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	(Sponsor this newsletter) U.S. ends program flagging 'sensitive' patent requests A little known but controversial program that flagged sensitive patent applications involving potentially touchy subjects such as AIDS vaccines and abortion devices has been scrapped by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The program, called the Sensitive Application Warning System, began in 1994 and was meant to notify the agency's leadership of applications that could generate extensive or unfavorable publicity. "Upon careful consideration, the USPTO has concluded that the SAWS program has only been marginally utilized and provides minimal benefit," the agency said in a notice posted to its website on Monday night. The agency's review of the program, conducted in January, came after attorneys Kate Gaudry and Thomas Franklin at law firm Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton revealed details of the program in December from documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Read More » Cyborg Roaches Could Be Used to Find Disaster Survivors Fleets of cyborg cockroaches could someday roam into damaged nuclear power plants or collapsed mines to carry out reconnaissance or locate survivors. A team of researchers implanted live cockroaches with electrodes that stimulate the nerves in the insects' antennae, enabling the scientists to steer the creatures around like remote-controlled toys. While people may normally think of cockroaches as pests that live on human waste, these insects are better than any small-scale robots that exist today, said Hong Liang, a materials scientist at Texas A&M University in College Station, and co-author of the study published online today (March 4) in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Read More » UK scientists work out weight of Sophie the Stegosaurus LONDON (AP) — Scientists at a British museum have worked out the weight of Sophie, one of the world's most complete Stegosaurus skeletons. Read More » Penguins Rapidly Conquered New Zealand After Humans Ate Rivals Bones left behind by a penguin that was eaten to extinction reveal that a remarkably fast turnover in species occurred after Polynesian seafarers wiped out New Zealand's weird wildlife, a new study reports. Archaeological evidence has already confirmed the first humans to arrive in New Zealand treated the islands like a giant buffet. The first Pacific Islanders arrived in the late 13th century, and within 200 years, about 40 percent of the islands' bird species had vanished, studies show. Rats traveling with the settlers drove the extinction of smaller bird species, while human hunters vanquished the megafauna, including the nine species of large, flightless moa. Read More » Image Captures Light's Spooky Dual Nature for 1st Time This strange behavior is a consequence of quantum mechanics, bizarre rules of physics that govern the behavior of subatomic particles. "This experiment demonstrates that, for the first time ever, we can film quantum mechanics — and its paradoxical nature — directly," study co-author Fabrizio Carbone, a researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, said in a statement. Read More » 'Nightmare Bacteria' Require Old and New Weapons "Superbug" bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics have the potential to create a nightmare scenario for modern medicine, but experts are hopeful that doctors will be able to slow the spread of these scary infections, by both traditional means and new innovations. Recently, a Los Angeles hospital announced that more than 100 patients treated there had potentially been exposed to CRE, or carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae, bacteria that are resistant to many antibiotics. The bacteria appear to have contaminated a piece of medical equipment used at the facility called an endoscope, which is a flexible tube that doctors use to view the digestive tract. Endoscopies are generally considered to be low-risk procedures, but two of the patients died from their infections, the hospital said. Read More » In a Zombie Outbreak, Head for the Rocky Mountains In the event of a zombie outbreak, the best way to avoid getting infected is to stay away from populated areas, according to a new study. To figure out the best way to survive a zombie apocalypse, a team of researchers modeled what would happen if an epidemic of the undead were to hit the United States. "We did a full U.S.-scale simulation of 307 million individuals and thousands of outbreaks, to see who ended up infected and who did not," said Alex Alemi, a graduate student in theoretical physics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Read More » Heroin Overdose Deaths Nearly Quadruple in 13 Years In 2000, the group with the highest rate of heroin overdose deaths was black adults ages 45 to 64, with a rate of 2 deaths per 100,000 yearly. In contrast, in 2013, the group with the highest death rate was white adults ages 18 to 44, with a rate of 7 deaths per 100,000, according to the report. Heroin overdose deaths were more common among men than women. Doctors don't know for certain the reasons why heroin deaths are increasing, but it's thought that the increase in prescription pain medication use and abuse has been a contributing factor, said Dr. Scott Krakower, assistant unit chief of psychiatry at Zucker Hillside Hospital in New York, who was not involved with the report. Read More » Kids Get Flu Every 2 Years, Adults Twice a Decade Children get the flu more often than adults do, a new study finds. "There's a lot of debate in the field as to how often people get flu, as opposed to flu-like illness caused by something else," said Adam Kucharski, the study's lead researcher and a fellow at the London School of Hygiene &Tropical Disease in the United Kingdom. When people get sick with the flu, their immune systems produce antibodies that target proteins on the virus surface, and after a person recovers, "the infection will show up when a blood sample is subsequently tested," Kucharski said. In other words, the blood retains a memory of the flu strains that have infected a person in the past. Read More » Israel uses military expertise to join commercial space race By Ari Rabinovitch HAIFA, Israel (Reuters) - Israel is embarking on a five-year mission to stake its claim on a crowded new frontier, the $250 billion a year commercial space market. Using the expertise of a defense industry that created technology such as the "Iron Dome" missile interceptor, Israel plans to move beyond its current focus on spy and military communications satellites into producing civilian devices, some small enough to fit in your hand. "The idea was that we have a well-developed space infrastructure for our defense needs, and without a big financial investment, we can use it to grab a few percentage points of the commercial market as well," said Issac Ben-Israel, chairman of the Israel Space Agency. Ben-Israel hopes the country will capture at least a three percent market share, but it faces competition from global technology giants looking for new markets and industries. Read More » Jaws Not Brains Define Early Human Species The extinct human species long thought of as the earliest known member of the human family may be at least a half million years older than previously thought, according to state-of-the-art computer models of the species. These extinct species, like modern humans, were members of the genus Homo. The species long thought of as the earliest known member of that genus was Homo habilis, or "handy man," which paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey and his colleagues discovered in 1964. Thekey Homo habilis fossil is known as Olduvai Hominid 7, or OH 7 for short, which consists of a lower jaw, parts of a braincase and hand bones of a single individual. Read More »
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