News Briefs 11-02-2013

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• Planetary Resources is looking for a few good asteroid miners.
• Video: How big is the universe … compared with a grain of sand?
• Retired silversmith uncovers the largest collection of ancient rock art ever found in the Scottish Highlands.
• What is life? Physicist Erwin Schrödinger sparked a revolution in biology 70 years ago.
• Chemical romance: Could a new love drug cure divorce?
• Alarm bells after UFO appears and circles over the world's largest oil refinery.
• South Pole turning into waste dump.
• Geoengineering is being tested, albeit inadvertently, in the north Pacific. Soot from oil-burning ships is dumping about 1000 tonnes of soluble iron per year across 6 million square kilometres of ocean, new research has revealed.
• MIT engineers have created genetic circuits in bacterial cells that not only perform logic functions, but also remember the results, which are encoded in the cell's DNA and passed on for dozens of generations.
• The largest prime number yet discovered – all 17 million digits of it.
• Monkey midwife: black snub-nosed monkey seen helping another monkey give birth.
• An environmental catastrophe is occurring on the high seas, and governments have finally decided to do something about it.
• For the past two years, Taronga Western Plains Zoo has been storing the sperm and eggs of coral from the Great Barrier Reef.
• US Supreme Court to decide seed battle between Indiana farmer and Monsanto.
• Raytheon's Riot program mines social network data like a 'Google for spies', tracking people's movements and predicting future behaviour.
• Secret history of drones: The prototype of the drones now used in Afghanistan was actually conceived in 1916.
• Five Homeland Security 'bots coming to spy on you (if they aren't already).
• DHS 'watchdog' OKs suspicionless seizure of electronic devices along US border (which stretches 100 miles inland from the actual border).
• Recycled cellphones tend to hang on to their former owners' personal data. A new algorithm aims to wipe them clean.
• Webcam and CCTV security flaw exposes us to prying eyes.
• Children are writing malicious computer code to hack accounts on gaming sites and social networks.
• Historian Greg Jefferys, who has a degree in archaeology, says he has new evidence that not all crop circles have a human origin.
• Legendary creature effects artist Stuart Freeborn, creator of the ape-filled 'Dawn of Man' sequence in '2001: A Space Odyssey' and of Yoda, Chewbacca, and other 'Star Wars' characters, dies at age 98.
• DC Comics is turning the Occupy Movement into a superhero title.
• CEOs with big signatures are more likely to be narcissists.

Quote of the Day:

Sherlock Holmes, studying James Moriarty's signature: Are you familiar with the study of graphology?

Professor Moriarty: I have never given it any serious thought. No.

Sherlock Holmes: The psychological analysis of handwriting. The upward strokes on the p, the j, the m indicate a genius level intellect, while the flourishes on the lower zone denote a highly creative yet meticulous nature. But if one observes the overall slant and pressure of the writing, there's a suggestion of acute narcissism, a complete lack of empathy, and a pronounced inclination toward moral insanity.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows