The Xbox 360 turns five this week and with no known successor on the horizon for the Xbox, PlayStation or Wii, Cnet reports on the the death of the 5 year console cycle - one of the video game industry's most longstanding truisms. For example, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) came out in 1985, followed by the Super NES in 1991, the Nintendo 64 in 1996, the GameCube in 2001, and the Wii in 2006. But now why should console makers upgrade their offerings? Consumers are still buying their machines by the hundreds of thousands each month, and ramped-up online initiatives are breathing new life into the systems. "I've been saying since 2002," says analyst Michael Pachter, "that the generation [started] in 2005 might be our last one."

To observers like Pachter, a lot of it has to do with the fact that with the current generation of consoles, each company found a way to maximize either the technology behind the devices, or the utility to a wide range of new gamers. For example, while Nintendo's Wii didn't break new ground in its graphics capabilities, its innovative and intuitive Wii controller made it possible to design games that appealed to millions of people who had never considered themselves gamers in the past. By the time that Wii’s juice finally runs out and a more powerful piece of hardware becomes necessary, Pachter sees Nintendo releasing what he calls “Wii Plus” — a Wii with graphics more on par with 360 and PS3, to make it easier for game publishers to port games between all three consoles.

Finally the ability to put high-quality games in the cloud--via services like OnLive or Trion Worlds could mean that the basic concept of requiring gamers to buy sophisticated hardware goes by the wayside. "If the content [is in the cloud]," Pachter concludes, "why would I buy another box? So we really might not see another console."

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Photo: soulja boy playing xbox live by believekevin Flickr Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

The Guardian reports that scientists claim to be a step closer to reversing the aging process after experimental treatment developed by researchers at Harvard Medical School turned weak and feeble old mice into healthy animals by regenerating their aged bodies. "What we saw in these animals was not a slowing down or stabilization of the aging process. We saw a dramatic reversal – and that was unexpected," says Ronald DePinho, who led the study. The Harvard group focused on a process called telomere shortening where each time a cell divides, the telomeres are snipped shorter, until eventually they stop working and the cell dies or goes into a suspended state called "senescence".

Researchers bred genetically manipulated mice that lacked an enzyme called telomerase that stops telomeres getting shorter causing the mice to age prematurely and suffer ailments, including a poor sense of smell, smaller brain size, infertility and damaged intestines and spleens. When the mice were given injections to reactivate the enzyme, it repaired the damaged tissues and reversed the signs of aging raising hope among scientists that it may be possible to achieve a similar feat in humans – or at least to slow down the aging process.

"This could lead to strategies that enhance the regenerative potential of organs as individuals age and so increase their quality of life," added DePinho cautioning that "whether it serves to increase longevity is a question we are not yet in a position to answer."

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Photo: Let's pose,baby! by EmilyJane Photography Flickr Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic

John Boudreau writes in the Mercury News that during its just-completed fiscal year, Apple broke four consecutive quarterly revenue and profit records and amid the worst recession in decades, hired thousands while others cut jobs, but what most distinguishes Apple is that while other tech titans spent 2010 cutting costs and acquiring new technology through mergers, this $65 billion company has been relentless in innovating like a startup and ruthless in promoting technologies that disrupt its own product lines. ""It's been an awesome year. The frequency of new stuff just boggles the mind," says Charles Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Co. "There is no company that is remotely close to what Apple is doing. They are the Energizer Bunny."

Some companies, such as Microsoft, whose Windows operating system has been a franchise moneymaker, are too focused on protecting successful products and not on the next new disruptive innovation says Wolf "They can't envision another profit stream that would be that important, so they go into protective mode." But Apple is unafraid to cannibalize or kill its own products. "No company is more willing to kill its own babies," writes Boudreau. "Rather than wait for competitors to draw the knife, co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs does the deed himself."

In September 2005, Apple killed off the popular iPod Mini to make way for the the iPod Nano; Apple openly acknowledges that the iPhone is cannibalizing its iPods -- and they don't seem to care; and the iPad tablet could ultimately threaten its core laptop business. "[Apple] has a different cultural mind-set," concludes Wolf. "They are acting like a startup, though they are becoming a $100 billion company."

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Photo: Nikon D80 Apple by Abhijit Tembhekar Flickr Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

Ellen Nakashima writes in the Washington Post that after the intelligence community came under heavy criticism after 9/11 for having failed to share data, officials sought to make it easier for various agencies to share sensitive information giving intelligence analysts wider access to government secrets but WikiLeaks has proved that there's a downside to better information-sharing. "One of the consequences [of 9/11] is you gave a lot of people access to the dots," says Jeffrey H. Smith, a former CIA general counsel. "At least one of the dots, apparently, was a bad apple."

The director of U.S. national intelligence, James Clapper, says he believes the WikiLeaks releases will have a "chilling effect" on information-sharing. "We have to do a much better job of auditing what is going on on any [intelligence community] computer," he said this month. "And so if somebody's downloading a half-million documents . . . we find out about it contemporaneously, not after the fact." To prevent further breaches, the Pentagon announced Sunday it had ordered the disabling a feature that allows material to be copied onto thumb drives or other removable devices on its classified computer systems and the DOD will limit the number of classified systems from which material can be transferred to unclassified systems requiring that two people be involved in moving data from classified to unclassified systems.

The bottom line is that recent leaks "have blown a hole" in the framework by which governments guard their secrets. According to British journalist Simon Jenkins "words on paper can be made secure, electronic archives not."

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Photo: The Thinker by Mike Willis Flickr Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic

The Guardian reports that when Wikileaks came under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack on Sunday night from an unidentified hacker, it used Amazon's "Elastic Cloud Computing" (EC2) service as a convenient way of evading the attack. DDOS attacks typically force sites off the net unless they have enormous bandwidth at their disposal or highly effective countermeasures. Wikileaks, being small and struggling for funds, has neither.

In theory, if the US government decides that WikiLeaks has broken the law in publishing federal intelligence data, the US could move to have WikiLeaks booted from such US-based servers but WikiLeaks could simply fall back on its core servers — presumably still hosted by "bulletproof" Swedish hosting outfit PRQ — and the feds would take a PR hit. "It's unlikely that Wikileaks views Amazon's EC2 service as a permanent solution to its hosting needs," writes Lawrence Latif at the Register.

"However its choice of Amazon is perhaps the ultimate single finger salute at the US government." In an added twist, Wikileaks is also using software from Seattle-based outfit Tableau to visually map its trove of leaked diplomatic cables. Tableau grew out of a project run by the US Department of Defense.

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Photo: The Cloud by Gueorgui Tcherednitchenko Flickr Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic