Geek News

Fake Apple devices have been making the rounds for years, but it's rare that they have much sway in the US -- although it looks like one team of bootleggers had a surprising amount of success. Jianhua Li, a Chinese man living in the US on a student visa, has pleaded guilty to charges he trafficked in more than 40,000 counterfeit electronic devices from China between 2009 and 2014, including iPads and iPhones. All told, he received a whopping $1.1 million in payments -- no mean feat for several years of contraband. He wasn't alone in the plot, either, and the scheme was relatively elaborate. Three others (Andreina Becerra, Rosario LaMarca and Roberto Volpe) working with Li have already pleaded guilty. The group tried hard to disguise their activities, according to the Justice Department -- they shipped the counterfeit labels separate from the devices to avoid border control, and used carefully crafted money deposits and transfers to hide the source of the ill-gotten revenue...

Ever since cloning produced Dolly the sheep , scientists have copied a slew of mammals ranging from dogs to ponies. Primates, however, have been elusive -- until now. Chinese researchers have successfully cloned a macaque monkey fetus twice, producing sister monkeys Hua Hua and Zhong Zhong using the same basic method used to create Dolly. The team removed the nucleus from monkey eggs and replaced it with DNA from the fetus, implanting the resulting eggs in female monkeys for them to give birth. The process wasn't easy. It took 127 eggs and 79 embryos to get these results, and it still required a fetus to work (Dolly was cloned from an adult). Still, it reflects progress in cloning science. The team managed the feat by injecting both a form of mRNA and an inhibitor, the combination of which improved the development of blastocysts (the structures that form the embryo) and the pregnancy rate for transplanted embryos. Both baby macaques are healthy, the researchers said, and genet...