A species of damselfish. Klaus Stiefel

Apart from strengthening the greenhouse effect, our emissions of carbon dioxide also affect the chemistry of the oceans. When CO2 dissolves in water, it lowers the pH, which makes it more difficult for organisms to make calcium carbonate shells. The low pH also has some direct physiological effects on other marine organisms like fish. The big question mark for the future is whether these organisms can adapt or evolve to better deal with a higher-CO2 world. A new study in Nature Climate Change digs into the adaptation part of that question.

The study, led by Megan Welch at James Cook University, follows up on a previous experiment we covered in 2012. In that work, researchers put spiny damselfish hatchlings in tanks with varying levels of CO2 and tested several behaviors.

First, researchers put the fish in a split tank with one side containing the odor of a predator, and then they measured how much time the fish spent in each side. High CO2 made the animals much less likely to avoid the predator cue.

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A class of coding vulnerabilities could allow attackers to fool Windows system administrators into running malicious code because of a simple omission: quotation marks.

The attack relies on scripts or batch files that use the command-line interface, or "shell," on a Windows system but contain a simple coding error—allowing untrusted input to be run as a command. In the current incarnation of the exploit, an attacker appends a valid command onto the end of the name of a directory using the ampersand character. A script with the coding error then reads the input and executes the command with administrator rights.

"The scenario... requires a ‘standard’ user with access rights to create a directory to a fileserver and an administrator executing a vulnerable script," Frank Lycops and Raf Cox, security researchers with The Security Factory, said in an e-mail interview. "This allows the attacker to gain the privileges of the user running the script, thus becoming an administrator."

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Hewlett-Packard has alerted some customers that it will be revoking a digital certificate used to sign a huge swath of software—including hardware drivers and other software essential to running on older HP computers. The certificate is being revoked because the company learned it had been used to digitally sign malware that had infected a developer’s PC.

An HP executive told security reporter Brian Krebs that that the certificate itself wasn’t compromised. HP Global Chief Information Security Officer Brett Wahlin said that HP had recently been alerted to the signed malware—a four-year old Windows Trojan—by Symantec. Wahlin said that it appears the malware, which had infected an HP employee's computer, accidentally got digitally signed as part of a separate software package—and then sent a signed copy of itself back to its point of origin. Though the malware has since been distributed over the Internet while bearing HP's certificate, Wahlin noted that the Trojan was never shipped to HP customers as part of the software package.

“When people hear this, many will automatically assume we had some sort of compromise within our code signing infrastructure, and that is not the case,” Wahlin told Krebs. “We can show that we’ve never had a breach on our [certificate authority] and that our code-signing infrastructure is 100 percent intact.”

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Pakistani child education activist Malala Yousafzai has said she is honoured to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian child rights campaigner.

BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson travelled with the Iraqi army to the front line with Islamic State outside Baghdad.

It's final: the Rockstar patent case will be heard in a court near Google's headquarters in Northern California. bubbletea1

It's been nearly one year since Rockstar Consortium, a patent holding company owned in part by Microsoft and Apple, launched a major patent assault against Google. Now, the issue of where the case will be heard has finally been resolved—in Google's favor.

Google took the case to the nation's top patent court to get it out of East Texas and back to its home state, California. The matter of venue isn't a mere sideline skirmish. East Texas courts are generally considered tough on patent defendants, with few cases resolving on summary judgment, stringent discovery rules, and last-minute scheduling decisions. Google's Texas case was scheduled to be heard in front of US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap, who hears far more patent cases than any other district court judge in the nation.

Rockstar v. Google: A brief history

Nortel, a Canadian telecom company, went bankrupt in 2009. Two years later, the company's patents were auctioned off. Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Ericsson, and Sony, grouping together as "Rockstar Bidco," spent $4.5 billion to buy the whole batch. Google bid $4.4 billion, seeking to beef up its patent portfolio, but it wasn't enough. After the auction, Google's top lawyer called the purchase a "hostile, organized campaign against Android."

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President Barack Obama yesterday said he is still “unequivocally committed to net neutrality” and that he wants the Federal Communications Commission to issue rules that prevent Internet service providers from creating paid fast lanes.

“There are a lot of aspects to net neutrality,” Obama said in response to a question at an event hosted by Cross Campus in Santa Monica, CA. “I know one of the things people are most concerned about is paid prioritization, the notion that somehow, some folks can pay a little more money and get better service, more exclusive access to customers through the Internet. That’s something I oppose. I was opposed to it when I ran; I continue to be opposed to it now.”

Obama pointed out that the FCC is “an independent agency” but said he wants the commission to prevent paid prioritization.

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At least one person has died after floods swept the Italian city of Genoa

Parts of northern China have suffered the worst bout of smog since July, pushing pollution well past healthy levels and reducing visibility. Martin Patience reports from Beijing.

Found the play (10:02 left 4th qtr) when Kyle Orton said he was hit with a laser pointer. No doubt about it. #Bills pic.twitter.com/4y9k0jDvCU

— Prescott Rossi (@PrescottRossi) October 8, 2014

A 17-year-old fan accused of pointing a green laser in the eye of the visiting team's quarterback at an NFL matchup over the weekend was cited Thursday on allegations of disorderly conduct and banned from Detroit Lions games.

