US Forest Service

Chickens are not fussy eaters. Any object resembling food is worth an exploratory peck. But give a chicken the choice between sugary sweets and seeds, and they will pick the grains every time. This is odd. Many animals, including our own sugar-mad species, salivate for sugar because it is the flavor of foods rich in energy. New research suggests that many birds’ lack of interest in sugar is the result of genes inherited from their dinosaur ancestors.

Most vertebrates experience sweet taste because they possess a family of genes called T1Rs. The pairing of T1R1 and T1R3 detects amino acids and gives rise to the savory “umami” taste, while the T1R2-T1R3 pair detects sugars, giving us our sweet tooth.

Maude Baldwin, a postgraduate student at Harvard University, searched the genomes of ten species of birds, from chickens to flycatchers. She found that insectivorous and grain-eating birds possess the gene pair that detects the amino acids present in insects and seeds, but none of them had the T1R2 gene responsible for the ability to taste sugar. These modern birds evolved from carnivorous theropod dinosaurs that had diets that were rich in proteins and amino acids, but lacked sugar. So Baldwin reasoned that without a need to detect sweetness, ancient birds lost their T1R2 gene.

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Wikipedia The head of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee is urging the federal bureaucracy to restore a decade's worth of electronic court documents that were deleted last month from online viewing because of an upgrade to a computer database known as PACER.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) said the removal of the thousands of cases from online review is essentially erasing history.

"Wholesale removal of thousands of cases from PACER, particularly from four of our federal courts of appeals, will severely limit access to information not only for legal practitioners, but also for legal scholars, historians, journalists, and private litigants for whom PACER has become the go-to source for most court filings," Leahy wrote Friday to US District Judge John D. Bates, the director of the Administrative Office of the Courts (AO).

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Engineers from Stanford and Berkeley Universities have figured out how to make radios the size of an ant, which have been created specifically to serve as controllers and sensors in the Internet of Things.

The radios are fitted onto tiny silicon chips, and cost only pennies to make thanks to their diminutive size. They are designed to compute, execute, and relay demands, and they are very energy efficient to the point of being self-sufficient. This is due to the fact that they can harvest power from the incoming electromagnetic signal so they do not require batteries, meaning there is no particular lifetime associated with the devices.

"We've rethought designing radio technology from the ground up," said Amin Arbabian from Stanford, who worked on the project. "The advantage of moving to this architecture is that we can have the scalability we want." This means that they can scale the technology to potentially thousands of devices within a very dense area.

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Gunfire has been heard from Donetsk airport where Ukrainian government troops say they have repelled an attack by pro-Russian rebels.

The parents of Reeva Steenkamp say they are "disappointed and sad" after Oscar Pistorius was acquitted of murdering their daughter.

On Friday, Nintendo's Twitch channel hosted an all-day livestream of testers playing the company's upcoming holiday and 2015 releases, including Ultimate NES Remix, Bayonetta 2, and the 3DS version of Super Smash Bros. While showing off the fighting game, Nintendo used the livestream to confirm a surprise announcement: Its portable version was coming to the 3DS eStore in the form of a free, downloadable demo version, and it launched simultaneously with the announcement.

However, the demo hasn't been made available to all users, yet it doesn't require pre-ordering the game, either. Instead, the demo must be claimed by a download code, and those are only being sent to Club Nintendo users who achieved platinum status before June 30 of this year. While Club Nintendo allows fans to register purchased games and rack up points, which can be spent on merchandise and downloadable games, this is the first time it has offered Club Nintendo-exclusive software to its users. (As of right now, however, this distribution of codes comes with a catch: They're only being sent to users who gave Nintendo permission to send promotional e-mails, meaning if you made the no-spam call back when you signed up, you're out of luck.)

The demo isn't as expansive as the ones that launched at Best Buy stores across the country this summer; instead, it lets players pick from five combatants—Mario, Mega Man, Link, Pikachu, and the Animal Crossing villager—and fight in a single arena via local multiplayer. That same demo will see wide release on the eStore the following Friday, September 19, ahead of the game's full retail 3DS launch on October 3rd; the Japanese version hits stores tomorrow, but review copies have already hit the wild, confirming many of the game's so-far unannounced characters. Its Wii U version still doesn't have a release date beyond "Winter 2014."

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Justice Sonia Sotomayor visits Rosa Parks Elementary School in Berkeley, Calif. in 2011. Berkeley Unified School District

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor says that without proper privacy safeguards, the advancement of technology could lead to a world like the one portrayed in "1984" by George Orwell.

Speaking to Oklahoma City University faculty and students, the justice said Thursday that technology has allowed devices to "listen to your conversations from miles away and through your walls." She added: "We are in that brave new world, and we are capable of being in that Orwellian world, too."

The President Obama appointee also discussed the lack of privacy standards concerning drones.

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Fighting in Ukraine has abated but it has not stopped completely and people are still living in fear for their lives.

By allowing cameras and microphones into the courtroom - did the South African authorities create an educational moment - or was it simply a circus?

A new approach to psychological healing after the genocide in Cambodia combines aspects of psychotherapy with Buddhist meditation

A team of scientists in Delhi has developed a smart cane for blind people, which uses sensors to give vibration feedback.

Gabriel Gatehouse reports for BBC Newsnight on how unlikely alliances are forming in the battle against Islamic State in Iraq.

Ernest Hemingway's grandsons are making a trip to Cuba to visit the house he lived in and see his Nobel prize.

