5:00 PM
University of Texas scientists have developed a new procedure to repair severed nerves that could result in patients recovering (and being able to use their limbs) in days or weeks instead of months or years. They found that invertebrates have a superior ability to regenerate nerve axons compared to mammals and discovered how to use a cellular mechanism to mirror how invertebrates repair damage to nerve axons:
http://www.rdmag.com/News/2012/02/Life-Science-Medical-Tech-Neurology-Procedure-repairs-severed-nerves-in-minutes/
A 5th-grade girl accidentally created a new energy storing molecule that can be used as an explosive. She used a molecular modeling set and combined nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon atoms into a molecule never discovered before. The 10-year-old girl said that she never though she would be a published scientific author by age 10:
http://now.humboldt.edu/news/not-your-average-fifth-grade-assignment/
Government officials and military personnel will soon be issued smartphones for work-related activities that can store classified information and within a few months even transmit Top Secret-level classified information over networks. The government doesn't need to build custom hardware but can instead use commercial devices (MUCH cheaper!) with a super-secure verision of Android. This way the government gets to use the latest commercial smartphones and they can even get secure versions of the latest Android operating system within 2 weeks of when Google releases it:
http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/03/tech/mobile/government-android-phones/index.html
Motorola won a *significant* patent battle with Apple in German courts today, getting a "permanent injunction" that forced Apple to remove the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and all 3G-enabled iPads from Apple's German-based store due how Apple uses its iCloud product.
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2012/02/motorola-wins-german-injunction-against.html
After Apple pulled its products, Apple apparently offered enough money that the appeals court lifted the ban. Motorola and Apple had agreed that Apple would pay the FRAND fee for future products, but the licensing dispute was over how much Apple should pay for failing to license Motorola's technology up until now, with Motorola demanding a much higher fee than the FRAND amount:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16877438
Comscore found that 97.9 mil smartphones were owned in December 2011, with Android having 47.3% of the US market (up 2.5% since September 2011) with iOS having 29.6% of the market (up 2.2%). All other smartphone platforms lost market share, with BlackBerry down to 16% (down 2.9%), Windows dropping from 5.6% to 4.7%, and Symbian dropping from 1.8% to 1.4%:
http://www.fiercemobilecontent.com/press-releases/comscore-reports-december-2011-us-mobile-subscriber-market-share-0
Study found that the top 1/4 apps in Android crashed about 1/3 as many times as the top 1/4 iOS apps, while the next quartile Android apps crashed about 1/2 as much as the comparable iOS apps, and in general iPhone/iPad apps crash quite a bit more often than Android apps. But this snapshot is for one point in time and things might be different in different stages of OS releases:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/02/02/does-ios-crash-more-than-android-a-data-dive/