the PCIe slot, and then a device that looks strikingly similar to a typical 2.5" SSD.

This standard looking SSD is actually connected via a PCIe connection. Even though the connector resembles a standard connection, it is actually an extension of PCIe which allows for superb latency and much higher throughput speed.

I woke up this morning to my wife sitting across from me asking "did you hear about the Apple vs. Samsung case? Apple won". I immediately grabbed my Galaxy Note (wink) and read up on it. Today is a dark day for technology, my dear readers.

The jury on the case found that Samsung were guilty on infringing six out of the seven Apple patents, with the results of this pushing Samsung to pay just over $1 billion in damages to Apple. On Samsung's side, the jury ruled that Apple did not infringe on Samsung's patents with their iPhone 3G and 3GS phones, and have awarded Samsung absolutely nothing in damages.

The jury ruled that Samsung infringed on Apple's '381 bounceback patent, with all of their products in question, all 21 of them. In regards to the '915 patent on pinch-to-zoom, the jury ruled that all but three of Samsung's device infringed on the patent, and even worse, found that Samsung's executives either knew, or should have known their products were indeed infringing on the said patents.

Flash Memory Summit 2012 - NVMe is an emerging specification that looks to take over both SCSI and SATA as the go-to specification for SSDs. This new method of accessing SSDs allows for performance above and beyond the current methods of accessing storage. Many of the performance limitations of flash solutions are actually being held back by archaic storage interfaces, and the advent of the NVMe specification looks to remedy that situation.

Of course the first step to achieving this is working silicon, in the form of controllers that are already integrated into usable solutions. IDT has rose to the challenge, beating many others to actually producing the first operating devices capable of supporting this solution that has been in development for years. This demo unit had a rather large fan over the processor to keep it cool during operation.

This board is the higher capacity version that supports more NAND packages onboard a PCIe gen 3.0 compliant interface. The sheer aggregation of flash dies allows for a more linear scaling in performance from the device, leveraging 32 channels via the 89HF32P08AG3 controller.

Computer sales have been slow, especially considering we are in the third quarter, a time when sales are usually peaking due to back to school shopping and other factors. This slow down in sales has caused a drop in demand for DRAM and quite the stock pile of RAM back at the factories. Most have pulled in production, but they still have a 3 month surplus.

Hopefully, Windows 8 PCs and the release of Windows 8 will drive PC sales back up to where they should be. This should help clear out the back up as sales pick up. Some sources have reported OEM PC factories have a surplus of 6 months. This huge pile up is bad for the industry but good for consumers looking to upgrade their RAM.

Some sources are saying that RAM prices could be 10-15 percent lower in October than they are today--good news if you need to expand your RAM offerings or are looking to give RAM as a gift. Elpida and Rexchip Electronics have cut production by 25-30 percent in order to stop prices from dipping even further.

We may just have a piece of good news here for users of the Android Facebook app. As most of you know, the thing sucks. I'm not going to use pretty language like "subpar" or other sanitized language when describing it. Facebook updated the iOS version of the app with a completely rewritten version that is faster, more stable, and generally better than the previous iteration--and the previous iteration was still better than the current Android app.

Facebook management has come to realize just how bad the Android app is and is working on getting their employees to fix it. But, if they don't use it, they won't really know just how bad it is or where the problems are. This is where Facebook's new "policy" comes into play. I say "policy" as it's not an official policy, rather a suggestion (with some coercion).

Facebook is suggesting employees, and has even ordered a few, to give up their iPhone and use an Android phone and the Facebook app all day, every day. Hopefully if they are stuck with the terrible app, they will become more interested in fixing it up to where it is at least competitive with the iOS version.

If you've ever been camping and sat around a campfire, you know how hot your face can get. While in war, many soldiers wear camouflage face paint. The issue with the current face paint is that it is a concoction of oil and wax which, when exposed to high temperatures such as a bomb blast, melts and burns the skin.

Furthermore, any face paint is required to have Deet, an insect repellent, included in the formula so that soldiers don't get bitten to death in jungles and other settings. The problem with Deet is that it is highly flammable, not exactly something you want exposed to high heat. This is where the scientists come in.

Scientists have invented a new face paint which "resists intense heat from bombs" and can resist temperatures of up to 600*C for up to 15 seconds. Considering bomb blasts last just two or three seconds, this face paint can protect soldiers' skin from the heat produced by the blast.

"Planetary Annihilation brings RTS gameplay to a new generation of players in a way that's never been seen before." Sick of all those games that are produced by massive publishing companies? Thankfully, Kickstarter has come along and provided a way for games to get funding without having to get the OK from these giant companies.

This allows games such as Planetary Annihilation, a game which the developers have said likely wouldn't get funding from a big studio, to be created, the way the developers and players want them to be. At their Kickstarter page, the developers, Uber Entertainment Inc, have provided a video and full description of the game:

Flash Memory Summit 2012 - Since we just happened to be in town at the world's only dedicated NAND flash event, we decided a little extracurricular overclocking was in order. Corsair provided us with some of the hottest new technology on the market today, AX1200i, the world's first all digital power supply, eight Neutron GTX SSDs, the world's first Link_A_Media Devices SSDs and two Dominator Platinum 2400C9 kits. Areca tied it all together with a brand new, unreleased ARC-1882ix-12 with 4GB of DDR3 cache, a true PCIe 3.0 RAID controller.

We managed to smash the record with a result of 55,340 PCMarks. PCMark Vantage is the premier storage benchmarking suite used worldwide, so to break the overall record isn't easy.

As per usual when we set out for taking a record there is a large amount of Liquid Nitrogen used, bringing us down to -130C on the processor to allow for much higher CPU clocks. Quite a bit of preparation and test runs went into this adventure, with Mike Guava and Charles Wirth, AKA Fugger, from XtremeSystems taking point.

It's about time that someone went and made a 7990. We've been hearing that AMD has them coming for a long time now, but they have failed to deliver. That is, until today. PowerCooler has announced the world's first dual-Tahiti GPU and is calling it the 7990. Does this mean that we may finally start seeing them from other manufacturers?

For right now, PowerCooler is billing this card as the first and only 7990 in the world. The specifications are pretty beefy and really provide what everyone was expecting. The Devil 13 HD7990 has default settings at 925MHz engine clocks and 1375MHz memory clocks and sports 6GB of GDDR5.