Companies complying with NSA’s PRISM may face EU lawsuits
Internet companies that pass data to the National Security Agency under the PRISM >program could face legal action in the European Union, say privacy regulators and experts there. U.S. government activities and the activity of U.S. companies on home soil are not bound by E.U. law, but companies that operate in the E.U. and serve citizens of the bloc are subject to its relatively strict data-protection laws.
The ILC through two lenses
Now that Japan has expressed interest in hosting the International Linear Collider, the next-generation particle collider that will seek to better understand phenomena including the Higgs boson and dark matter, the big question is where in Japan the 31-kilometer-long machine might be built.
Two potential sites—the Sefuri mountains in Kyushu in the south and the Kitakami mountains in Tohoku in the north—released promotional videos this spring that take >two distinct approaches.
Awkward Google wisely buys the least human social network
Google has emerged as the >victorious bidder for Waze , a collaborative mapping system that had reportedly been subject to a billion-dollar bidding war involving Facebook. It’s the perfect social acquisition for Google, a company that tends to suck at the nuances of human-to-human communication.
Waze, you see, is a social network that requires no actual human interaction.
Life on Saturn’s moon? How a mountain gave clues to a subsurface sea
Dione, one of Saturn's many moons, hasn't attracted a lot of attention before now. It has faded into the near-anonymity of the dozens of other icy satellites orbiting gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. (At last count, Jupiter's up to 66 moons and Saturn has 62.) But behind its "bland cueball" exterior, Dione might be hiding some secrets of her own – like a >n ocean anywhere from 5 to 30 miles deep , trapped beneath a frozen surface, according to an article recently published in Icarus.
Closing the last Bell-test loophole for photons
An international team of researchers has reached a milestone in experimental confirmation of a key tenet of quantum mechanics, using u >ltra-sensitive photon detectors devised by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), USA, scientists.
Are pigs stupid? Perhaps they’re just stressed
Despite research, >pigs have a reputation for being ‘stupid’. Similar to the‘three-second memory’ myth with fish, I wonder if it’s perpetuated to make people not feel bad about eating these animals, or the conditions under which they are often reared.
Compiled by Vasudevan Mukunth
