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CurrentC, the mobile payments system being pushed by some of the biggest retailers in the US, has been hacked – before the system is even fully up and running.

“Within the last 36 hours, we learned that unauthorized third parties obtained the e-mail addresses of some of our CurrentC pilot program participants and individuals who had expressed interest in the app,” a spokeswoman for the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) told El Reg.

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Merchants aren’t blocking Apple Pay to collect data on us. They aren’t doing it to spite Apple, or to pressure Apple into giving them a split of the profits. While those might be factors, the real reason is a deep-seated, and possibly well-deserved, hatred of credit cards.

Unfortunately, none of this has anything to do with improving the customer experience.

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Sardinians want to become part of Switzerland. And who could blame them?

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Of course; where else would it be?

Researcher Jean Thie said Wednesday he used satellite imagery and Google Earth software to locate the dam, which is about 850 metres (2,800 feet) long on the southern edge of Wood Buffalo National Park.

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Honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) is a well-known Chinese herb. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, it has been used to effectively treat influenza infection for centuries.

…

Now, a team of researchers headed by Dr Chen-Yu Zhang of Nanjing University in China has identified MIR2911 (honeysuckle-encoded atypical microRNA2911) as the first active component directly targeting various influenza viruses, including the swine flu H1N1, highly pathogenic avian H5N1 and H7N9 infections.

MIR2911 represses influenza viruses by targeting PB2 and NS1, two genes that are known to be required for influenza viral replication.

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Some of these are pretty interesting.

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In the realm of cancerous diseases, tumors affecting the brain can be particularly difficult to cure. Many are fast moving and take hold of key sections of the body’s most fundamental organ, rendering surgical removal extremely difficult or impossible.

Now, researchers at Harvard Stem Cell Institute have come up with a new method for battling these deadly brain tumors — by taking them apart from the inside out. In a new study, the scientists have engineered stem cells to secrete cancer-killing cytotoxins that degrade the tumor from within its core.

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John Coleman, the founder of Weather Channel, has written an open letter to UCLA, in which he claims the theory of anthropogenic climate change is no longer scientifically credible.

BottleLoft.

Darth Vader toaster.

Seek Thermal Camera.

Catherine Shu shows some serious claw.

Mark Zuckerberg may only own one hoodie, as far as we can tell, but he is multilingual. The Facebook founder was interviewed at business school Tsinghua University today and answered all questions in Mandarin, to the delight of the audience and the relief of Renee Zellweger, who is probably happy that the Internet now has something to talk about besides her face.

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The product of interest is Freescale’s new MHT1003N, a 250 watt LDMOS transistor for 2.45 GHz that provides a power-added efficiency (PAE) of 58%.  Another device targeting RF heating applications is the MHT1002N for 915 MHz that can deliver 350 watts at 63% PAE.  Using the MHT1003N, manufacturers can use from one to eight of these 250 W units to build a microwave oven with the desired power level.  And the magnetron’s 4 kV power supply goes away in place of a supply of 28 to 50 volts.  Furthermore, the crude on-off control of the magnetron can be replaced with full variable power control.  Using multiple antennas, one per amplifier, provides better coverage of the cooking chamber.  This allows food to be cooked more precisely while the unit operates more efficiently.  And the product lifetime is significantly greater.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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You want Merlot with that?

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In the latest issue of the journal Science, researchers at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics — together with colleagues at Harvard University and the Vienna University of Technology — describe the experimental realization of an optical switch that’s controlled by a single photon, allowing light to govern the transmission of light. As such, it’s the optical analog of a transistor, the fundamental component of a computing circuit.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Dr. John Deasy, Ph.D., has been shoved out as boss of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, temporarily denting his ambition to become Secretary of Education under Obama or Hillary.

Deasy ranks with Arne Duncan as the classic White Male Empty Suit of the Education Reform Era. Until this setback, Deasy had overcome his stale pale maleness to forge a fabulous career of job hopping by aggressively mouthing all the cliches about Closing the Gap beloved by philanthropic billionaires currently dabbling in education, such as Bill Gates and Eli Broad.

Work Sharp WSKTS Knife and Tool Sharpener.

Handy Paint Pail.

Air Umbrella.

Cat Ear Headphones. It helps to be Japanese, female, and have magenta hair.

Portable Cardboard Standing Desk. This is really slick.

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The blood cells of cancer patients, reprogrammed by doctors to attack their leukemia and re-infused back into the patients’ veins, led to complete remissions in 27 of 30 people. That’s especially exciting because those patients had failed all conventional treatments.

