Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has announced plans to take passports from Australians who may be planning to travel to fight with Islamic State.

Tulip Mazumdar visits a camel market in Saudi Arabia to see how people feel about Middle East Respiratory Virus being linked to the animals.

A centre-left coalition led by the Social Democrats has won Sweden's parliamentary elections.

There have been no less than 11 federal judicial rulings striking down patents as "abstract" since the US Supreme Court's June 26 decision in Alice v. CLS Bank.

It's a high number. The case was recognized as a big decision by commentators when it came, and what's happened since suggests the ramifications may be broader than first thought. Vox Media's Tim Lee (former Ars contributor) has an article rounding up the 11 rulings.

The list only highlights patents that have lost under Section 101 of the US patent law, which governs when a patent is an "abstract idea" that can't be patented. Section 101 wins are important to repeat defendants, because they're wins without going through discovery and hiring costly experts. However, some members of the patent bar see Section 101 as an overly blunt tool for weeding out bad patents from true innovations. Many of the patents being knocked out under 101 are "do it on a computer" patents that take everyday activity and add a lot of computer jargon.

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Jeremy Bowen reports on how Syrians are "traumatised" by fears of Islamic State fighters.

Space Shuttle Enterprise: namesake of the Star Trek spaceship, and one of NASA's greatest, and biggest, behind-the-scenes testing tools. (video link)

NEW YORK—The space shuttle Enterprise has been ensconced aboard the USS Intrepid for just over two years. It sits in a silent warehouse, dramatically lit so it appears to be cruising in a dark vacuum. Tourists can wander around or under it at the exhibit; they can even walk up some stairs and get nose-to-nose with the Enterprise, staring down its long axis through a thick layer of glass.

While the whole thing evokes space exploration, the Enterprise has never actually made it out of Earth's atmosphere. The shuttle on display has the distinction of being one of NASA's biggest workhorses despite earning perhaps the least amount of glory among the entire space shuttle fleet. So while visitors look closely at the Enterprise, they can see what has stopped it from earning more prestige and examine the scars its body has retained from experimentation during its years in service from 1976 through 2012.

Casey Johnston

Like the USS Enterprise it's named after, the Enterprise shuttle is more or less fake. Where a shuttle's $40 million engines should be, the Enterprise has mere mockups, covered by a cone for aerodynamic purposes. A shuttle should be speckled with reaction control system thrusters to help maintain or change its orientation in space. But since the Enterprise has always been Earth-bound, it has nothing but covered holes.

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Opium poppies—soon to be a thing of the past? Stanford

The past few decades have seen enormous progress being made in synthetic biology—the idea that simple biological parts can be tweaked to do our bidding. One of the main targets has been hacking the biological machinery that nature uses to produce chemicals. The hope is that,once we understand enough, we might be able to design processes that convert cheap feedstock, such as sugar and amino acids, into drugs or fuels. These production lines can then be installed into microbes, effectively turning living cells into factories.

Taking a leap in that direction, researchers from Stanford University have created a version of baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) that contains genetic material from the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), bringing the morphine microbial factory one step closer to reality. These results, published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, represent a significant scientific success, but eliminating the need to grow poppies may still be years away.

More than bread and booze

If dog has been man’s best friend for thousands of years, the humble yeast has long been man’s second-best friend. The single-cell organism has been exploited by human societies to produce alcoholic beverages and bread for more than 4,000 years.

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Pope Francis has pronounced 20 Italian couples man and wife during a mass wedding ceremony in St Peter's Basilica in Rome.

The brother of British aid worker David Haines, murdered by Islamic State militants, pays tribute to him.

"Apple Pay beta" TheTruthAbout

A couple of months ago I was visiting New York City and had to catch an early flight out of La Guardia. At 4:30am I hailed a taxi on Houston Street, and the driver and I sped to the airport over dark, empty streets.

On the way, I found a Samsung Note 3 in my bag that Review Editor Ron Amadeo had sent me a few weeks before. The thing had a Near-Field Communications (NFC) chip in it, and I had set up my Google Wallet account on it earlier. I also noticed that the taxi I was in had a tap-to-pay terminal displayed in the backseat. I am a consummate morning person, and a rush of new-day adrenaline told me that it was time to make my first Google Wallet purchase in three years—my last one occurring in 2011 when I reviewed the service at its debut for PCWorld.

As we pulled up to the curb, the driver continued to ignore me as I got out my phone. I touched the Note 3 to the terminal. The phone vibrated, but nothing happened. At this point, the driver turned around. I gave an embarrassed laugh and he said a few polite words, but he had no idea how to help me. “Nobody ever uses their phone to pay,” he said. I tried again. Nothing. But the driver was curious now, and maybe because it was so early in the morning and he had nothing else going on, he got out of the taxi and came around to my side.

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An American man is sentenced to six years of hard labour for "hostile acts" by a North Korean court.

Faizal Muhammad Ali reports from Srinagar which has been devastated by floodwaters.

Stack Exchange

This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.

durron597 asks:

I was naughty. Too much "cowboy coding," not enough committing. Now, here I am with an enormous commitment. Yes, I should have been committing all along, but it's too late now.

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Aurich Lawson

It's now been nearly 10 months since we first sized up the launch day competition between the Xbox One and PS4 (and even longer since we took a holistic look at the Wii U experience). Back then, we didn't really recommend upgrading to either system immediately. But given every head to head needs a winner, we gave a slight edge to the Xbox One for its superior game lineup and media features.

