Hawaii's Puʻu ʻŌʻō eruption. And you thought Iceland got all the good volcano names. USGS

The Earth seems to have been smoking a lot recently. Volcanoes are currently erupting in Iceland, Hawaii, Indonesia, and Mexico. Others, in the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, erupted recently but seem to have calmed down. And then there was the fatal eruption in Japan. Many of these have threatened homes and forced evacuations. But among their less-endangered spectators, these eruptions may have raised a question: Is there such a thing as a season for volcanic eruptions?

Surprisingly, this may be a possibility. While volcano “seasons” aren't anything like the four we're familiar with, scientists have started to discern intriguing patterns in their activity.

Eruptions caused by a shortened day

The four seasons are caused by the Earth’s axis of rotation tilting towards and away from the Sun. But our planet undergoes another, less well-known change, one that affects it in a more subtle way—perhaps even volcanically.

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Hundreds of hot air balloons took to the skies above New Mexico on Saturday at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta.

Clashes between Islamic State militants and Kurdish forces over the besieged Syrian town of Kobane are continuing.

A key stronghold of al-Shabab Islamists has been captured by Somali government troops backed by African Union forces, local officials say.

A mass grave is found on the outskirts of the Mexican town of Iguala, where 43 students went missing on 27 September.

Formula 1 Marussia driver Jules Bianchi suffers a "severe" head injury in a crash at the Japanese Grand Prix.

A mass grave is found on the outskirts the Mexican town of Iguala, where 43 students went missing on 27 September.

As Ukraine prepares for parliamentary elections at the end of the month, a series of what are being called "trash bucket challenges" are spreading across the country.

Neha Bhatnagar reports from a demonstration in Nairobi, as protests are held in over a hundred cities across the world calling for an end to the trade of ivory and rhino horns.

Islamic State militants have intensified attacks on the town of Kobane, near Syria's border with Turkey, from where thousands of Syrian Kurds have fled.

An internal front view of the vending machine, with the battery, circuitry, and top dial. USPTO

In the late 1800s, we still didn't know a great deal about electricity. One scientist was still attempting to figure out how electric shocks kill things in 1895, and found that when he delivered a 240-milliamp shock to dogs, their hearts were very damaged (for comparison, a taser puts out about 3 milliamps). In 1903, Thomas Edison was trying to prove alternating current was dangerous by electrocuting animals. But before these instances of using electricity for death, one inventor thought people would be interested in using quick jolts to improve health, like the green juice of his day.

"When electricity was in its infancy, the power was believed to have a beneficial effect on health. Why not vend a small measure of electricity by coin operation?" wrote Paul Braithwaite in his book, Arcades and Slot Machines. Braithwaite was describing an existing patented design: a coin-operated vending machine that would deliver an electrical shock to the customer in exchange for money.

The patent for a "coin operated electrical apparatus" was originally filed by Norman W. Russ and granted in England in 1886. Russ followed up with patents for his invention in France, Belgium, Canada, and the United States, which granted it on May 15, 1888.

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I needed a bit of food, but do i find this red stuff rewarding? University of Florida

Scott Waddell, at Oxford's Centre for Neural Circuits and Behavior, is interested in Big Ideas like memory and motivation—and not necessarily in thirsty flies. But in trying to understand the former, he has spent a lot of time studying the latter.

Reward systems depend on both obtaining a resource and learning to appreciate it. Drinking water is rewarding to thirsty animals, but only because the act of drinking impacts the nervous system and controls water-seeking behavior. How it manages to do so has been largely unexplored.

In the case of flies, thirst completely rewires behavior. Water-sated flies avoid water; only those that have been deprived for at least six hours gravitate towards it. Waddell's group demonstrated that a specific subset of dopamine-using neurons are required for thirst to induce flies to value water, and that this valuation depends on the flies' sensing of water vapor.

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Two kayakers have been rescued in California after they said they had been attacked by a great white shark.

