The progress towards a vaccine against Ebola in 80 seconds.

Welcome to Google's actual offices in Dublin, Ireland. Tobias Abel

Ireland's Ministry of Finance announced that Ireland will phase out its controversial (but legal) tax scheme known as the "Double Irish," which lets companies, especially tech companies, drastically reduce their overseas tax burden.

"I am abolishing the ability of companies to use the ‘Double Irish’ by changing our residency rules to require all companies registered in Ireland to also be tax resident," Irish Finance Minister Michael Noonan said in a statement accompanying the government’s new 2015 budget on Tuesday. "This legal change will take effect from the 1st of January 2015 for new companies. For existing companies, there will be provision for a transition period until the end of 2020."

The move will affect many tech firms that take advantage of this arrangement such as Apple, Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft, and Google. Last year, for example, Google alone cut billions off of its tax bill.

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A smattering of the brands with products available via Google Express (née Google Shopping Express). Google Blog

Google has added a subscription option to its Shopping Express service, putting it in competition with Amazon's Prime membership program. Shopping Express customers can now pay $95 per year or $10 per month to access a number of perks, including free same-day or overnight delivery on orders of $15 or more and the ability to share the membership with another person in the household.

Google has offered Shopping Express (which, going forward, the company will simplify to "Google Express") in Northern California since the spring of 2013. It expanded the service to New York and LA a year later, just as a same-day delivery service. As of October, the company will expand Express to Chicago, Boston, and Washington, DC.

Google Express service is limited to certain brands including Staples, Walgreens, and Target. New stores and retailers were added with this most recent update, including 1-800-Flowers, Barnes and Noble, and Sports Authority, as well as regional stores like Paragon Sports in New York and Stop & Shop in Boston. When users order from the selection of stores, a livery vehicle picks the items up and delivers them to the user's location.

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TrackingPoint's ShotGlass wearables. TrackingPoint

When we last visited Austin-based TrackingPoint in August, the company was keen to show off some as-yet-unnamed preproduction wearable technology that was still in development. At the time, this took the form of a somewhat difficult-to-see Android-powered screen mounted on some ski goggles. The tech mirrored the image on a TrackingPoint Precision Guided Firearm directly into your eye, enabling the weapon’s user to do some fancy "no-look" shots.

The wheel has turned, and a few months later, the goggles have evolved into a set of sleek sunglasses with a new name: ShotGlass.

ShotGlass has kept its Android-powered core, but it has gained quite a few features from the prototype model we used a few months back. In addition to being able to display and record the output of the rifle’s scope (transmitted via Wi-Fi), ShotGlass has its own microphone and forward-facing camera to record what the wearer sees and hears. When added to the rifle’s own audio and visual recordings, ShotGlass has the potential to capture a considerable amount of information about each and every shot taken.

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Ethan Kirschner

In March, Newsweek came roaring back to the print world with a tech-themed cover story. The publication said it had discovered "the face behind Bitcoin"—an unemployed engineer living an unassuming life in a Los Angeles suburb.

Within days of publication, critics began pointing out that the magazine's case that Dorian Nakamoto was actually Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto was based on circumstantial evidence. The 65-year-old Dorian Nakamoto, who has no background in cryptography at all, denied the story after it was published. Newsweek and author Leah McGrath Goodman did not apologize and instead doubled down on their thesis, putting out a statement that "the facts as reported point toward Mr. Nakamoto's role in the founding of Bitcoin."

Now, Nakamoto and his lawyer Ethan Kirschner have made clear they'd like to sue Newsweek over the story—but they need more money to do it. The two have created a website called "Newsweek Lied," which lays out their grievances and features a photo of Dorian Nakamoto holding a sign saying "Newsweek's article hurt my family."

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Police use chainsaws and bolt-cutters to dismantle barricades put up by pro-democracy activists near the government offices in Hong Kong.

Thanks to base pairing, a carefully designed DNA molecule can fold into all sorts of interesting shapes. Caltech

Controlling the shape of tiny, inorganic structures could help us build light harvesting devices and other nanophotonic equipment. Previous methods for making them were limited in terms of controlling things like size, symmetry, and shape, and there were problems with scalability for commercialization.

Recently, researchers have developed DNA nanotechnology, which allows us to rationally design and synthesize nanoscopic structures with specific shapes. They've now used the successes they’ve had with DNA to develop an innovative approach to making 3D inorganic structures with specific shapes.

Researchers used computational modeling to design the shape of a 3D DNA cavity that is then created by self-assembled DNA strands—base pairing dictates how the DNA folds up in three dimensions. The DNA structure then acts as a mold for casting metal nanoparticles into desired 3D shapes, including asymmetric ones. Computational design of the DNA mold involved optimizing its structural stiffness and the dimensions of the internal cavity.

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Traditionally, Skype has been built all around more or less synchronous conversations; whether audio, video, or instant message, Skype chats have tended to be realtime conversational communication. Today, the company is branching out with a new standalone messaging app, Skype Qik, built around asynchronous video messaging, available for Windows Phone, Android, and iOS.

I think the best way to describe Qik is by analogy to other mobile messaging platforms. Like WhatsApp, Qik has no real registration or user ID concept; it just uses your phone number, verified by SMS message. The app ties into your phone's address book to put names to numbers, and it seems that to send a message to someone, they must in fact be in your address book. There are no friendships or other formal relationships, so anyone can send a message to anyone, but if you don't want someone to send you messages, you can block them (though currently this feature is missing from the iOS version).

Listing your conversations, on the Windows Phone version.

