North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un is healthy, the country's ambassador says, despite the leader's non-appearance in public since September.

A new species of mussel has been found in the UK which could be hugely damaging to British wildlife.

Liberian officials appeal to medical staff not to strike over the risk fee paid to them for treating Ebola patients, as the health crisis continues.

American health officials say a breach in protocol is to blame, after a nurse treating an Ebola victim in Texas also became infected.

The BBC is visiting five states in five days to test the mood in America ahead of the mid-term elections. First stop: Ferguson, Missouri.

Version:next-20141013 (linux-next) Released:2014-10-13

Exit polls in Bolivia's presidential elections indicate that the incumbent, Evo Morales, has won a third consecutive term in office.

The BBC's John Sudworth heard from one pro-democracy protester in Hong Kong that she would be prepared to resist the police if they started to use force.

Cyclone Hudhud is pounding the eastern Indian coast, causing extensive damage and prompting the evacuation of some 350,000 people.

A US company has developed a way of monitoring an entire neighbourhoods using technology originally developed during the Iraq war.

Ready to rock? My Electric Loog arrives, just shy of a year after the Kickstarter launch—and after a long stay in a container at the Port of Los Angeles. Sean Gallagher

A little less than a year ago, I backed a Kickstarter project launched by Rafael Atijas, a New York-based designer. The project was the Electric Loog, a small, three-string electric guitar designed for children (and adults) to jam with. It seemed like a perfect project—Atijas created the Loog as part of a master's thesis at NYU, and he was working on refining the design for production.

The risks seemed minimal. Atijas already successfully executed an acoustic version of the Loog in 2011, and that knocked its funding goal out of the park. This time, for $150, I'd get an instrument for my collection with plenty of upside. I could build the Loog and share it with my daughter. Maybe I could even take it along with me while I travel for Ars, jamming in hotel rooms with headphones on. I happily said "Shut up and take my money," then sat back and waited for an anticipated May delivery.CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});

This past week, after a series of twists, turns, and delays, my Loog arrived. Following Atijas' updates along the way has been the equivalent of reading a business case study in why it's so hard to execute what is essentially a "maker" project as a mass-produced product. The Loog encountered manufacturing problems in China, a port strike in Los Angeles, and quality control issues during production ramp-up that resulted in a few small flaws in the delivered guitars. Atijas had to make what he characterized as a "flash" trip to China just last week when the latest issues emerged. Now his New York company is unboxing everything left in the first shipment to check for issues, and Atijas is preparing to ship out replacements to backers with flawed guitars in order to make good on his promise.

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Megan Geuss

Two weeks ago, I heard about a new company called Yondr that was making lightweight smartphone socks-with-locks that prevent the smartphone's user from accessing the device during a concert, movie, or party.

At the time, Yondr had quietly teamed up with two Bay-area music venues—Milk Bar in San Francisco and Stork Club in Oakland—for a pair of trial runs in which concert-goers would be asked to place their phones in the Yondr case before entering the venue in order to create a phone-free space. I was curious—would people even go for this?

Preventing fans from accessing their phones during a show might seem like an extraordinary step, especially in tech-centric San Francisco. But even the most compulsive texters among us can say that they've seen That Person: the guy in front of you at the concert who holds up his iPhone to record eight minutes of video, forcing you to watch your favorite band through his tiny screen, or the girl whose phone lights up with texts while you're in the theater trying to watch an important scene.

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"Play. Create. Share" has long been the three-word slogan for the charming, if a bit well-worn, LittleBigPlanet games. For most players it's likely more than a motto, it's an actual schedule of events as well. You play the game to get a feel for what's possible, then mess around with the creation tools, and finally share it with the community in the hope that it's worth the effort.

About a year after LittleBigPlanet's 2008 release, Microsoft tried its own hand at the design-your-own-game game with Kodu Game Lab, a $5 download doomed to the backwater of the Xbox 360's Indie Games program. I spent $5 and an ounce of curiosity on that release back in the day, and I can't say I came away impressed. I was expecting a magic wand to impart knowledge and power in the wizardry of "coding" in a way that I could understand as someone with no real experience in programming or game design. Instead, Kodu was a bare bones logic learning tool that threw me in to the deep end of ifs, thens, and whens with little guidance and little ability to build anything with real depth.