This looks very promising.

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More innovation from Amazon. No wonder ‘progressives’ hate it.

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Most existing fusion devices slam together atoms using a tokamak, a magnetic device that contains the superheated plasma required for fusion to occur. Invented in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, it’s what most nuclear fusion devices use. The problem is, the energy required to sustain the reaction is almost as much as what’s created by the reaction.

Lockheed says they’ve figured out how to solve that problem, using their CFR, a jet-engine-sized device. They’ve changed the process for holding the plasma in a way they say has 10 times the output of a tokamak.They also say there’s no risk of a meltdown, and that radioactive waste will be considerably lessened.

More here.

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The highly respected Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota just advised the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) that “there is scientific and epidemiologic evidence that Ebola virus has the potential to be transmitted via infectious aerosol particles,” including exhaled breath.

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Wiktenauer is an ongoing collaboration among researchers and practitioners from across the Western martial arts community, seeking to collect all of the primary and secondary source literature that makes up the text of historical European martial arts research and to organize and present it in a scholarly but accessible format. The Wiktenauer project started in 2009, later receiving sponsorship from the Historical European Martial Arts Alliance, and is named for Johannes Liechtenauer, grand master of the oldest known longsword fencing style; his tradition was also the best-documented of the early Modern era, the subject of many dozens of manuscripts and books over a period of more than three centuries.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Pepsi is embracing stevia-leaf extract with a new soda called True, but you won’t find it at your local grocery store. Curious beverage fans will have to buy it on Amazon.

Speaking as an Amazon shareholder, I welcome our new artificially-sweetened masters….

Seriously, I hope that this product is different from all the other reduced-sugar products I’ve tried over the years. Pepsi is one of my few culinary indulgences, and in order to keep from looking like a beach ball I have to restrict the amount I drink in a day quite rigidly. It doesn’t help that most ‘diet’ alternatives taste like something that they ought to be paying you to drink, not the other way ’round.

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Treasures found on an ancient Mediterranean shipwreck suggest that the massive vessel met a stormy, violent death, and scattered remains over a much larger area than previously thought.

SlideBelts.

Kernel-Filtering Popcorn Bowl.

VSSL Outdoor Utility Tools.

DUXTOP Portable Induction Cooktop.

Magnetic Shoe Closures.

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The process has been certified as carbon negative by Trucost and NSF Sustainability, and actually costs less to produce than oil-based plastics, says Mr Campbell.

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Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven’t penciled out. Fusion power designs aren’t cheap enough to outperform systems that use fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.

University of Washington engineers hope to change that. They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output.

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Startup Alphabet Energy is billing its new product, announced on Tuesday, as the world’s first industrial scale thermoelectric generator, which means it is powerful enough to be used at remote oil, gas and mining sites. Called the “E1,” the device uses the latest in material science and nanotechnology to capture waste heat from the exhaust stack of a diesel generator, and the material inside converts that heat into usable electricity.

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Some of these are obvious. Some of them are painful.

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The concept of a skin-tight form-fitting spacesuit has long been common in science fiction; now people are actually building them.

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In which they are not unlike journalists and politicians.

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Anti-discrimination legislation and preferences for government programs are no doubt under preparation.

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Hotel WiFi sucks. If you do any traveling, you’re aware of this. Though, from what I’ve seen, the higher end the hotel, the worse the WiFi is and the more insane its prices are. Cheap discount hotels often offer free WiFi, and it’s generally pretty reliable. High end hotels? I’ve seen prices of $30 per day or higher, and it’s dreadfully low bandwidth. These days, when traveling, I often pick hotels based on reviews of the WiFi quality, because nothing can be more frustrating than a crappy internet connection when it’s needed. But, even worse than the WiFi in your room, if you’re using the WiFi for a business meeting or event — the hotels love to price gouge. And, it appears that’s exactly what the Marriott-operated Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville did. Except, the company went one step further. Thanks to things like tethering on phones and MiFi devices that allow you to set up your own WiFi hotspot using wireless broadband, Marriott realized that some smart business folks were getting around its (absolutely insane) $1,000 per device WiFi charges, and just using MiFi’s. So, Marriott then broke FCC regulations and started jamming the devices to force business folks to pay its extortionate fees.

Egg-on-a-Stick Cooker.

Yonanas fruit gelato maker.

Paparazzi-Thwarting Reflective Visor. And about time, too.

