A woman in Sweden has become the first in the world to have a baby after having a womb transplant.

Clashes break out on the tense border between Turkey and Syria, where tens of thousands of Syrians have fled to escape Islamic State (IS) militants.

A suspected bank robber is caught after leading police on a four-road car chase in southern California.

New research published by the Natural History Museum has shown that it is possible to culture cells from butterfly wings to produce iridescent colours in the laboratory.

The flat in Texas where a man lay sick for days with Ebola is sealed up by a Hazmat team.

Microsoft sued Samsung in August, alleging that the Korean firm had failed to make payments that were contractually owed. At the time, the documents were sealed, obscuring the value of the payments. Today, those documents were unsealed, revealing the full scale of the suit.

In September 2011, the two companies entered a seven-year cross-licensing agreement for mobile-related patents. The payments for the first year were made without fuss. In August 2013, Samsung told Microsoft that it had assessed the value of the royalties owed for the second year as over $1 billion. Payment of this fee was due in October, but Microsoft says that no payment was received until late November 2013. Redmond's complaint says that Samsung owes more than $6.9 million in interest fees for the late payment (per the terms of the original licensing agreement).

What changed between August and October? In September 2013, Microsoft announced that it was buying Nokia's Devices division. The software giant asserts that Samsung is both claiming that Nokia's devices are not covered by the cross-licensing deal—and hence violating Samsung's own patents—and that the Nokia purchase voids the licensing agreement in its entirety.

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British artist Alex Chinneck has created a 'floating facade' at the Covent Garden market place. The work is called 'Take my lightning, but don't steal my thunder' and took several weeks to make.

Turkey has not honoured its vow to protect Kobane from Islamic State occupation. The BBC's Paul Adams reports the city is still under attack while Turkish tanks sit idle metres away.

A search run by the iWorm malware against Reddit yielded lists of compromised servers making up the botnet's command and control network. Dr.WEB

The Russian antivirus vendor Dr. Web has reported the spread of a new botnet that exclusively targets Apple computers running Mac OS X. According to a survey of traffic conducted by researchers at Dr. Web, over 17,000 Macs worldwide are part of the Mac.BackDoor.iWorm botnet—and almost a quarter of them are in the US. One of the most curious aspects of the botnet is that it uses a search of Reddit posts to a Minecraft server list subreddit to retrieve IP addresses for its command and control (CnC) network. That subreddit now appears to have been expunged of CnC data, and the account that posted the data appears to be shut down.

The Dr. Web report doesn’t say how Mac.BackDoor.iWorm is being distributed to victims of the malware. But its “dropper” program installs the malware into the Library directory within the affected user’s account home folder, disguised as an Application Support directory for “JavaW." The dropper then generates an OS X .plist file to automatically launch the bot whenever the system is started.

The bot malware itself looks for somewhere in the user’s Library folder to store a configuration file, then connects to Reddit’s search page. It uses an MD5 hash algorithm to encode the current date, and uses the first 8 bytes of that value to search Reddit’s “minecraftserverlist” subreddit’—where most of the legitimate posts are over a year old.

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On Sunday Brazilians will elect a new president with the incumbent President Dilma Rousseff still the favourite but opponent Marina Silva has staunch support spanning society.

A video purporting to show the beheading of British hostage Alan Henning has been released by Islamic State militants.

alex

It was just about a month ago when the Justice Department kicked to the curb the attorneys representing the alleged Silk Road mastermind. The government said there wasn't a National Security Agency "bogeyman" needed to discover the illicit drug site's servers as the defense lawyers alleged.

Instead, the authorities said poor programming by defendant Ross Ulbricht allowed the FBI to easily discover the Icelandic servers because of a leak in the site's login CAPTCHA.

"Ulbricht conjures up a bogeyman – the National Security Agency (“NSA”) – which Ulbricht suspects, without any proof whatsoever, was responsible for locating the Silk Road server, in a manner that he simply assumes somehow violated the Fourth Amendment," Serrin Turner, the assistant US attorney in New York, had written in a September court filing.

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tonystl

Apple will soon have to face a trial over accusations it used digital rights management, or DRM, to unlawfully maintain a lead in the iPod market, a federal judge has ruled. The plaintiffs' lawyers, representing a class of consumers who bought iPods between 2006 and 2009, are asking for $350 million.

Last week, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers gave the green light (PDF) to sending a long-running antitrust lawsuit against Apple to trial. Plaintiffs in the case say that Apple used its FairPlay DRM system to "lock in" its customers and make it costly to switch to technology built by competitors, like Real Networks. They describe how Apple kept updating iTunes to make sure songs bought from Real's competing digital music store couldn't be used on iPods. As a result of this lock-in, Apple was able to overcharge its customers to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.

At an earlier hearing, Apple's lawyer claimed the plaintiffs don't have "any evidence at all" showing harm to customers from the FairPlay DRM. The Robins Geller lawyers representing the class said they had thousands of complaints from consumers who were upset because they couldn't play non-iTunes songs on their iPods.