Internet retailer Alibaba may have floated on the US stock market, but the China-based company is making waves in Silicon Valley as well as in Wall Street.

Ten people suspected of planning and carrying out the attack on the Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai have been arrested.

"If you ask anyone my name, in or out of drag, they will tell you it's Roma. Is it the name on my driver's license? No. But it is my name."

On Wednesday, Facebook's policy of only allowing legal names on personal accounts ran headlong into a drag queen. According to a report by the Daily Dot, performer Sister Roma, whose legal ID actually reads Michael Williams, found herself locked out of her account with a prompt asking that her profile name be changed to the legal one as it "appears on your driver's license or credit card," as per Facebook's official real-name policy.

This was the first such request Roma had seen since opening her Facebook account in 2008. When she complied to reopen her Facebook page, she wasn't asked to confirm her name via an ID card—"They seem to know my real name already," she said in an e-mail interview with Ars—and she didn't take the name-change requirement lightly: "I've been Sister Roma for 27 years," Roma said. "If you ask anyone my name, in or out of drag, they will tell you it's Roma. Is it the name on my driver's license? No. But it is my name."

Roma is also a decades-long member of the famed Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (SPI), an LGBT-friendly human rights advocacy nonprofit, and she immediately rounded up the social media troops to spread the word about Facebook's real-name policies. She soon found out that she was far from alone. "Every few minutes, I get a message from a friend or see a post of someone complaining that they've been forced to change their name," Roma said to Ars. "It's happening all over the country."

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Satellite view of the remains of the Larsen B ice shelf on March 7, 2002. NASA/Earth Observatory

A number of noteworthy studies have recently highlighted the importance of what's going on at the bottom of glaciers that flow into the ocean. The topography beneath the glacier—as well as the “grounding line” beyond which a glacier becomes thin enough to float in the water rather than rest on the seafloor—have a lot to do with its stability.

In 2002, the Larsen B ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula abruptly collapsed, scattering 3,200 square kilometers (yes, approximately one standard Rhode Island unit of area) of 200 meter thick ice into the waves. But why? Did warming water beneath the ice shelf loosen it from the grounding line and destabilize the ice shelf in front? Or can we pin the blame on the warming temperatures of the region?

With the ice shelf gone, researchers looking for answers have been able to look at the seafloor that once sat beneath it. In 2006, a research vessel spent some time at the site of the collapse, looking for clues. The findings of that team, led by the Italian National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics’ Michele Rebesco and the University of South Florida’s Eugene Domack, have now been published in the journal Science.

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Beware, scammer! Aurich Lawson

Tech support scams are nothing new—we first went in-depth almost two years ago on "scareware scammers" who cold-call unsuspecting victims and try to talk them into compromising their computers by installing remote control applications and handing the keys over to the scammers.

We even managed to engage with one for a protracted length of time, with deputy editor Nate Anderson playing the role of a computer neophyte and recording the entire mess. But one developer has taken things a step further, producing a tool that will enable you to fight back if targeted—if you don’t mind a bit of bad acting yourself.

Matt Weeks is one of the developers who contributes code to the open source Metasploit Project, a sprawling and continually updated security framework that functions as a repository for software vulnerabilities and is frequently used as a Swiss Army Knife for penetration testing. Weeks has published a long report on his site detailing how he was able to reverse-engineer the encrypted communications protocol used by Ammyy Admin, one of the most popular remote control apps used by tech support scammers, and then use that knowledge to ferret out a vulnerability in the Ammyy Admin application.

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sinterbear / flickr

The head of the patent examiners' union at the US Patent and Trademark Office has shot back at allegations that workers there are abusing a "telework" program, saying the idea that thousands of workers have bent the rules is "ridiculous on its face." He also defended the "cleaned up" version of the report that was sent to an inspector general, calling it a "more balanced and accurate" report than the original version, which he called biased.

The fiery exchange comes at a sensitive time. The Washington Post, which broke the news of the telework scandal, reports that top Commerce Department officials will talk to Congressional oversight committees today, following allegations that the US Patent and Trademark Office's "telework" program has been abused by patent examiners.

Robert Budens, president of the Patent Official Professional Association (POPA), sent a note to his membership earlier this week. The leaked, 32-page report that formed the basis of the Post report was biased, he suggested. Budens wrote:

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The Montreal Protocol, created in response to the decline in the Earth's ozone layer, called for a world-wide phase out in the production of chemicals that were responsible for the ozone's decline. It is perhaps the greatest global environmental achievement to date. And, this week, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Program announced it was working. Unfortunately, this week also saw the WMO release its annual greenhouse gas bulletin, and here the news was nowhere near as promising, as emissions returned to levels not seen since the 1980s.

First, the good news. In the 2014 version of the Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion, the WMO finds that the atmospheric concentrations of most of the chemicals covered by the Montreal Protocol are in decline. The exceptions are hydrochlorofluorocarbons, which are used in refrigeration, and halon, used in fire suppression. The WMO also noted that there must be some unidentified source of carbon tetrachloride to explain its persistence in the atmosphere.

In sum, however, the effect has been positive. Chlorine and bromine levels in the stratosphere were down 10-15 percent over the past 15 years. And, after having declined over the course of the 1980s and '90s, the ozone concentrations have been stable since about 2000. If everything continues to go as expected, ozone will return to levels seen in 1980 by the middle of this century.

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