grrlscientist writes "While living and working as a marine biologist in Maldives, Charles Anderson noticed sudden explosions of dragonflies at certain times of year. He explains how he carefully tracked the path of a plain, little dragonfly called the Globe Skimmer, Pantala flavescens, only to discover that it had the longest migratory journey of any insect in the world."

Deep Packet Inspection, or DPI, is at the heart of the debate over Network Neutrality — this relatively new technology threatens to upset the balance of power among consumers, ISPs, and information suppliers. An anonymous reader notes that the Canadian Privacy Commissioner has published a Web site, for Canadians and others, to educate about DPI technology. Online are a number of essays from different interested parties, ranging from DPI company officers to Internet law specialists to security professionals. The articles are open for comments. Here is the CBC's report on the launch.

A "trailblazing" Norfolk town has begun heating many of its buildings - including the schools - by burning oil made from melted-down cow and pig carcasses. The strategy is described as "equal or lower in carbon footprint than natural gas." Should schools have to offer vegetarian heating?

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on the different flavors of Turing Test being used by AI researchers to judge the human-ness of their creations. While some strive only to meet the 'appearance Turing Test' and build or animate characters that look human, others are investigating how robots can be made to elicit the same brain activity in a person as interacting with a human would."

theodp writes "Using Yahoo's free e-mail service to conduct government business was good enough for Sarah Palin. And now the Washington Times reports that Obama staffers turned to Gmail on Inauguration Day to conduct their business. Those wishing to contact members of the incoming Obama administration were instructed to contact staffers at wh.LASTNAME@gmail.com until official White House e-mail addresses became available."

Sol-Invictus writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: The ULE scheduler is now the default in GENERIC kernels for amd64 and i386 architectures. The ULE scheduler significantly improves performance on multicore systems for many workloads. Support for using DTrace inside the kernel has been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework. A new and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client. Boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices. KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3. DVD-sized media for the amd64 and i386 architectures."