Embarrassed UTA Alumnus writes "My former college, the University of Texas at Arlington, just made the now-all-to-common announcement that student data — including Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grades, and other information — were on several recently stolen personal computers. The computers were from the home of a Computer Science lecturer, and perhaps more worrisome was the fact that they were the only stolen items in the incident. I had the displeasure of taking one of the lecturer's courses a few years ago, and anyone from his courses since the year 2000 is affected. In response, UTA is providing free 90-day 'fraud monitoring' (not full credit reports), and no disciplinary action has been taken against the lecturer who lost the data." In situations like this, what can a student do when a large institution loses critical private information, makes only a token effort to fix the problem, and lets the people involved continue in practices that may make a similar, or more serious breach occur in the future?

Roland Piquepaille writes "Ohio University physicists have used a simple molecule of chlorophyll taken from spinach to develop a complex nanobiological switch. They used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to image chlorophyll-a and then injected it with a single electron to manipulate the molecule into four positions. The researchers say this biological switch might be used in future applications for green energy, technology and medicine. Read more for additional pictures and references about this spinach-based biological switch."