4 more images in gallery

Like Vine and Snapchat, Qik messages are short videos, with a limit of 42 seconds (a number that was apparently chosen for its cosmic significance). These can be recorded with the front or back cameras. On iOS and Android (and coming later to Windows Phone), Qik also lets you save short (5 second) messages, called Qik Fliks, that you can use as canned responses for when you want to reply to a conversation but aren't somewhere that you can record a video response.

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Today we're looking at the Nixeus MODA, a tenkeyless mechanical keyboard designed for applications where a compact quality keyboard at the lowest possible cost is the main goal. It lacks backlighting and advanced features but comes with a three-year warranty and has a competitive price tag. If you are interested in a "no frills, no thrills" kind of product, then the Nixeus MODA may be just right for you.

Nordic Food Labs (mobile division?). Flickr user: Gregory Povey

At first my meal seems familiar, like countless other dishes I’ve eaten at Asian restaurants. A swirl of noodles slicked with oil and studded with shredded chicken, the aroma of ginger and garlic, a few wilting chives placed on the plate as a final flourish. And then, I notice the eyes. Dark, compound orbs on a yellow speckled head, joined to a winged, segmented body. I hadn’t spotted them right away, but suddenly I see them everywhere—my noodles are teeming with insects.

I can’t say I wasn’t warned. On this warm May afternoon, I’ve agreed to be a guinea pig at an experimental insect tasting in Wageningen, a university town in the central Netherlands. My hosts are Ben Reade and Josh Evans from the Nordic Food Lab, a non-profit culinary research institute. Reade and Evans lead the lab’s ‘insect deliciousness’ project, a three-year effort to turn insects—the creepy-crawlies that most of us squash without a second thought—into tasty, craveable treats.

The project began after René Redzepi (the chef and co-owner of Noma, the Danish restaurant that is often ranked the best in the world) tasted an Amazonian ant that reminded him of lemongrass. Redzepi, who founded the Nordic Food Lab in 2008, became interested in serving insects at Noma and asked the researchers at the lab to explore the possibilities.

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The US mid-term elections are exactly three weeks away. Our BBC North America Correspondent Aleem Maqbool is on the second day of his road trip down the so-called 'Blues Highway' looking at some of the big election issues, and at how those concerns are being reflected in the music of the day.

It has been six months since more than 200 school girls were abducted in north east Nigeria and two parents have spoken to the BBC about the "desperate" situation.

South African athlete Oscar Pistorius returns to court for sentencing after being convicted of killing his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp

Brazil has a strong cinema industry and has joined forces with UK film-makers in a pioneering co-production led by British director Stephen Daldry.

A group of cyber spies targeted the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Ukrainian and Polish government agencies, and a variety of sensitive European industries over the last year, in some cases using a previously unknown flaw in Windows systems to infiltrate targets, according to a research report released on Tuesday.

Dubbed "Sandworm" by iSIGHT Partners, the security consultancy that discovered the zero-day attack, the campaign is suspected to be Russian in origin based on technical details, the malware tools used, and the chosen targets, which also included government agencies in Europe and academics in the United States. If confirmed, the attack is an uncommon look into Russia's cyber-espionage capabilities.

"We can confirm that NATO was hit; we know from several sources that multiple organizations in the Ukraine were targeted," said John Hultquist, senior manager of cyber-espionage threat intelligence for iSIGHT. "We have seen them using Ukrainian infrastructure as part of their attacks."

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Version:next-20141014 (linux-next) Released:2014-10-14

Popular online locker service Dropbox appears to have been hacked. A series of posts have been made to Pastebin allegedly containing login credentials for hundreds of Dropbox accounts. The poster claims that 6,937,081 account credentials in total have been compromised.

reddit users who tested some of the leaked credentials have confirmed that at least some of them work. Dropbox seems to have bulk reset all the accounts listed in the Pastebin postings, though thus far passwords for other accounts do not appear to have been reset.

The hackers claim that they will release more username/password pairs if they receive donations to their Bitcoin address.

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The Financial Times reported on Monday (paywall) that YouTube has paid out $1 billion to copyright holders in a program that allows them to monetize unauthorized use of their copyrighted material.

YouTube introduced ContentID in 2007 to scan user-generated uploads for copyright infringement. When ContentID finds an upload that may have unauthorized copyrighted material on it, it alerts rights holders and gives them the option to either have the video taken down or to place ads on the video and make money off those views.

Over 5,000 copyright holders, like music labels and TV and movie studios, participate in the program. “All of the big US TV networks and movie studios” are included, the Financial Times notes. Over the last seven years, $1 billion has been paid to those participants, in some cases making unauthorized uses on YouTube an important revenue stream for the rights holders.

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The foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, has been holding talks in Baghdad on efforts to combat Islamic State militants, who control significant parts Iraq and Syria.

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management One of the more unusual recent developments in ocean conservation has been the use of artificial reefs. Old ships and even old subway cars have been used to create environments for fish to congregate in areas of the seafloor that are otherwise featureless. But it's not clear whether these habitats provide a place for fish to gather or actually boost the fish populations in the area.

A new study looked at the productivity of a different sort of artificial reef: the oil and natural gas rigs that dot the state's coastline. The report finds that the oil rigs are the most productive fisheries ever measured—not only in California but in the entire world. The report notes that many of these platforms will be obsolete over the coming decades, and we might want to think about what we do when we're done using them for their original purpose.

There are different ways of measuring an ecosystem's productivity. One is primary productivity, or how much carbon dioxide is converted into useful organic molecules by plants and other photosynthetic organisms. Then there's secondary productivity, defined as how much of that finds its way to herbivores and predators. In this case, the authors were interested in fish, so they focused on secondary productivity.

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