The sense of smell is a surprisingly important way for rats -- and humans -- to gather information about their environment. The brain is able to adjust automatically to the demands of distinguishing between small differences in smell, new research shows.

Blog: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has dropped a lawsuit it filed on behalf of a group that posted a parody video of ...

When Viacom took down 100,000 videos from YouTube claiming they were infringing, one problem was that there were a number of false positives where they forced videos offline that weren't infringing at all. In one case, the EFF and others sued over the removal of a parody of the Colbert report, and Viacom bizarrely claimed that it hadn't sent a takedown about it despite a ton of evidence that it had. Eventually Viacom admitted that it had, in fact, accidentally sent the takedown. In response, the company has convinced the EFF to drop the lawsuit after promising to manually review all videos before sending takedown notices, training those who review the videos to understand fair use and publicly stating that it has no problem with videos that are "creative, newsworthy or transformative" and are "a limited excerpt for non commercial purposes." In other words, it's basically everything the EFF wanted, and now we'll see if Viacom lives up to the promise.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Handhelds

As technology continues to make doctors' lives a bit easier (not to mention saving a few in the process), we've got yet another device that can detect a potentially fatal problem long before mere humans can figure it out. The Indian-based Infrascanner is a "handheld, non-invasive, near-infrared (NIR) based mobile imaging device used to detect brain hematoma at the site of injury" within the most important stage of pre-analysis. The device could also aid in the decision to proceed with "other tests such as head Computed Tomography (CT) scans" when not "facilitating surgical intervention decisions." While the methods behind the scanning are quite sophisticated, the unit uses diffused optical tomography to convert the light differential data seen in the local concentrations of hemoglobin into "interpretative scientific results." Potentially best of all, however, is just how close this thing is to actually hitting hospital wards, as it's simply missing the oh-so-coveted FDA stamp of approval before it can see commercial use.

[Via MedGadget]

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Students who borrow money to pay for school are no strangers to junk mail and telemarketing calls from loan companies. Now, some senators are concerned that the companies are getting their marketing and contact information from a government database of borrowers to which they shouldn't have access. Borrowers' records in the database are only supposed to be accessed by companies that have their permission, or that have a financial relationship with them, but the amount of solicitations and marketing materials many students receive from a wide array of companies makes it fairly obvious that this isn't the case. This story comes amid a wider scandal in the student-loan industry, with officials from several schools accused of receiving kickbacks from loan companies, and allegations of lax oversight from a government department stacked with ex-employees from the companies they're supposed to be watching over. But the security hole is also representative of the government's lack of interest in protecting personal data. If federal and state governments can't be bothered to secure the information, it's probably unreasonable to expect them to do anything to make sure the private sector takes security seriously either.