A user writes "The Washington Post is carrying a story about how male bass in the Potomac river are actually producing eggs. The source of this interesting phenomena is currently unknown. Scientists are speculating that it may have something to do with chicken estrogen left over in manure or perhaps even human hormones dumped in the river from sewage treatment plants. Scientists aren't sure if the affected fish are still able to reproduce and the long-term repercussions of this find are unknown."

stuck in a bind asks: "I am currently coding a civilization-type game (in C) but on a galactic scale. OpenGL is used to draw everything so far. However I have been unable to find a decent, nice GUI, practically all of them are coded in C++. The only other options I can think of is coding my own toolkit (too much work, and I would hate to reinvent the wheel here), using SDL to draw 2D bitmaps on top of my OpenGL window. The last option would be to switch to GTK and use the GTK GL widget. What would the educated gamer/programmers of Slashdot recommend?"

An anonymous reader asks: "This question was posted on Ask Slashdot about a week ago: 'If Mac OS X Came to x86, Would You Switch?' This makes me ask why not have Windows run on PowerPC? Windows/PPC would not necessarily have to run on Apple hardware, or at least not exclusively on it. I'm sure their friends at IBM and Motorola would be happy to provide chips to anyone that wanted to make computers to run this new OS. Microsoft could dust off the code from NT4/PPC, add some code from Virtual PC to get Windows/x86 compatibility, and have it up and running in about the same amount of time it would take Apple to get Mac OS X running on common Intel hardware." An additional question comes to mind, however: If Microsoft made this move, how would Intel react?

Slashdot readers both contributed and helped moderate questions for the New Voters Project Presidential Youth Debate. You can read the answers below, but if you'd like to see an expanded introduction, thumbnails of the candidates, and different formatting, go to the Youth Debate page. And that's not all: We're supposed to get candidates' rebuttals on or about October 17, so don't touch that dial!

Our latest Slashdot interview victim... err... guest... is Neal Stephenson, author of (among others) Snow Crash, CRYPTONOMICON, the much-discussed essay, In the Beginning was the Command Line, and more recently a series of books he calls The Baroque Cycle. (Last month Slashdot reviewed the series' third volume, The System of the World.) Now you can ask Neal whatever you want. As usual, we'll send him 10 -12 of the highest-moderated questions and post his answers verbatim when we get them back.

UnknowingFool writes "I'm about to go on a whirlwind trip with my laptop. Currently I'm using a generic laptop bag, but it's not really made for trips like this. I want to see if I can get a good notebook backpack and wanted to know what experiences traveling geeks here have had with notebook backpacks. My criteria: 1) Around $50 2) Functional enough to be used after my trip as a generic backpack 3) Tough enough to survive hauling through airport, yet comfortable enough to endure wearing for hours 4) Enough pockets for my chargers, cables , etc." I've been impressed with some bags from Targus; any good suggestions out there?

A not-so anonymous Anonymous Coward would like to put this query before you: "I'm not a fan of Windows, and never have been, but I am a fan of the x86 architecture. I really like Linux, but there are still a few issues that are keeping me from switching completely. I really like Mac OS X but I don't want to drop $2000 on a computer that is only as fast as an x86 computer at half the price. Darwin, Mac OS X's unix-ish core, has been ported to x86 and Microsoft's upcoming Longhorn OS seems to be disliked by everyone but Microsoft. If Apple released Mac OS X to compete with Longhorn, would you switch?"