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nvolving six high schools in the state’s second-largest school district follows a sick-out from teachers that shut down two high schools in the politically and economically diverse area that has become a key political battleground.

organized by word of mouth and social media.

the commission will put the newly-freed blocks of spectrum up for auction. If, as expected, the spectrum is more valuable when used for mobile services than broadcast television, then the FCC should reap significantly more from these traditional auctions than it had to pay for the spectrum in the original reverse auctions, producing a tidy profit for taxpayers.

Court documents have revealed how information supplied by New Zealand’s Organised and Financial Crime Agency led to Kim Dotcom and his associates being illegally monitored by GCSB, the Kiwi spy agency comparable to the United States’ CIA. Today a High Court judge expressed concern at the situation, with Dotcom’ legal team calling for an independent inquiry into the fiasco. Meanwhile, pressure continues to mount on Prime Minister John Key as it’s revealed the government issued an information suppression order.

According to court documents, GCSB checked with OFCANZ that both Dotcom and der Kolk were indeed foreign nationals. OFCANZ said they were, but in fact neither should have been spied on by GCSB. The monitoring went ahead anyway. In the High Court today, Justice Helen Winkelmann asked lawyers how it could be possible that GCSB hadn’t known about Dotcom’s New Zealand residency.

During an earlier hearing, Detective Inspector Grant Wormald of OFCANZ said that apart from surveillance carried out by the police, no other surveillance had been carried out against Dotcom. But with the revelation that GCSB had indeed been monitoring the Megaupload founder at the behest of OFCANZ, questions are now being raised about this apparent inconsistency, not least since Wormald previously acknowledged that a secret government unit had been involved in a pre-raid planning meeting in January.

“In the same way that a laser is a hell of a lot more powerful than a light bulb, room-temperature superconductivity would completely change how you transport electricity and enable new ways of using electricity,” said Louis Taillefer, a professor of physics at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec.

ripples of electrons inside the superconductors that are called charge density waves. The fine-grained structure of the waves, reported in two new papers by independent groups of researchers, suggests that they may be driven by the same force as superconductivity. Davis and his colleagues directly visualized the waves in a study posted online in April, corroborating indirect evidence reported in February by a team led by Riccardo Comin, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto.

Taken together, the various findings are at last starting to build a comprehensive picture of the physics behind high-temperature superconductivity. “This is the first time I feel like we’re making real progress,” said Andrea Damascelli, a professor of physics at the University of British Columbia who led two recent studies on charge density waves. “A lot of different observations which have been made over decades did not make sense with each other, and now they do.”

You may remember a high-profile, landmark ruling last year in Massachusetts, where charges against Simon Glik -- arrested for violating a state law that said it's "wiretapping" to record a police officer in public without his permission -- weren't just dropped, but the arrest was found to be both a First and Fourth Amendment violation. In the end, Boston was forced to pay Glik $170,000 for violating his civil rights. You would think that story would spread across Massachusetts pretty quickly and law enforcement officials and local district attorneys would recognize that filing similar charges would be a certified bad idea. Not so, apparently, in the town of Shrewsbury. Irving J. Espinosa-Rodrigue was apparently arrested and charged under the very same statute after having a passenger in his car videotape a traffic stop for speeding, and then posting the video on YouTube. Once again, the "issue" is that Massachusetts is a "two-party consent" state, whereby an audio recording can't be done without first notifying the person being recorded, or its deemed a "wiretap." This interpretation, especially when dealing with cops in public, is flat-out ridiculous and unconstitutional, as the Glik ruling showed.

The Food and Drug Administration has already approved his technique for human trials, and he has secured funding from the Army to conduct the feasibility phase. Dr. Rhee is currently lobbying for funds to conduct a full trial. If he’s successful human trials could begin as early as next year.

What Dr. Rhee hopes to test on humans is a method he worked out for the past couple decades on pigs. Patients would be injected with a cold fluid to induce severe hypothermia. Clinically hypothermia is characterized by the drop of a person’s body temperature from its normal 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celcius) to lower than 95 degrees (35 C). Below 95, the heart, nervous system and other organs begin to fail. The strict range is indicative of a metabolic system with strict temperature requirements for proper function (death waits only a few degrees the other way as well). Dr. Rhee’s method involves injecting patients with a cold fluid that would bring the body’s temperature down to 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 C). Sounds chilling, but when he induced the extreme hypothermia in pigs they came out just fine. Heart function, breathing, and brain function was completely normal.

Dr. Rhee is no stranger to high-stakes medicine. The native South Korean was trained at the Uniformed Services University Medical School in Bethesda, Maryland. Following a fellowship in trauma and critical care at the University of Washington’s Harborview Medical Center he served in the US Navy as director of the University of South California’s Navy Trauma Training Center at Los Angeles County. He was then sent to Afghanistan where he was one of the first surgeons at Camp Rhino. Later he started the first surgical unit at Ramadi, Iraq. His cool under fire was on display nationally as he performed surgery on US Representative Gabrielle Giffords after she was shot through the skull in the Tucson shootings this past January. His experience with induced hypothermia came into play the night of the shootings when Dr. Rhee removed part of the congresswoman’s skull. The wound had raised her body temperature and began “cooking the brain.” He used a device to cool Rep. Giffords’ skin.

