Early this year, the International Court of Justice handed down a ruling that brought at least a temporary halt to Japan's whaling program. Normally, an international court case isn't science news. In this case, however, the whaling was justified under a clause of the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling that allowed whales to be killed “for the purposes of scientific research." And, as detailed in a perspective in this week's edition of Science, the court decision came down to whether Japan was actually doing any science.

Australia, which brought the case, argued that science is an international activity, and subject to some properties that hold no matter where it's done:

(i) defined and achievable objectives; (ii) use of appropriate methods, including use of lethal methods only where objectives cannot be answered through alternate methods; and (iii) proper assessment and response through the community of scientists.

Japan, in contrast, argued that if some research resulted from its whaling, the whole effort should be considered "for the purposes of scientific research."

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The FBI easily found the main server of the now-defunct Silk Road online drug-selling site, and didn't need the National Security's help, federal prosecutors said in a Friday court filing.

The underground drug website, which was shuttered last year as part of a federal raid, was only accessible through the anonymizing tool Tor. The government alleges that Ross Ulbricht, as Dread Pirate Roberts, "reaped commissions worth tens of millions of dollars” through his role as the site's leader. Trial is set for later this year.

The authorities said Friday that the FBI figured out the server's IP address through a misconfiguration in the site's login window. They said that a US warrant wasn't required to search the Icelandic server because "warrants are not required for searches by foreign authorities of property overseas."

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So far, the largest biofuels efforts have involved the age-old process of converting sugars in plants into ethanol. If biofuels are ever to make a significant dent in fossil fuel use, however, they're probably going to have to be made from something that can't also be used as food (either by us or our farm animals.) That means working with something other than sugar.

The leading candidate is cellulose, a robust polymer of sugars that give plants the strength to grow several hundred feet tall. Breaking down cellulose into sugars (which can then be converted into ethanol) is not easy to do economically, although a lot of research has gone into finding processes that work. A leading candidate for this is to use the enzymes from bacteria and fungi that normally decompose wood. The US Energy Information Agency has announced that the nation's first commercial-scale plant based on this approach has just opened in Iowa.

"Project Liberty," the result of a joint venture between US-based POET and the Netherlands' Royal DSM, will have the capacity to process over 750 tons of corn stover each day. Stover is the inedible parts of the plant: husks, cobs, the stalk and leaves. Although intended to work with corn (hence the Iowa location), it's possible that the facility could be used for other sources of cellulose, like grasses.

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The Hitachi H1 VeinID finger scanner is the size of a tennis ball. You can see the SIM card slot in the base of the device. Barclays

Barclays has announced the arrival of personal biometric scanners to keep your Internet banking security firmly under your thumb.

Gone are the days of fumbling with desktop card readers, phone authentication, and PIN codes as a finger scanner will be available to wealthy corporate banking clients from 2015, and the rest of us surely soon after.

The device, developed with Hitachi's Finger Vein Authentication Technology (VeinID), will read the subdermal patterns of the client's finger vasculature in order to combat identity fraud. Vein pattern recognition holds several advantages over fingerprint scanning, including reliability and speed, with the authentication taking only two seconds.

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Very tense, huh? Maybe because her roommate is ON FIRE?!

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});Because I am a particularly awful person, I started my first playthrough of The Sims 4 by trapping one of its virtual citizens in a four-wall box with no doors. This simple, horrible power has been available in Sims games for over 15 years, and I am confident in claiming that everybody who has played the series has done this at least once, if just to test the weirdness boundaries of EA and Maxis’ dollhouse-management series.

Used to be, doing this resulted in your Sims soiling themselves and swaying awkwardly until keeling over. That’s still the case, only now it comes with the added awfulness of the game outright telling you how your character feels about the predicament. Any Sim you control in The Sims 4 has his or her portrait displayed in a corner of the screen at all times, and those come with giant, white letters, and a color to match, explaining exactly what the simulated person is feeling and why.

