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Snapped undersea cables off the coast of Egypt have cut bandwidth in India to half its normal capacity. Users from Bangladesh to Egypt have been affected, and even Dubai’s stock exchange experienced some problems late Wednesday. Big companies with backup plans probably won’t be hurt too badly, but the outsourcing industry could experience some hiccups, as all those administrative and customer-service-related tasks could slow.

Officials aren’t sure what caused the damage, though a ship’s anchor was cited as a possibility. One story contends that a ship was instructed to moor in an unusual spot off the coast of Alexandria, and dropped anchor right on the cable. Oops.

The former CTO of the One Laptop Per Child initiative, which builds inexpensive notebook computers for kids in developing countries, now plans to build an even cheaper version. Mary Lou Jensen hopes to succeed where OLPC failed: She wants to produce laptops that sell for under $100. Way under, in fact. She says she should be able to commercialize one with a price tag of only $75. Given that the price of the OLPC version is currently north of $180, this might sound unrealistic.

But that price point may just be a long-term goal for Jensen’s new company, Pixel Qi. They’ll also be pursuing the idea of bringing sunlight-readable screens to other products, including laptops, cellphones and digital cameras.

Via : ArsTechnica

A blogger with the Public Library of Science, or PLoS, which is an open-access, Web-based family of journals covering biology, medicine, genetics and more, has an interesting post about how new work may be disseminated in the future. While traditional publications still rule—most researchers shoot for Science, Nature, Physical Review Letters or the other top journals—the open model is also making progress. And that’s good news for the interested public. You can actually read about all this publicly-funded research for free instead of paying $20 or sometimes $30 for a single article online.

Yet it may also be that publishing moves out of the single-paper realm entirely. New projects like JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) and SciVee, which we’ve written about previously, could lead to scientists posting their work in a multimedia format. If that means accurate, vivid animations like these, we’re all for it.