The wasp relies on cockroaches for its grisly life cycle but unlike many venomous predators, which paralyze their victims before eating them, the wasp's sting leaves the cockroach able to walk, but unable to initiate its own movement. Researchers have discovered that the wasps sting the cockroaches once to subdue them, then administer another, more precise sting right into their victim's brain.

Then the wasp grabs the cockroach's antenna and leads it back to the nest 'like a dog on a leash', says one researcher. The team found that they could restore spontaneous walking behavior in stung cockroaches by giving them a compound that reactivates octopamine receptors in the insects' central nervous system. Researchers were also able to create their own zombies by injecting unstung cockroaches with a compound that blocks the receptors producing a similar effect to that of the venom.

One of the most interesting mysteries of Death Valley National Park is the sliding rocks at Racetrack Playa (a playa is a dry lake bed). These rocks can be found on the floor of the playa with long trails behind them. Somehow these rocks slide across the playa, cutting a furrow in the sediment as they move.

No one knows for sure exactly how these rocks move - although a few people have come up with some pretty good explanations. The reason why their movement remains a mystery: No one has ever seen them in motion!

The prevailing winds that blow across Racetrack Playa travel from southwest to northeast. Most of the rock trails are parallel to this direction. This is strong evidence that wind is the prime mover or at least involved with the motion of the rocks.

The Court has ordered UMG Recordings, Warner Bros. Records, Interscope Records, Motown, and SONY BMG to disclose their expenses-per-download to the defendant's lawyers, in UMG v. Lindor, a case pending in Brooklyn. The Court held that the expense figures are relevant to the issue of whether the RIAA's attempt to recover damages of $750 or more per 99-cent song file, is an unconstitutional violation of due process.

The Motion Picture of Association of America is urging some of the nation's largest universities to deploy custom software designed to pinpoint students who may be using the schools' networks to illegally download pirated movies. A closer look at the MPAA's software, however, raises some serious privacy and security concerns for both the entertainment industry and the schools that choose to deploy the technology.

What we found was that depending on how a university's network is set up, installing and using the MPAA tool in its default configuration could expose to the entire Internet all of the traffic flowing across the school's network.

The MPAA overview of the toolkit stresses that the software does not communicate any information about a university's network back to the association. But in its current configuration, the very first thing the toolkit does once it is fired up is phone home to the MPAA's servers and check for a new version of the software.

The toolkit sets up an Apache Web server on the user's machine. It also automatically configures all of the data and graphs gathered about activity on the local network to be displayed on a Web page, complete with ntop-generated graphics showing not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the Internet address of every Web site each user has visited.

The use of Tasers "causes acute pain, constituting a form of torture," the UN's Committee Against Torture said. "In certain cases, they can even cause death, as has been shown by reliable studies and recent real-life events." Three men — all in their early 20s — died from after tasering in the United States this week, days after a Polish man died at Vancouver airport after being tasered by Canadian police. There have been 17 deaths in Canada following the use of Tasers since they were approved for use, and 275 deaths in the US. "According to Amnesty International, coroners have listed the Taser jolt as a contributing factor in more than 30 of those deaths."

At a police convention press briefing, Joerg Ziercke, president of the German Federal Police Office, told reporters, "The encryption with Skype telephone software ... creates grave difficulties for us."

He said, "We can't decipher it. That's why we're talking about source telecommunication surveillance -- that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it's been decrypted."

He also said that German police really need to be able to employ "Trojan horse" spyware.

Intercepting telephone conversations at the source or destination means using listening devices, that is, bugs. Sometimes the old methods are still really the best ones, after all.

In an open letter to Internet service providers published earlier this week, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban calls for telecoms to put an end to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing. Cuban expresses concerns that P2P "freeloaders" are clogging the tubes with commercial content. His letter doesn't focus on piracy, however, and instead primarily attacks companies that use P2P for legitimate commercial applications.

"If I was a Comcast customer, I would tell them, as I am now telling all the services I am a customer of: BLOCK P2P TRAFFIC, PLEASE. As a consumer, I want my Internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my Internet service down are P2P freeloaders," says Cuban.

"I wanted to offer the best alternative to P2P for audio and video..... Google Video. If you are trying to do distribution of audio or video, why in the world would you use P2P when Google Video will host and distribute it very efficiently and for free?"

The Entertainment Retailers Association are begging Hollywood and the record companies to stop installing DRM and making their products impossible to sell.

The organisation says that draconian DRM technologies, not P2P piracy, is responsible for the slow growth in the market.

It is getting so silly now that incompatible DRM formats are making punters wonder if content will even work on their machines.

As a result, the ERA says, customers are seeing file sharing and pirating an easier and safer option than buying legitimate content.

As CD and DVD retailers move towards the Christmas rush, early sales this season are slower, something that music industry will probably put down to an increase in piracy and look for harsher forms of DRM.

The technology behind 3-D printers isn't new. Rapid prototyping machines have existed in myriad forms since the early 1980s, but the pace at which new capabilities and printing materials are being added to the machines is astonishing, says Scott Summit, the co-founder of San Francisco-based industrial design firm Summit ID.

As the technology has evolved, 3-D printers are now capable of printing out fully functional finished products. For example, according to Summit, battleships and aircraft carriers now make extensive use of selective laser sintering (SLS) printers, which can "print out" materials like titanium, cobalt chromium and polyamide, to fabricate spare parts on the spot instead of carrying huge warehouses full of replacements.

"(3-D printers) are basically like the new car that landed in everybody's driveway," Summit concludes. "(Every designer) wants to try them out and see what they can do."

According to a thread on the forums of AnimeSuki, a popular anime bittorent index site, Comcast has begun sending DCMA letters to customers downloading unlicensed fan-subtitled anime shows via bittorrent. By 'unlicensed', they mean that no english language company has the rights to it. The letters are claiming that the copyright holder or an authorized agent are making the infringement claims, though usually these requests are also sent to the site itself rather that individual downloaders.