BeachSafe.

Wallet Ninja. I’m a sucker for these cute little gizmos.

King Jim Wearable Futon.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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According to new research, the sense of smell is the canary in the coalmine of human health. A study published today in the open access journal PLOS ONE, shows that losing one’s sense of smell strongly predicts death within five years, suggesting that the nose knows when death is imminent, and that smell may serve as a bellwether for the overall state of the body, or as a marker for exposure to environmental toxins.

So don’t say that we didn’t warn you.

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Civet coffee is among the most expensive coffees in the world—a cup can cost $80. Coffee beans that have passed through the digestive tract of this cat-sized creature native to southeast Asia make a remarkably smooth brew, producers and aficionados say. But the cost isn’t just financial. Although civet coffee, also known by its Indonesian name, kopi luwak, originated with beans collected from the feces of wild animals, increased demand has encouraged producers to keep the animals in cages and force them to subsist on a nutritionally deficient diet of coffee beans.

A noble endeavor.

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While the “seven-year rule” is nothing more than mythology, dog owners (and media outlets) continue to use it for its simplicity — it’s convenient, after all, to have a “one size fits all” method of understanding our pets’ equivalent stages of life. In reality, contextualizing a dog’s age is a bit more complex.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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So shut up about the fargin whales already.

Smartphone microscope.

Submarine yacht.

Chocolate skulls. I am not making this up.

Potato chip coasters.

ThermalStrike luggage.

Pixel Waffle Maker.

Gravity Maze.

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The coffee genome has now been published, and it reveals that the coffee plant makes caffeine using a different set of genes from those found in tea, cacao and other perk-you-up plants.

If you’re trying to read an article on a site that has a paywall — e.g. Wall Street Journal, New York Times — and clicking on a link just gives you the ‘teaser’ for the article, highlight the title and search for it in Google, then click on that link to the same article. More often than not, it will give you the full thing, presumably because it thinks you’re coming from a search engine rather than being a Boring Old Consumer.

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Is there nothing that can’t be solved with the judicious application of bacon? Apparently not, as this year’s Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine winners can attest.

The boffins from the US and India took home the gong for their paper on treating “uncontrollable” nosebleeds by packing the nose with strips of cured pork.

Arrrrrr.

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There are some very interesting things happening in this field.

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The question of whether we all see the same colours has a long history in philosophy and science. In the past, there seemed little reason to expect huge differences. We know that almost everyone has three types of “cone cells” in their retina that each respond to a different bandwidth of light. The colour of an object depends on the particular combination of those signals, but although the exact sensitivity may vary between people, overall one person’s colours should roughly match another person’s. The exceptions were thought to be colour-blind people, where one of the cones is faulty. With reduced sensitivity at certain wavelengths, they struggle to tell the difference between reds and greens, for instance.

In theory, though, it could go the other way: according to some estimates, an extra cone would offer a hundred different variants to each colour that humans normally see. We know that this happens in nature: zebrafinches and goldfish both have a fourth cone that seems to help them differentiate apparently identical colours. About 20 years ago Gabriele Jordan at the University of Newcastle and John Mollon at the University of Cambridge proposed a way that it might be possible in humans too.

The crux of Jordan’s argument lay in the fact that the gene for our red and green cone types lies on the X chromosome. Since women have two X chromosomes, they could potentially carry two different versions of the gene, each encoding for a cone that is sensitive to slightly different parts of the spectrum. In addition to the other two, unaffected cones, they would therefore have four in total – making them a “tetrachromat”. For these reasons, it’s thought to be a condition exclusive to women, though researchers can’t totally rule out the possibility that men may somehow inherit it too.

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How about that Global Warming, eh?

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“What if you never had to worry about food again?” Soylent’s website asks. For an idealistic, overachieving, and incredibly harried generation, a bland, nutritionally complete slurry that promises effortless waste-free consumption at a manageable price point just may be the ultimate comfort food. Soylent only costs around $3 per meal. It can be purchased in bulk online and prepared in seconds. You don’t have to idle in drive-through lines to sustain yourself, and you sure don’t have to source and chop organic carrots. Soylent renders microwave ovens, refrigerators, stoves, forks, knives, plates, dishwashers, and apparently even toilet paper as unnecessary as turntables and bookshelves. Say goodbye to shopping, prepping, clean-up, even chewing. A cup is your kitchen. Molars are little more than decorative heritage utensils from a bygone era.

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So shut up about my use of salt already.