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Submission + - PCBs cause birds to sing a different tune (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Songbirds living along the Hudson River in New York state are exposed to levels of PCBs that don't kill them but do disrupt the songs they sing, reports a team of researchers from Cornell University. Their study reveals that birds residing in regions with higher environmental PCB contamination levels have higher total blood PCBs, which affects their singing behaviour: the team found these species' songs varied predictably based on their PCB load, and also based upon the type of PCBs. Thus, the scientists suggest that another of the many toxic effects of sublethal environmental PCB pollution are neurological effects that translate into observable behaviour changes that disrupt song quality used by birds to communicate.

Submission + - Extreme Microbe Brewing: The Curse Of Auto-Brewery Syndrome (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CNN reports, "Most beer guts are the result of consuming fermented brew, but a new case study describes a rare syndrome that had one man's gut fermenting brew, not consuming it. It's called gut fermentation syndrome or auto-brewery syndrome, and it's "a relatively unknown phenomenon in Western medicine" according to a study published in July's International Journal of Clinical Medicine. "Only a few cases have been reported in the last three decades" according to Dr. Barbara Cordell, the dean of nursing at Panola College in Carthage, Texas, and Dr. Justin McCarthy, a Lubbock gastroenterologist, the study's authors." More at NPR and Medical Daily.
Books

Is HTML5 the Future of Book Authorship? 116

Posted by samzenpus from the forget-the-paper dept.
occidental writes "Sanders Kleinfeld writes: In the past six years, the rise of the ebook has ushered in three successive revolutions that have roiled and reshaped the traditional publishing industry. Revolution #3 isn't really defined by a new piece of hardware, software product, or platform. Instead, it's really marked by a dramatic paradigm change among authors and publishers, who are shifting their toolsets away from legacy word processing and desktop publishing suites, and toward HTML5 and tools built on the Open Web Platform."
Businesses

StumbleUpon Claims They've Stumbled Onto Profits 31

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the thought-you-were-dead dept.
cagraham writes with this excerpt from Technology Advice: "In an interview with Bloomberg, CEO Mark Bartels says that StumbleUpon is now profitable, and expects to grow their revenue by 33% this year, up to $40 million. The service has been around since 2001, was briefly owned by eBay,and earlier this year cut its staff from 120 to 70. According to Bartels, a huge increase in mobile usage has led to the turn-around, and they now have over 100,000 advertising clients. Still, they didn't provide any hard profit numbers to Bloomberg, so you'll have to take them on their word that they've successfully monetized."

Submission + - Google planning on replacing cookies with AdID (usatoday.com)

Submitted by markjhood2003
markjhood2003 writes: According to a story published in USA Today, an anonymous source at Google familiar with the plan has revealed that Google is developing an anonymous identifier for advertising tracking, replacing the function of third party cookies currently used by most major advertisers. The new AdID supposedly gives consumers more privacy and control over their web browsing, but the ad industry is worried about putting more power in the hands of large technology companies. Sounds like the idea could have some promise, but at this point the proposal is not public so we will probably have to wait until Google reaches out to the industry, government and consumers to provide the details.
Iphone

Crowdfunded Bounty For Hacking iPhone 5S Fingerprint Authentication 148

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the good-luck-with-that dept.
judgecorp writes "There's more than $13,000 pledged for a crowdfunded bounty for bypassing an iPhone 5S's fingerprint reader. The bounty, set up by a security expert and an exploit reseller, requires entrants to lift prints 'like from a beer mug.' It has a website — IsTouchIDHackedYet — and payments are pledged by tweets using #IsTouchIDHackedYet. One drawback: the scheme appears to rely on trust that sponsors will actually pay up." Other prizes include whiskey, books, and a bottle of wine.
The Courts

Charles Carreon Finally Surrenders To the Oatmeal 173

Posted by timothy from the getting-off-easy dept.
First time accepted submitter Guy From V writes "Charles Carreon, zany lawyer and poster-child for the Streisand Effect (sorry Babs) for his lawsuit against The Oatmeal creator Mattew Innman last year in his original role as legal counsel for Funnyjunk, as reported by ArsTechnica, seems to have finally called it quits. In other news, the River Styx has reportedly dropped below 32 degrees Fahrenheit."