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Controlling a remote computer is something you're all familiar with. Whether that means RDP to your corporate Windows Server (we don't judge), Apple Remote Desktop (which is really VNC) to your OS X machine or VNC/X11/etc. into your GUI Linux machine, it's always a pain in the rear. more>>

Marriage, divorce and contraception will top the agenda as Catholic clergy gather for an extraordinary synod in Rome which is seen as a litmus test for Pope Francis' papacy.

The Gaylord Opryland hotel in Nashville, Tennessee used to block guests' personal hotspots. Michael Kappel

Marriott Hotel Services has come to a $600,000 agreement with the Federal Communications Commission to settle allegations that the hotel chain "interfered with and disabled Wi-Fi networks established by consumers in the conference facilities" at a Nashville hotel in March 2013.

According to the nine-page order issued on Friday, a guest at the Gaylord Opryland hotel in Nashville, Tennessee complained that the hotel was "jamming mobile hotspots so you can’t use them in the convention space."

The hotel admitted to the FCC that "one or more of its employees used containment features of a Wi-Fi monitoring system at the Gaylord Opryland to prevent consumers from connecting to the Internet via their own personal Wi-Fi networks."

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Apple is reportedly set to announce new iPads and more at an event on October 16. Andrew Cunningham

When it rains, it pours—Apple was silent for most of 2014 before dropping iOS 8, new iPhones, and the Apple Watch announcement on us last month. Now, Re/code says the company plans to hold an iPad-centric event at its on-campus town hall event space in Cupertino on October 16. Re/code (formerly AllThingsD) has a stellar track record for predicting Apple event dates, so we're inclined to believe them even though the event is falling on a Thursday instead of a Tuesday (as Apple events usually do).

New iPads will reportedly be the focus of the event, and it's not hard to guess what they'll look like. Expect tablets that look a lot like last year's iPad Air and Retina iPad Mini, but with the new A8 chip, TouchID support, and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. There have been rumors about a new larger 12.9-inch iPad, but most of them say that if a bigger tablet comes, it will be next year.

Joining the new iPads onstage will be OS X Yosemite, a near-final "Golden Master" build of which was just distributed to developers earlier this week. Last year, Apple launched the final version of Mavericks on the same day as the event, and we expect the same for Yosemite.

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Christie MicroTiles, a set of modular panels for large-format displays. Note the faint lines going through the images. Christie Digital Systems USA, Inc.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google's secretive, hardware-focused laboratory, Google X, has a display division—and it's current working on making giant displays. The head of the division is Mary Lou Jepsen, cofounder of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project and founder and former CEO of Pixel Qi, a startup that makes displays that are readable in direct sunlight.

The report says that Google X is hard at work creating "large-scale video displays" that are "composed of smaller screens that plug together like Legos to create a seamless image." The modular design would allow for different screen shapes and sizes, just by moving the modules around.

This sounds like most large-format displays already in existence, such as the Christie MicroTiles pictured above. The Google X difference is that the group is trying to figure out how to make modules without any seams at all. If you look closely at the picture above, you can see the borders around each rectangular module.

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Sonny Vleisides (right), is Butterfly Labs' cofounder and largest shareholder. A federal judge told him in January 2014 that there was a "strong smell" of fraud with respect to his company. Nasser Ghosieiri

A new order issued by a federal court in Kansas City on Thursday has effectively extended a temporary restraining order set down earlier this month, leaving Bitcoin mining rig builder Butterfly Labs (BFL) under the control of a court-appointed receiver. The order does allow for "limited operations" by the company, however.

For the last 15 months, Ars has followed BFL as it has gone from being a curious hardware startup in a nascent industry to becoming the target of a federal investigation brought by the Federal Trade Commission.

The FTC believes the three named members of the company’s board of directors—Jody Drake (aka Darla Drake), Nasser Ghoseiri, and Sonny Vleisides—spent millions of dollars of corporate revenue on non-corporate expenses like saunas and guns while leaving many customer orders either wholly unfulfilled or significantly delayed.

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A bat (left) flutters near the nacelle of a wind turbine in one of the authors' videos.

Wind turbines mostly get bad press for killing birds, but they might actually have a bigger impact on bats, which appear to be killed in large numbers at wind farms. This might disproportionately affect bat populations because, as the authors of a new paper put it, "Bats are long-lived mammals with low reproductive potential and require high adult survivorship to maintain populations."

A team of researchers decided to find out why bats have so many lethal interactions with the turbines. To do so, they used infrared video cameras that imaged any warm-blooded animals close to the wind farm. They also used radar to follow groups of animals flying around the site, which included flocks of migratory birds. In addition, audio recorders were used to determine which species of bats were present, as well as whether they were hunting. Combined with over 1,300 hours of video footage, the data presented a fairly complete picture of the areas near the wind farm in question.

Eighty percent of the close encounters observed between animal and equipment involved bats. The mammals flew near the blades and the body of the wind turbines, sometimes within two meters. In some cases, they chased each other around the hardware or lingered for several minutes near it. The close approaches were more common under two conditions: the presence of bright moonlight and during periods of low winds. The bats also typically approached from the downwind direction when the wind was slow.

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