The incident is similar to one that happened in June at the World Cup, when Russian coach Fabio Capello blamed his team’s 1-1 draw with Algeria on a laser pointer fired at his goalkeeper during the game.

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In early 2014 the Razer Blade got a refresh. The significant updates over the 2013 model are the display, moving from a (rather poor) 1600x900 panel to a 3200x1800 QHD+ IGZO display and an upgraded GPU to push all of the extra pixels they just added. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 870M replaces the GTX 765M from the 2013 model. Read on for our full review.

The World Health Organization says it did not anticipate how big the Ebola crisis in Africa and beyond, was going to become.

A colleague of the Spanish nurse infected with Ebola has spoken to the BBC about the challenges of staying safe while caring for infected patients.

Barack Obama has said the US has 'unique capabilities' to fight Ebola, as troops in Fort Campbell, Kentucky prepare to fight the 'invisible enemy'.

Version:next-20141010 (linux-next) Released:2014-10-10

BBC News follows a group of surgeons from the UK as they take their skills to help treat Palestinians wounded in this year's Gaza conflict.

The Yoga 3 Pro showing off its elaborate hinge in action. Lenovo

Lenovo is doubling down on its Yoga brand, unveiling a bunch of new tablets and laptops sporting the name today. The highlights were the Yoga Tablet 2 Pro, a 13.3-inch Android tablet with an integrated pico-projector, and the Yoga 3 Pro, a 13.3-inch Windows tablet with a 360 degree hinge that contains more than 800 parts.

Many of Lenovo's Yoga tablets have been a little unusual, as tablets go. Instead of simple cuboids, they've had a bulge along the bottom that's housed a hinged stand to prop the screen up. In the Yoga Tablet 2 Pro, this bulge is used to house a tiny projector that can cast a respectable 50 inch picture onto a nearby wall, so if the 13.3 inch, 2560×1440 LCD isn't big enough to watch a movie on, the wall may do the job.

The Yoga 2 Pro with its projector all lit up. Lenovo

The Android 4.4 tablet unusually sports a 4 core Intel Atom processor running at up to 1.86GHz. It pairs this with 2GB RAM and 32GB storage (with a microSD slot for adding another 64GB). Connectivity comes from dual band 802.11/b/g/n, and in some countries, optional 3G/4G. It has dual cameras; an 8MP rear and 1.6MP front device. The whole package weighs just over 2lbs. The battery lasts up to 15 hours on a charge. It'll be available from the end of the month starting at $499.

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Satya Nadella at Thursday's Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

On Thursday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella issued an apology on his personal Twitter account after making comments about the gender pay gap at a women-in-technology conference, and he followed that up with a lengthy internal Microsoft memo.

Re/code published the memo, which saw Nadella acknowledge his mistakes during a conversation with Harvey Mudd president Maria Klawe (herself a Microsoft board member). "Toward the end of the interview, Maria asked me what advice I would offer women who are not comfortable asking for pay raises," Nadella wrote. "I answered that question completely wrong."

His memo continued by acknowledging industry-wide initiatives meant to "close the pay gap," then added, "when it comes to career advice on getting a raise when you think it’s deserved, Maria’s advice was the right advice. If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask."

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The updated -D models will have another motor between the front wheels. Tesla Motors

After teasing the Internet with a poorly-worded Twitter announcement earlier in the week, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk this evening unveiled a new optional powertrain configuration for the entire line of the company's flagship Model S sedans: dual motors, powering all four wheels.

This image of a P85D's hindquarters leaked prior to the event.

After making a few good-natured jokes about how he recently received a crash-course in the colloquial meaning of "the D," Musk kicked off the event by having a factory robot hoist an all-wheel drive Model S frame up from beneath the stage. USA Today jumped the gun with their announcement summary, and the report proved accurate. All-wheel drive will be an available option on all Model S trim levels and the new top-end P85D version will have a 0-60 time of 3.2 seconds. It will also feature a small increase in range, to 275 miles, over its rear-wheel drive predecessor.

Standard Model S sedans have until now all featured a single rear motor slung between and slightly behind the car’s rear axle, powering the rear wheels only; the new "D" models will add a second motor between the two front wheels. The new models will have a "D" suffix added to their model, so the entry-level Model S with the 60 kWh battery and all-wheel drive would be the "60D," and the top-end P85 performance model would become the "P85D."

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Tracking the planet's output as it completes an orbit. Hubble

Since the discovery of the very first exoplanets, it's been clear that there are lots of worlds out there that are markedly different from our solar system: hot Jupiters nearly skimming their host stars' surface, super-Earths, mini-Neptunes.

But we don't know exactly what these worlds look like. For the most part, we've been left to infer their properties using indirect measurements.

This week's edition of Science contains a description of one of the exceptions. The Hubble Space Telescope has imaged light from a hot Jupiter called WASP-43b, detecting temperature differences between the planet's day and night sides. The results suggest that the planet has an eastward jet stream that redistributes some of the heat from its host star, but otherwise there's very little circulation of heat.

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