All too often, technology companies have raced against each other to build restrictive tangleware that suits Hollywood's whims, selling out their users in the process. But open Web standards are an antidote to that dynamic, and it would be a terrible mistake for the Web community to leave the door open for Hollywood's gangrenous anti-technology culture to infect W3C standards. It would undermine

Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks is publicly dumping just under two million diplomatic cables - dubbed the Kissinger cables - from the mid 1970s.

Wikileaks has put together a search function on its website so users can comb for keywords in these Kissinger files as well as the 'Cablegate' files, which were largely from the mid-2000s.

Called PlusD, or the Public Library o

Hollywood is at it again. Its latest ploy to take over the Web? Use its influence at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to weave Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) into HTML5 — in other words, into the very fabric of the Web. Millions of Internet users came together to defeat SOPA/PIPA, but now Big Media moguls are going through non-governmental channels to try to sneak digital restrictions i

Octopuses had hundreds of suckers, each with its own ganglion with thousands of neurons. Those "mini-brains" were interconnected, making for a widely distributed nervous system, which was why a severed octopus arm may crawl on its own and even pick up food.

Similarly, when an octopus changed skin colour, the command may come from the skin.

Gene sequences that were simila

Hollywood director James Cameron found little evidence of life when he descended nearly 11,000 metres to the deepest point in the world's oceans last year. If only he had taken a microscope and looked just a few centimetres deeper.

Ronnie Glud at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, and his colleagues, have discovered unusually high levels of microbial activity in the sediments at the

The shale gas revolution was meant to bring lasting prosperity. But the result of the gas glut may be just a bubble, producing no more than a temporary recovery that masks deep structural instability.

The al-Qaida extremists bypassed the brightly colored, high-end synthetic floor coverings and stopped their pickup truck in front of a man selling more modest mats woven from desert grass, priced at $1.40 apiece. There they bought two bales of 25 mats each, and asked him to bundle them on top of the car, along with a stack of sticks.

"It's the first time someone has bought such a large amount,

In transforming an office with an aura of divinity into something far more human, Benedict’s decision has sent shock waves through the Vatican hierarchy, who next month will elect his successor. But it has also puzzled the faithful and scholars, who wonder how a pope can be infallible one day and fallible again the next — and whether that might undermine the authority of church teaching.

Bened

A new study using data from a pair of gravity-measuring NASA satellites finds that large parts of the arid Middle East region lost freshwater reserves rapidly during the past decade.

Greenhouse gas emissions in the 1990s could have been underestimated by billions of tonnes, throwing doubt on some of the maths behind the Kyoto Protocol, research by Australian and international scientists suggests.

The research team measured real-world changes in the amount of CO2 building up in the atmosphere against the amount of gases that each country said it emitted. And, like a jigsaw

There’s an ex-employee who has a warrant outstanding for his arrest and yet he has a glowing profile. People delete the five jobs they’ve had in two years. Recommendations are biased. This leaves the few genuine people remaining without a competitive advantage. The liars look just as good. I’m cautious of people’s profiles and read them sceptically.

Not just the identity of the man in the car park with the twisted spine, but the appalling last moments and humiliating treatment of the naked body of Richard III in the hours after his death have been revealed at an extraordinary press conference at Leicester University.

Scepticism about climate change in Australia may be something else that will melt during the nation's great heatwave.

Joseph Reser, adjunct professor at Griffith University's School of Applied Psychology, said ''there's a powerful climate change signal in extreme weather events in Australia for the public - the current heatwave is outside people's experience''.

A study published in late 201

The soldiers and marines are packing their bags. The pilots are sitting on the tarmac. But the armed robotic planes are busier than they’ve ever been: Revised U.S. military statistics show a much, much larger drone war in Afghanistan than anyone suspected.

WHO has recommended wider testing, but the linkage of the initial cases to Mecca, including a trip during Umrah week, raises concerns that the novel coronavirus has spread well beyond Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Large numbers of pilgrims from Indonesia, India, and Pakistan visited Saudi Arabia for the Hajj, and the return of those pilgrims to their counties or origin has increased concerns.