Our test case, Ashley, turned “very uncomfortable” within a few hours of game time, owing to a mix of sleeplessness and a fetid stench; 18 hours later, she turned “desolate,” indicating that she’d grown very lonely in her den of sadness. Roughly 24 hours after that, she fell over and vanished, her body and her emotions lost to the sands of time.

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Research led by experts at Harvard University shows technology can be used to send a simple mental message from one person to another without any contact between the two.

Researchers believe that California blue whales have recovered in numbers and the population has returned to sustainable levels.

Who needs the FBI party van when you can just order CALEA take out? FBI

Not every Internet provider can handle the demands of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant or law enforcement subpoena for data. For those companies, Zack Whittaker reports on ZDNet, the answer is to turn to a shadowy class of companies known as “trusted third parties” to do the black bag work of complying with the demands of the feds.

Under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), phone companies and Internet providers can charge back the government for their efforts in responding to warrants. AT&T charges the CIA more than $10 million per year for access to its phone call metadata. But smaller ISPs who aren’t frequently hit with warrants can’t afford to keep the infrastructure or manpower on-hand to respond to requests—so they sign up with a “trusted third party” capable of doing the work as an insurance policy against such requests.

Companies such as Neustar, Yaana Technologies, and Subsentio contract with smaller providers and reap the profits from charging federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies for the data. Neustar and Yaana are also essentially private intelligence companies, providing large-scale data capture and analytics (though probably not on the scale of NSA’s Xkeyscore.) Neustar is also in the phone number portability business, and owns a number of the new top level domains approved by ICANN.

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Clive Darra

In a Security and Exchange Commission filing on Friday, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba said it is looking to raise $24.3 billion dollars in its upcoming initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange. Alibaba aims to sell off 368 million shares of its company at $66 per share, according to its SEC filing.

If Alibaba is able to raise $24.3 billion in its IPO, it would make it one of the biggest tech IPOs in history. Similarly large IPOs in the US have included Visa racking up $17.9 billion in 2008 and a previously de-listed General Motors coming back in 2010 to raise $15.8 billion.

A Reuters source said that Alibaba aims to kick off its IPO next week, although the Wall Street Journal reported this morning that the company will likely offer a “friends and family” deal first, selling off pieces of the company to insiders before making the shares more widely available. This practice was common during the first tech boom in the late '90s and early '00s, but it has become less popular in recent years.

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Nvidia has sued Samsung and Qualcomm in a pair of legal actions claiming that the processors used in a range of Samsung products—including the Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy Note Edge, Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 3, and Galaxy S4 smartphones, and Galaxy Tab S and Galaxy Note Pro tablets—violate seven different GPU patents.

Nvidia has sued Samsung and Qualcomm in the Delaware federal court and is seeking unspecified damages. Simultaneously, the company is asking the International Trade Commission to impose an import ban on Samsung products made in South Korea, Vietnam, and China.

The GPU firm's complaint claims that the Qualcomm Adreno GPUs, found in its range of Snapdragon systems-on-chip, ARM Mali GPUs, and Imagination PowerVR GPUs, both found in Samsung's own Exynos SoCs, all violate Nvidia patents on graphics technology. The patents cover various core GPU technologies, such as multithreaded processing of graphical data, graphics pipelines that include shaders and rasterizers, and programmable GPUs.

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Network neutrality protest at Google headquarters. Steve Rhodes

Common Cause and more than 50 other advocacy groups this week called on Google to end its affiliation with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that has pushed state laws limiting the rights of cities and towns to create community-owned broadband networks. ALEC also opposes network neutrality rules that Google used to be a staunch supporter of and last month urged the FCC to quickly approve Comcast’s purchase of Time Warner Cable without imposing any regulatory conditions on the merger.

In a letter to Google’s top executives, Common Cause et al wrote that “Over the last year, hundreds of thousands of Americans have signed petitions asking Google to end its ALEC membership because of their concerns about the harmful role ALEC has played in our democratic process… The public knows that the ALEC operation—which brings state legislators and corporate lobbyists behind closed doors to discuss proposed legislation and share lavish dinners—threatens our democracy. The public is asking Google to stop participating in this scheme.”