Submission + - Crowdfunded Bounty For Hacking An iPhone 5S (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by judgecorp
judgecorp writes: There's more than $3000 pledged for a crowdfunded bounty for bypassing an iPhone 5S's fingerprint reader. The bounty, set up by a security expert and an exploit reseller requires entrants to lift prints "like from a beer mug". It has a website — IsTouchIDHackedYet — and payments are pledged by tweets using #IsTouchIDHackedYet. One drawback, is the scheme appears to rely on trust that sponsors will actually pay up.

Submission + - "Synthetic Tracking" Set To Revolutionise Near-Earth Asteroid Discovery (medium.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Astronomers think that near-Earth Asteroids the size of apartment blocks number in the millions. And yet they spot new ones at the rate of only about 30 a year because these objects are so faint and fast moving. Now astronomers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have developed a technique called synthetic tracking for dramatically speeding up asteroid discovery. Insteads of long exposures in which near-Earth asteroids show up as faint streaks, the new technique involves taking lots of short exposures and adding them together in a special automated way. The trick is to shift each image so that the pixels that record the asteroid are superimposed on top of each other. The result is an image in which the asteroid is sharp point of light against a background of star streaks. They say synthetic tracking has the capability to spot 80 new near Earth asteroids each night using a standard 5 metre telescope. That'll be handy for spotting rocks heading our way before they get too close and for identifying targets for NASA's future asteroid missions.

Submission + - Charles Carreon Finally Surrenders In Epic Legal Battle With The Oatmeal

Submitted by Guy From V
Guy From V writes: Charles Carreon, zany lawyer and poster-child for the Streisand Effect (sorry Babs) for his lawsuit against The Oatmeal creator Mattew Innman last year in his original role as legal counsel for Funnyjunk, as reported by ArsTechnica, seems to have finally called it quits. In other news, the River Styx has reportedly dropped below 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
NASA

Without Plutonium, Deep-Space Probe Missions May Sputter Out 268

Posted by timothy from the not-much-to-go-on dept.
cold fjord writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Most of what humanity knows about the outer planets came back to Earth on plutonium power. ... The characteristics of this metal's radioactive decay make it a super-fuel. ... there is no other viable option. Solar power is too weak, chemical batteries don't last, nuclear fission systems are too heavy. So, we depend on plutonium-238, a fuel largely acquired as by-product of making nuclear weapons. But there's a problem: We've almost run out. 'We've got enough to last to the end of this decade. That's it,' said Steve Johnson, a nuclear chemist at Idaho National Laboratory. And it's not just the U.S. reserves that are in jeopardy. The entire planet's stores are nearly depleted. ... what's left has already been spoken for and then some. ... Political ignorance and shortsighted squabbling, along with false promises from Russia, and penny-wise management of NASA's ever-thinning budget still stand in the way of a robust plutonium-238 production system." The plutonium shortage has been deepening for a long time, leading to some creative solutions. The Wired article alludes to the NASA project underway to create more, but leans toward gloom.

Submission + - Fracked Shale Could Sequester Carbon Dioxide (acs.org)

Submitted by MTorrice
MTorrice writes: The same wells that energy companies drill to extract natural gas from shale formations could become repositories to store large quantities of carbon dioxide. A new computer model suggests that wells in the Marcellus shale, a 600-sq-mile formation in the northeastern U.S. that is a hotbed for gas extraction, could store half the CO2 emitted by the country’s power plants from now until 2030.

Submission + - Last days for China's Space Station Tiangong (spacedaily.com)

Submitted by Big Hairy Ian
Big Hairy Ian writes: When the crew of Shenzhou 10 departed the Tiangong 1 space laboratory in June, Chinese officials declared that Tiangong was now a spacecraft on death row. China's first space laboratory had three months to live. At the end of its lifetime, it would be subjected to a firery re-entry.

We are now approaching the end of the projected lifespan of Tiangong 1. We still don't know the exact date of its execution, which will be carried out when thrusters aboard the module are fired to remove it from orbit. It is expected that Tiangong 1 will re-enter over the Pacific Ocean, where any fragments from the laboratory will fall harmlessly into the water.

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