Haiti's former ruler Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier has died of a heart attack in the capital Port-au-Prince, reports quoting official sources say.

Stack Exchange

here asks:

I'm trying to determine the technical details of why software produced using programming languages for certain operating systems only work with them.

It is my understanding that binaries are specific to certain processors due to the processor specific machine language they understand and the differing instruction sets between different processors. But where does the operating system specificity come from? I used to assume it was APIs provided by the OS but then I saw this diagram in a book.

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ComputerCOP Supercut
A county sheriff from Limestone, Alabama is sticking by his department's endorsement of ComputerCOP, a shady piece of software given to parents to monitor their kids online. Other law enforcement agencies, it appears, have followed that example.

Earlier this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published an investigation into software called ComputerCOP which approximately 245 agencies in more than 35 states, plus the US Marshals, have been distributing to parents to use to monitor their children. The software is essentially spyware, and many versions come with a keylogger, which in some cases transmits unencrypted keystrokes to a server.

In addition to ComputerCOP's security issues, the EFF discovered misleading marketing materials that wrongly claimed endorsements from the US Department of the Treasury and the ACLU. “Law enforcement agencies have purchased a poor product, slapped their trusted emblems on it, and passed it on to everyday people. It’s time for those law enforcement agencies to take away ComputerCOP’s badge,” Dave Maass of the EFF wrote in an article that was republished on Ars on Wednesday.

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Quentin Sommerville follows Kurdish Peshmerga forces in northern Iraq to see the tactics Islamic State militants are using to slow the war against them.

The parents of US hostage Peter Kassig have appealed to Islamic State militants to "show mercy" and release him.

A Tava sandstone dike standing free of the surrounding rock, which eroded away here. C. Siddoway

Igneous rocks are rebels. Sedimentary rocks follow straight-forward rules—they are deposited in horizontal layers, with the oldest sediments on the bottom. Igneous rocks can do what they want. Molten rock can eat away at other rocks below ground, opening up a cozy space to cool and solidify. It can also come flying—or oozing—out of a volcano, quickly crystallizing on the surface. Or it may squirt through crevices like fractures or boundaries between sedimentary layers, inserting itself as a sheet in any number of orientations. Where these walls of igneous rock cut across rock layers, they are called “dikes.”

Every now and then, when conditions are just right, sediments get to play this game, too. When they’re over-pressurized, water-soaked sands can sometimes get injected into fractures to form “clastic dikes”. Most often, these clastic dikes invade sediments or sedimentary rocks. Only very, very rarely, does sand get to turn the tables on those igneous hooligans, forming dikes of sandstone within igneous rocks.

In Colorado’s Front Range, near Colorado Springs, you can find that strange inversion. Along the Ute Pass Fault, the Tava sandstone forms dikes and similar formations within the billion-year-old Pikes Peak Granite, as well as some even older crystalline rocks to the south. Sheets of sandstone up to six meters thick cut through the rocks, which would confuse the heck out of any young geology students an instructor was mean enough to bring out there.

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The front (left) and back (right) of RocketSkates, motorized chariots for your feet. Andrew Cunningham

Some words just make other words seem cooler. Add "rocket" to just about anything—car, backpack, toast—and suddenly you've made those words way more interesting. Rocket car! Rocket backpack! Rocket toast!

That was my thinking when I decided to try out RocketSkates, an upcoming product from Acton that cleared $550,000 in Kickstarter funding over the summer. While they aren't actually propelled by rockets, the motorized and battery-powered skates will scoot you along at speeds of about 12 miles per hour, and creator Peter Treadway has high hopes that they'll compete with skateboards, bikes, regular skates, and plain old feet as a form of urban transit. We met with Treadway earlier this week to talk about the skates and to take them for a test run.

RocketSkates began as a school project that Treadway began working on while he was getting his master's degree in industrial design. For him, "wearable transportation" was a natural way to combine his "love of cars and love of fashion." During the prototyping phase, he even delayed his own graduation so he could retain his access to the school's facilities.

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