Project Spark, the free-to-play design lab that Microsoft first showed at its E3 2013 press conference, is everything I wanted Kodu to be at the time. Spark is a learning tool, sure, but it's also a genuine platform for making games.

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A Catholic Church leader in Iraq has said that western airstrikes have not done enough to protect the country's Christians, as Quentin Sommerville reports.

Scott K. Johnson

A view from Potholes Coulee, with a pond fed by irrigation runoff.

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It's hard to believe the desert-like Scablands neighbors the rest of lush Washington state. Just ask J Harlen Bretz; he spent the better part of a century trying to convince his colleagues this landscape wasn't always so dry. As Ars writer Scott Johnson discovered, the Scablands are essentially wounds, still unhealed by time and erosion. These canyons were carved into the land after a series of unfathomably large floods unleashed by the catastrophic draining of great glacial lakes—half the volume of Lake Michigan splashed onto this land in less than a week.

Johnson crammed supplies into his backpack and attempted to survey the lands that Bretz obsessed over (and dedicated his life to studying). His feature outlines both the past and present experiences of exploring The Scablands, but there simply wasn't enough room for all the images he took of the breathtaking scene. So like the excess of water that led to its creation, an excess of visuals led to another Scablands birth (this time, only a gallery).

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EASTERN WASHINGTON—Traveling from the verdant, mossy coastal belt of the Pacific Northwest, one could be forgiven for feeling that the defining characteristic of Eastern Washington is its dryness. It's a land seemingly starved of rain in the shadow of the Cascade Mountains. But the dry landscape known as the “Scablands” actually tells a story about excess—excess of water, water that was torrential and sudden.

The Scablands are essentially wounds, still unhealed by time and erosion. They cut through the land and down into the rock after a series of unfathomably large floods unleashed by the catastrophic draining of great glacial lakes—half the volume of Lake Michigan splashed onto the land in less than a week. If you can imagine that, you’ve got us beat. The story recorded in this landscape is so incredible, it took one geologist decades to convince his colleagues that he was reading it correctly.

Inflation of the modern American vernacular has devalued superlatives like “awesome” and “epic,” but we’re going to need them where we’re going.

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A health care worker in Dallas is the first person to become infected with the Ebola virus within the US. Reuters is among many outlets reporting that a nurse who treated an Ebola patient has now tested positive for the virus. That patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, contracted the virus in Liberia, but he travelled to the US while still asymptomatic. He was treated by the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital before dying last week.

The newly diagnosed patient was one of the nurses involved in his treatment. According to the BBC, the nurse wore standard protective gear during the treatment: gown, gloves, respiratory mask, and face shield. Nevertheless, the individual began experiencing a low-grade fever and checked into the same hospital where he or she works; the patient has been kept in isolation since. Authorities are currently preventing anyone from entering the individual's apartment pending a decontamination.

Preliminary testing in Dallas indicates an Ebola infection; confirmatory tests from the Centers for Disease Control are pending.

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Typhoon Vongfong, the strongest storm to hit Japan this year, has made landfall on the country's main islands, after injuring at least 30 in Okinawa.

Sebastian Surendar

A federal judge has declined to suppress evidence the government is using against the alleged Silk Road mastermind, paving the way for a federal trial set for next month in connection to the website that once sold illicit drugs and hacking tools.

US District Judge Katherine Forrest's decision Friday sidestepped the controversial issue of whether federal prosecutors breached defendant Ross Ulbricht's constitutional rights of unlawful search and seizure. Ulbricht's defense team asserts that the Federal Bureau of Investigation or even the National Security Agency somehow unlawfully gained access to Silk Road severs in Iceland, which paved the way for several search warrants of e-mail and social networking accounts the government said belong to Ulbricht.

But the New York judge said that it doesn't matter whether the government unlawfully accessed the severs. That's because she ruled that Ulbricht has no right to even challenge the seizure of the servers that ultimately led to his downfall last year.

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Thousands of people have marched through the streets of the US city of St Louis on the second day of protests against police violence.