Those consoles, as they existed on their respective launch days, don't really exist anymore. In the intervening months, the system software changed through downloadable updates, and the game library grew with dozens of new releases. So naturally, our general opinions of the systems evolved as we kept using them over the weeks and months. Today we have a fuller picture of the Xbox One and PS4 instead of a quick peek based on a few hectic usage days before "comprehensive" launch reviews.

With that in mind, it's time to revisit the state of the console wars as it stands today and potentially amend our launch day thoughts with the benefit of a few hundred days of extra experience.

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Coverage of Thunderbolt devices has been expanded on our site over the last few months. At IDF, we took the opportunity to chat with Intel about where Thunderbolt was headed.

The current market perception is one of Thunderbolt being relevant only to Mac users. But, a look at the products that Intel showcases, indicate that there are plenty of PC components (motherboards as well as workstations) that come with the technology integrated. Thunderbolt users on Windows have traditionally found that the technology doesn't live up to its advertised potential. Common complaints include

• Purchased peripherals don't carry certification on Windows
• Hot plugging peripherals doesn't work reliably
• Performance in terms of both bandwidth and latency end up being better on Mac compared to Windows for the same workloads

These issues have turned out to be a vicious circle - Mac users end up getting targeted with more Thunderbolt peripherals (for example, storage manufacturers pre-format their devices in HFS+ format), and this, in turn, lowers the appeal of these devices to Windows users. Irrespective of one's personal preference, it is an undeniable fact that Windows still rules the desktop and notebook market by a big margin. Without extensive adoption on the PC side, there is no doubt that Thunderbolt would go the way of FireWire, a technology that slowly faded into oblivion because Apple was the only vendor who invested in promoting it.

Expanding Thunderbolt's Reach with PCIe Expansion Cards

In the process of migrating from the Z77 / Z87 to the Z97 chipset, Intel tried to drive up Thunderbolt adoption by allowing motherboard makers to provide support via an add-in card. This kept the price of the motherboard low by avoiding the cost of integrating and verifying the Thunderbolt ASIC. The board layout only had to support a Thunderbolt header. The routing of the Display Port was also done externally.

Only interested consumers needed to pay the premium for the interface. In their motherboard segmentation plans for Thunderbolt, Intel intended these Add-In Cards (AICs) only for the X79 and H87 / H97 / Q87 chipsets. Z87 and Z97 motherboards were supposed to have Thunderbolt silicon on board. Unfortunately for Intel, many motherboard makers (including Asus) decided that the add-on card would be the best way to go forward, and didn't release any Z97 boards with integrated Thunderbolt support. This meant that the DIY market, for the most part, completely ignored Thunderbolt.

Thunderbolt on PCs: A Crippled Experience

The reason for the far from optimal experience with Thunderbolt on PCs boils down to two different aspects, the hardware and the software. In terms of hardware, Intel has never allowed motherboard vendors to hang the Thunderbolt silicon / add-in card off the CPU's PCIe lanes. These have to hang off the platform controller hub (PCH). On the other hand, Apple was allowed to hook up the Thunderbolt silicon directly to the CPU. The reason behind this leads us to the software side of things.

Apple has full control over the operating system. Hanging Thunderbolt peripherals directly off the CPU's PCIe lanes requires extensive support from the operating system, particularly when it comes to hot plugging devices and/or waking up peripherals from sleep mode. Over the PCIe lanes off the PCH, Intel has more control via its chipset drivers. Ultimately, it looks like Microsoft dropped the ball and Intel decided to come up with a certification solution by only allowing Thunderbolt silicon to talk to the PCH for all PC boards.

While Microsoft continues to twiddle its thumbs, Intel has decided to come up with less restrictive hardware suggestions to bridge the Thunderbolt experience gap between Macs and PCs.

Thunderbolt's Future - X99 Brings Promise, Driver Features Add Utility

The X99 platform's Thunderbolt capabilities were barely touched upon in the initial Haswell-E reviews. Part of the problem was that none of the motherboards from major vendors had support with on-board silicon. However, it is actually a very important chipset launch for the Thunderbolt on PCs ecosystem because Intel has finally allowed the AICs to hang off the CPU's PCIe lanes. A restriction is that the AIC must have support for a switch to disable the sleep mode for all the Thunderbolt devices in the chain, though this could conceivably go away if Microsoft fixes Windows for this issue.

In terms of updates to Thunderbolt itself, we are yet to see a move to PCIe 3.0. However, the drivers have been updated to enable 'Thunderbolt Networking'. This involves linking multiple PCs / Macs with Thunderbolt cables. A 10 Gbps network is automatically created (in the form of a 'dummy' network adapter). Macs and PCs can talk with each other to share printers and folders. For small workgroups, this could be an effective way to achieve 10 Gbps networking without the costly and noisy switches.

In conclusion, Thunderbolt is making great progress and PC users can expect things to get better in the future. In addition to Apple, lots of other vendors are also throwing in support for Thunderbolt in their workstations and notebooks. It would have been great to have a new version of Thunderbolt with PCIe 3.0 along with the X99 launch. But, we already know it is not going to be the case till Skylake launches. That said, it will be a priority for Intel and Microsoft to get the performance and experience right with current silicon for now.

The German chancellor Angela Merkel will speak at a major rally in Berlin against anti-Semitism on Sunday.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been trapped by flooding in Kashmir and other areas of northern India and Pakistan.

Ghanaian rapper M.Anifest kicks off new season of BBC Africa Beats with a medley of hits

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