Millie Kelly was born with a condition that required an immediate operation. During this operation her kidneys started to fail and since she was too small for dialysis machines, doctors told her parents that she was unlikely to live. Luckily for Millie, Dr. Malcolm Coulthard and a colleague tried to build a much smaller kidney machine on their own and they were successful. Her mother said, "It was a green metal box with a few paint marks on it with quite a few wires coming out of it into my daughter - it didn't look like a normal NHS one." The girl was hooked up to the machine over a seven day period to allow her kidneys to recover. Two years later, her mother Rebecca says she is "fit as a fiddle." You should see what Dr. Coulthard can build using a postage stamp, a tuning fork, a lawn chair and a jellyfish.

Rebecca will you marry me? writes "The ESA's Columbus laboratory module was added to the International Space Station in February, but Hewlett-Packard has only now chosen to reveal that the LAN onboard Columbus uses a ProCurve 2524 switch." HP admits it was the "most unusual and demanding" project ProCurve has done yet.

Aeonite writes "As we all learned in English class, there are three points of view one can employ when writing: first person ("I learned"), second person ("You learned"), and third person ("He learned"). You are about to read a review of Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, a book that addresses the use of second-person narration in games and related media. You are also likely to be eaten by a Grue." Read below for the rest of Michael's review.

Rebecca Bug writes "Several Web sites (Wired, eWEEK, The Washington Post) are reporting on Dan Kaminsky's Toorcon discussion of a serious security risk introduced when major ISPs serve ads on error pages. Kaminsky found that the advertising servers are impersonating, via DNS, hostnames within trademarked domains. 'We have determined that these injected servers are, in fact, vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks. Since these servers are being injected into your trademarked domains, their vulnerability can be used to attack your users and your sites,' Kaminsky said, identifying EarthLink, Verizon and Qwest among the ISPs."

Regular contributor Bennett Haselton has written in to say that "The Global Online Freedom Act, introduced last year during a firestorm of controversy over American companies cooperating with totalitarian governments in China and elsewhere, was introduced this month as the Global Online Freedom Act of 2007. When Chris Smith (R-NJ) first introduced the law in 2006, Yahoo was under fire for recently turning over information to Chinese authorities that led to the arrest of a political dissident, Microsoft was attacked for removing pages from MSN Spaces China at the behest of the government, Google was being criticized for removing political sites from search results displayed to China, and Cisco was accused of helping to enable Chinese filtering of the Web. All four corporations testified at a February 2006 House hearing during which Representative Tom Lantos summed up the mood of many of his colleagues by telling the companies, "I do not understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night." The companies protested that they had no choice but to comply with local Chinese laws, but that they were troubled by their own actions, and -- in a rarity for individual tech companies, much less for a chorus -- they all invited the U.S. government to play a bigger role, while being vague about what the role should be."

Mandriva announced it is holding a contest for the best startup and logoff music for Mandriva 2007. The winner gets to have their sound as part of the new release. Technical lead Romain D'Alverny told Newsforge some of the philosophy behind the contest.

earthbound kid writes "Rebecca MacKinnon at Global Voices Online has set up a test of Microsoft's censored blogs on MSN China (see previous Slashdot story) with screenshots. It seems that MSN rejected titling a new blog 'I love freedom of speech, human rights, and democracy' (in Chinese) because 'The title must not contain prohibited language, such as profanity.' MacKinnon managed to use a workaround and got a pro-freedom blog up, for the moment."

bgood writes "A federal judge in Illinois has ruled that a univeral remote garage door opener does not violate the DMCA. "Consumers have a reasonable expectation that they can replace the original product with a competing universal product without violating federal law," Judge Rebecca M. Pallmeyer said. "This was an attempt to expand the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to where it had never gone before," said Andrea B. Greene, attorney for privately held Skylink, the manufacture of the garage door opener in question. "[This is] very good news for consumers." Additional coverage at Wired and Security Focus."

dsmalle writes "Dr. Rebecca Hoyle from Surrey University in England has derived a formula for reverse parking your car. A lot of insurance companies would welcome an initiative to automate parking using this formula I guess. I'm sure somebody must have tried to do this before, so why don't we see this in cars?" New York drivers know that a space that's the length of your car plus six inches is plenty of room. :)

genehack writes "Long-time weblogger Rebecca Blood's The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog is an excellent introduction to the currently white-hot world of weblogs. Blood covers all the bases, from a history of the weblog form, through starting a blog of your own, and finally onto finding (and retaining) readers for your site. The book doesn't offer as much for the veteran blogger, but even the bloggeratti won't go away completely empty-handed -- Blood's weblog history provides a valuable common vocabulary for debating what is and isn't a weblog, and her discussion of weblog ethics should be required reading for anybody who claims to be serious about their weblogging." Genehack's review continues below.