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"On Saturday, around 18 months after President Obama signed it into law, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act will take effect. Ostensibly, the act is designed to bring U.S. patent law in line with the rest of the world. Of course, not everybody feels it will help achieve the patent system's goal of protecting inventors while fostering innovation, and its effect could be even more pronounced on the DIY inventor."

The Being Human Conference, which took place at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts this weekend, was designed to explore the science of human experience. The speakers ranged from neuroscientists, philosophers and psychologists, to monks, poets and filmmakers - and together their collective ideas and insights shined a light on the complexities of what it means to be human in 2012.  

"In recent years, researchers in the messy world of biology have been able to build systems that function like the clean, binary switches on computer chips-and we've covered a number of reports in this area. Unfortunately, most of these share a significant limitation: they rely on proteins from bacteria that act as switches to turn genes on and off under specific conditions. We know about only a limited number of these genetic switches, which may set a severe limit on the number of logical operations we can string together inside a cell."

""In a case decided on Wednesday, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that accessing someone's online e-mail without their permission doesn't violate the 1986-era Stored Communications Act (SCA). Though they differed in their reasoning, the justices were unanimous in ruling that e-mail stored in the cloud (like Gmail or Yahoo Mail) does not meet the definition of electronic storage as written in the statute."

IT professionals will increasingly act as data managers as the role of application manager becomes superfluous, according to a report called Technology Vision 2011, from IT services firm Accenture. In addition, the coming years will see IT decision-makers choosing platforms that are best able to manage soaring volumes of data as opposed to platforms designed to support applications. Read more: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2024987/management-accenture#ixzz1rlnYqkgY  Computing - Insight for IT leaders Claim your free subscription today.

There's been a movement afoot to boycott Elsevier journals. It's started over in the mathematics community, led by Timothy Gowers, a serious mathematician indeed. The objections to Elsevier are the ones you'd think: high prices, unsplittable bundles of journal subscriptions for institutions, and their strong support for legislation like the Research Works Act.

There is no proverbial silver bullet to creating a safer city, but analytics technology is assisting law enforcement agencies all over the world to sort through information - part of the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data we create and consume every day - to get ahead of crime. Having access to all that information is an invaluable resource for law enforcement agencies, but it can also be pretty paralyzing. After all, only a fraction of the bits and bytes can actually be relevant, right? But how do you know and, more importantly, how do you find and act on it?

Fresh from performing at Science Gallery in Dublin last night during the opening of Hack the City, an English group of urbanists, technologists and architects who created GPS-enabled quadcopter drones, were held at London Southend Airport on suspicion of terrorism and recorded under the UK's Terrorism Act.

Under a new deal signed by the University of Western Ontario and the University of Toronto, the act of emailing a link will be classed as equivalent to photocopying, and each student and faculty member will cost the universities $27.50/year for this right that the law gives them for free, along with a collection of other blanket licenses of varying legitimacy. In order to enforce these licenses, all faculty email will be subject to surveillance.

As I said in my recent review, I generally had a blast making my way through Uncharted: Golden Abyss on the PlayStation Vita. Despite some annoyances with the system's touch-screen and tilt-based controls, I had a good time working through the shooting and climbing sections and being rewarded with some well-acted witty banter in the cut scenes. But despite my overall enjoyment, there was still one point in the game where I was so frustrated I was ready to turn it off and never return. And while this frustration was probably at least as much my fault as the game's, I still think it would have been nice, and much less frustrating, if the game had offered just a little help getting me past that point.

"Are more people doing wrong or are more people speaking up? Retractions of scientific papers have increased about tenfold during the past decade, with many studies crumbling in cases of high-profile research misconduct that ranges from plagiarism to image manipulation to outright data fabrication. When worries about somebody's work reach a critical point, it falls to a peer, supervisor, junior partner or uninvolved bystander to decide whether to keep mum or step up and blow the whistle. Doing the latter comes at significant risk, and the path is rarely simple. Some make their case and move on; others never give up. And in what seems to be a growing trend, anonymous watchdogs are airing their concerns through e-mail and public forums. Here, Nature profiles three markedly different stories of individuals who acted on their suspicions. Successful or otherwise, each case offers lessons for would-be tipsters."