Common Cause also complained about ALEC’s nonprofit status to the IRS in 2012, saying the group “massively underreports” lobbying it does on behalf of corporate members.

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Fossils unearthed in Argentina represent the most complete giant sauropod dinosaur ever discovered.

We are currently on the verge of PCIe transition. Nearly every SSD controller vendor has shown or at least talked about their upcoming PCIe designs, and the first ones should enter the market in early 2015. In the meantime, there are a couple of existing PCIe drives for the early adopters, namely Samsung XP941 and Plextor M6e, and a variety of RAID-based PCIe SSDs like the OCZ RevoDrive 350. We already reviewed the 512GB Samsung XP941 in May and found it to be the fastest client SSD on the market, but today we are back with the 128GB and 256GB models along with OCZ's RevoDrive 350.

Zach Copley

On Thursday two prominent Bitcoin supporters, Robert Faiella and Charles Shrem, pleaded guilty to federal charges in a Federal District Court in Manhattan. Faiella, 54, was also known as BTCKing and admitted to operating an unlicensed money transmitting business on Silk Road. Shrem, 24, was formerly the CEO of BitInstant and is one of the founding members of the Bitcoin Foundation. He pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting the operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business.

A district court press release says that both men were accused on the basis that they, “knowingly transmitted money intended to facilitate criminal activity—specifically, drug trafficking on 'Silk Road,' a black-market website designed to enable its users to buy and sell illegal drugs anonymously and beyond the reach of law enforcement.” Federal investigators shut down the Silk Road last October and arrested the alleged founder, Ross Ulbricht, who went by the name “Dread Pirate Roberts.”

Shrem and Faiella were both arrested in January. Prosecutors said the two sold over $1 million in Bitcoins to users of the Silk Road. According to court documents, Faiella sold bitcoins to Silk Road users directly and relied on Schrem's company to set up anonymous exchange accounts for his customers.

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A class-action lawsuit against hiring practices at Adobe, Apple, Google, and Intel was set to settle shortly before trial for $324 million. The companies are accused of violating antitrust laws by creating "no poach" deals in which they wouldn't cold call each other's employees for recruitment purposes.

Last month, US District Judge Lucy Koh threw out the settlement, agreeing with objectors from the class that $324 million wasn't enough. The companies should have paid out "at least $380 million" to match the rate paid by other companies that had already settled, including Lucasfilm, Intuit, and Pixar.

But the four remaining defendants don't want to pay more, and they're going to fight for the $324 million deal they struck with lawyers representing the plaintiffs.

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Facebook has installed a "privacy checkup" pop-up on its Web interface intended to help prevent users from sharing information that they don't intend to, according to a press release issued on Thursday. The feature walks users through a set of steps to let them see which groups of friends see which pieces of profile information, as well as information from third-party apps.

The feature first asks users to adjust their default privacy setting on posts and then to look through their Facebook-connected apps to adjust the privacy settings in each one or to revoke access. The last step pulls up the privacy settings of each profile element into one box with the same drop-down menu for tweaks.

Facebook's previous best effort at privacy transparency was its View As tool, which allows users to see their profile as another particular user might see it. While this helped with profile design, it didn't address app information or posting privacy status. Facebook will be prompting users in waves over the coming weeks to use the checkup, but completing it won't be required.

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Iain Watson

A Congressional proposal to let cable and satellite customers choose which broadcast TV channels they pay for has led to a battle between small cable companies and broadcasters. While cable companies usually are opponents of mandates to sell channels individually instead of in bundles, in this case they are fighting for à la carte and against the broadcasters. The “Local Choice” proposal by US Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Sen. John Thune (R-SD) affects local broadcast stations such as affiliates of NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox.

A group called TVfreedom.org that represents local broadcasters and other organizations today criticized the American Cable Association (ACA) for supporting Local Choice. “We believe ‘Local Choice’ represents a frontal assault on free and local TV broadcasting,” TVfreedom Public Affairs Director Robert Kenny wrote. “It would tilt television’s balance of power in favor of pay-TV providers at the expense of broadcasters invested in localism. It would cost consumers more on their monthly bills, and do nothing to address shoddy pay-TV service or the deceptive billing practices of cable and satellite TV providers.”

