Will F. Johnston writes "Voters in AK, AR, AZ, CO, DC, FL, GA, HI, IN, KY, LA, MI, MS, OH, PA, TN, TX, and VA must register to vote by tomorrow, October 6, in order to vote in November. Other deadlines coming up soon: IL and NM are October 7. MT is Oct. 6, but you can do same-day registration at the elections office. UT is also Oct. 6, but you can register in person until the 20th."

Steve Daley writes "Prism window glass like Luxfer was big back in the 19th century, but now it seems to be making a high-tech comeback in Japan, where several companies are commercializing similar technology that gets enough natural light into factories and offices to do away with electric lighting. It's easy on the pocket and the planet."

The Los Angeles Times is reporting on a new California policy to match the DNA of suspected criminals to the criminal's family members in order to use them as investigative leads. Use of partial DNA matching is drawing fire over privacy concerns from citizens and law experts. FBI officials are hesitating as well, though their concern is that the courts will not accept such techniques. Quoting: "The policy, which takes effect immediately, is designed to work like this: The state's crime lab will tell police about DNA profiles that come up during routine searches of California's offender database and closely resemble, but do not match, the DNA left at a crime scene. (Previously, the state refused to tell police about these partial matches.) When such partial matches do not surface or fail to produce a lead, a more customized familial search can be done in which computer software scans the database proactively for possible relatives. The software measures the chance of two people being related based on the rarity of the markers they share."

jellybeans writes "MadPenguin.org takes a peek into the world of Linux as it looks going forward. "I hear this argument all the time. How companies trying to make Linux more accessible, through any means necessary, so long as they abide by the GPL, are working against the vision of Linux from the beginning. This is asinine. The vision, based on my own interpretation of Linux was always about choice."

ChromaticDragon writes "Astronomers have crunched some numbers on a galaxy to discover that its rotation can be fully explained by the gravity of the observable matter — in effect, this galaxy seems to lack dark matter. This shouldn't come as a total surprise given that one of the stronger observations of Dark Matter was the Bullet Cluster where supposedly a good deal of Dark Matter and good old fashion regular matter had separated."