"deny, disrupt, degrade and deceive" by any means possible.

A PowerPoint presentation from 2010 states that JTRIG activities account for five per cent of GCHQ's operations budget and uses a variety of techniques. These include "call bombing" to drown out a target's ability to receive messages, attacking targets in hotels, Psyops (psychological operations) against individuals, and going all the way up to disrupting a country's critical infrastructure.

According to reports in Der Spiegel last year, British intelligence has tapped the reservations systems of over 350 top hotels around the world for the past three years to set up Royal Concierge. It was used to spy on trade delegations, foreign diplomats, and other targets with a taste for the high life.

The two main components of Uroburos are - a driver and an encrypted virtual file system, used to disguise its nasty activities and to try to avoid detection. Its driver part is extremely complex and is designed to be very discrete and very difficult to identify.

The virtual file system can’t be decrypted without the presence of drivers, according to the Gdata’s analysis explained in the PDF.

The FBI has an elite hacker team that creates customized malware to identify or monitor high-value suspects who are adept at covering their tracks online, according to a published report.

JOHN MILLER: He's already said, "If I got amnesty, I would come back." Given the potential damage to national security, what would your thought on making a deal be? RICK LEDGETT: So, my personal view is, yes, it's worth having a conversation about. I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured, and my bar for those assurances would be very high. It would be more than just an assertion on his part.

The reason for granting amnesty is as a recognition that Snowden was, in fact, a whistleblower

“They’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of man-hours trying to reconstruct everything he has gotten, and they still don’t know all of what he took,” a senior administration official said. “I know that seems crazy, but everything with this is crazy.”

In recent days, a senior N.S.A. official has told reporters that he believed Mr. Snowden still had access to documents not yet disclosed. The official, Rick Ledgett, who is heading the security agency’s task force examining Mr. Snowden’s leak, said he would consider recommending amnesty for Mr. Snowden in exchange for those documents.

“So, my personal view is, yes, it’s worth having a conversation about,” Mr. Ledgett told CBS News. “I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured, and my bar for those assurances would be very high. It would be more than just an assertion on his part.”

Using genetically modified E. coli to generate biofuel isn’t new. U.K. scientists said in April they have developed a process under which the bacterium turns biomass into an oil that is almost identical to conventional diesel–a development that followed similar research by U.S. biotechnology firm LS9 in 2010. But the breakthrough this time is important because the reprogrammed E. coli can produce gasoline, a high-premium oil product that’s more expensive than diesel if the biofuel becomes commercially viable, according to Prof. Lee Sang-yup at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. His team’s study was published in the international science journal Nature on Monday.

The significance of this breakthrough is that you don’t have to go through another process to crack the oil created by E. coli to produce gasoline. We have succeeded in converting glucose or waste biomass directly into gasoline,

only a few drops of the fuel per hour—making just 580 milligrams of gasoline from one liter of glucose culture.

NASA recently announced that the rover has arrived at the base of Mount Sharp, a 3.4-mile-high mountain that Curiosity has been heading towards since July of 2013.

Curiosity was designed to travel a maximum of 660 feet per day and navigate difficult terrain on its six wheels. The Spirit rover traveled only 4.8 miles over its lifespan, although the still-active Opportunity rover has logged about 25 miles since 2003. Curiosity's path was rerouted earlier this year after scientists found that sharp rocks were poking holes in its wheels.

Documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the government worked in secret to exploit a new internet surveillance law enacted in the wake of revelations of illegal domestic spying to initiate a new metadata collection program that appeared designed to collect information about the communications of New Zealanders.

Snowden explained that “at the NSA, I routinely came across the communications of New Zealanders in my work with a mass surveillance tool we share with GCSB, called ‘X KEYSCORE.”" He further detailed that “the GCSB provides mass surveillance data into XKEYSCORE. They also provide access to the communications of millions of New Zealanders to the NSA at facilities such as the GCSB facility in Waihopai, and the Prime Minister is personally aware of this fact.”

three tonnes of force inside a golf ball-sized sample of material that is normally as brittle as fine china.

Superconductors are materials that carry electrical current with little or no resistance when cooled below a certain temperature. While conventional superconductors need to be cooled close to absolute zero (zero degrees on the Kelvin scale, or –273 °C) before they superconduct, high temperature superconductors do so above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (–196 °C), which makes them relatively easy to cool and cheaper to operate.

Superconductors are currently used in scientific and medical applications, such as MRI scanners, and in the future could be used to protect the national grid and increase energy efficiency, due to the amount of electrical current they can carry without losing energy.