TVfreedom is composed of “local broadcasters, community advocates, network television affiliate associations, multicast networks, manufacturers and other independent broadcaster-related organizations” and says its mission is to make sure “cable and satellite TV providers [are] held accountable for stifling innovation and repeatedly using their own customers as bargaining chips while increasing their record profits.” The group chided the ACA for supporting à la carte pricing this year despite arguing in a previous case that “current technology costs make à la carte a financial impossibility for ACA member systems, the business model is entirely unproven, and no lawful basis exists for imposing regulated a la carte.”

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You probably can't make out any pixels on that indistinct blue background thanks to the monitor's staggering 5K resolution. Dell

A recent Dell press event saw the computer manufacturer debut a number of new laptop and desktop models, but tucked into its product list came one particular stunner: a 27-inch monitor sporting a 5120×2880 resolution. The Dell UltraSharp 27 Ultra HD 5K Monitor, set to launch by the end of Q4 2014 for $2,499, will scream past the consumer-grade competition with a whopping 14.7 million pixels in all. That's over 70 percent bigger than the standard 4K spec of 3840×2160.

Maximum PC managed to make eyes with the monitor—and, perhaps more importantly, its backside, where their reporter found dual DisplayPort 1.2 ports required to handle 5K resolution; that dual-port solution suggests that Dell may be combining two 2560×2880 displays to make this monitor work. (Users who prefer the stone-age days of 4K can use a miniDisplayPort for that resolution as well.) Dell has also left out some details, such as the monitor's refresh rate.

At 218 PPI, the UltraSharp's pixel density just about matches that of a MacBook Pro with Retina display, and it will additionally sport six USB ports, a media card reader, and a pair of Harmon/Kardon speakers. We expect this monitor to serve as a workstation and photo-editing option for professionals who already split between multiple monitors as opposed to a jumping-off point for 5K gaming—most high-end rigs can barely render games in 4K resolution as it stands.

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Erik Lucero

Google was one of the early backers of a new approach to quantum computing adopted by a company called D-Wave. The company offers boxes that perform a process called quantum annealing instead of the more typical approach, which involves encoding information in a quantum state of a collection of entangled qubits. Although whatever D-Wave is doing is clearly quantum, it's still not clear that it offers a speedup compared to classical computers.

So rather than keeping all its eggs in D-Wave's basket, Google's "Quantum A.I. Lab" announced that it is starting a collaboration with an academic quantum computing researcher, John Martinis of the University of California-Santa Barbara. Martinis' group focuses on creating fault-tolerant qubits using a solid-state superconducting structure called a Josephson junction. By linking several of these junctions and spreading a single quantum state across them, it's possible to reach fidelities of over 99 percent when it comes to storing the quantum state.

Quantum states tend to be fragile and decay when they interact with their environment, so a lot of labs are working on making qubits that are more robust or have error correcting ability. Josephson junctions are one possible approach to this, but they have the advantage of being on familiar turf for computing companies, since they can be made by standard fabrication techniques (although they still need to be chilled to near absolute zero).

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An earlier version of Team Durafet's sensor. Yui Takeshita

A year ago, we reported on the launch of a new XPRIZE competition—not to launch a rocket, but to build a better device to measure ocean pH. The aim was to produce something that could be added to automated platforms like ARGO floats to greatly expand pH data collection, which presently has to rely mostly on expensive research vessel cruises.

Teams are competing for a pair of $1 million prizes put up by Wendy Schmidt—who, together with her husband Eric Schmidt, just donated $500,000 to help keep the famous atmospheric CO2 monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography running.

The first of three stages in the competition will begin next week. The 18 teams who were selected for the competition will place their devices into carefully controlled tanks of water at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Over three months, the devices will be judged on the accuracy, precision, and stability of their pH measurements.

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