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Wikipedians want to give users the ability to access the world's most popular encyclopedia in the most secure way possible: On the dark web. Cristian Consonni, Former Vice President of Wikimedia Italy,  proposed  Monday that Wikipedians should create a dark web version of the site accessible only via the Tor Browser. It's possible now to access Wikipedia via Tor—an encrypted browser that's popular with activists and among people living in countries with censored web traffic—but the connection is less secure than it would be if the site was accessible as a "hidden service" on the dark web.  As a hidden service (also called an onion site), Wikipedia would not need to direct its traffic through an exit node, a point where internet traffic "emerges" from the Tor network and connects to sites on the regular web. Exit nodes are known to be a  seriously vulnerable  portion of Tor's security. Consonni shared the proposal on Wikimedia-L, a listser...

"The human vagina has a wide array of bacterial species living in communities called the Microbiome; these are very important for a woman's health," said lead author Megan Amerson, a doctoral student in the department of Human Pathophysiology and Translational Medicine. "When confronted with viruses, such as those responsible for sexually transmitted diseases, these vaginal bacteria can limit or possibly prevent infection by changing the expression of genes within the vaginal cells." The study tested whether different kinds of bacteria in the vaginal microbial communities can prevent or hinder infection by Zika and herpes simplex viruses transmitted through sexual contact., Amerson and her team used a novel 3D culture system for human vaginal cells. This is the first cell culture system that supports colonization by transplanted vaginal microbiomes from healthy donors. They colonized their cultures with vaginal microbiomes containing mostly Lactobacillus bac...

The  psychedelic rock gecko  lives among the rocks on a tiny island in the South China Sea. Scientists first described this small, colourful creature in 2010 in the journal  Zootaxa —where to find it, what it looks like, and how it behaves. Three years later, you could buy  one in Europe  through the international pet trade. Same story for the Bornean earless monitor lizard, Campbell's alligator lizard, and countless other species.  Scientific data used to be accessible only through university subscriptions to specialized journals. But these days, there's a push to remove those limitations and make it available to anyone who wants it. It's a Catch-22—scientists now find themselves inadvertently putting animals at risk of exploitation by publishing and sharing their location and tracking information. And they're grappling with what to do about it. "My personal health information should be protected," said Steven Cooke, a conservation biologist and fi...

American Society of Clinical Oncology ASCO Perspective "These data provide reassurance to breast cancer survivors that having a baby after a breast cancer diagnosis may not increase the chance of their cancer coming back. For many young women around the world who want to grow and expand their families, it's very comforting news," said Erica L. Mayer, MD, MPH, ASCO Expert. CHICAGO - Findings from a retrospective study of 1,200 women provide reassurance to breast cancer survivors who are contemplating pregnancy. In the study, women who became pregnant after an early breast cancer diagnosis, including those with estrogen receptor (ER)-positive tumors, did not have a higher chance of cancer recurrence and death than those who did not become pregnant. The study will be featured in a press briefing today and presented at the 2017 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting. Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women of reproductive age. Taking ...

Taking part in the Relationships Zone will be: Sam Carr from the University of Bath Rose Turner from Kingston University Maggie Laurie from the University of Edinburgh Kirsty Miller from the University of Dundee Ben Kenward from Oxford Brooks Univeristy The psychologists taking part in the  Mental Health Zone  were announced a few days ago. I am a Scientist is an online event where scientists meet and interact with school students. It’s an X Factor-style competition between scientists, where the students are the judges. Students challenge the scientists over fast-paced online text-based live chats. They ask the scientists anything they want and vote for their favourite scientist to win a prize of £500 to communicate their work with the public. James Gudgeon, a psychologist who won the Decision Zone in the most recent running of I’m a Scientist, said afterwards:

The Sapayoa, a rainforest bird from Central and South America, has long been an evolutionary enigma. Genetic analyses indicate that this species is alone in the Americas: its closest relatives live on the other side of the ocean in Southeast Asia. More recently, field research finds that despite its temporal and geographic isolation, this bird shares many of its peculiar natural history traits with its closest genetic relatives half a world away.

NASA unveiled its next-generation  Mars rover , which is all set to make its way to the Red Planet in 2020. The space agency is now poised to show off a prototype for the future manned Mars rover at the Kennedy Space Center. Noted Hollywood prop makers designed and developed the futuristic-looking  rover , which will ferry the first humans to Mars. Hollywood Prop Designers Making Mars Rover The Mars rover's design and concept is the brainchild of two brothers — Shanon Parker and Marc Parker — who are best known for designing the futuristic-looking motorcycles in the movie "Tron." The  Mars rover prototype  from the Parker Brothers Concepts has six giant wheels and is 11 feet tall, 13 feet wide, and 28 feet long (with the laboratory attached). The Mars rover concept weighs roughly 5,000 pounds. Shanon conceptualized the vehicle's design, whereas Marc and his team built it from ground-up in just five months. "We built the body, the chassis, the ...

When the Big Bang first occurred, the Universe was filled with all the various particles and antiparticles making up the Standard Model, and perhaps still others yet to be discovered. But missing from the list were protons, neutrons, or any of the atomic nuclei key to the life-giving elements in our Universe today. Yet the Universe expanded, cooled, antimatter annihilated away, and the first elements began to take shape.

As recounted by author and journalist Daniel P. Mannix, during the European witch craze the Duke of Brunswick in Germany invited two Jesuit scholars to oversee the Inquisition's use of torture to extract information from accused witches. “The Inquisitors are doing their duty. They are arresting only people who have been implicated by the confession of other witches,” the Jesuits reported. The duke was skeptical. Suspecting that people will say anything to stop the pain, he invited the Jesuits to join him at the local dungeon to witness a woman being stretched on a rack. “Now, woman, you are a confessed witch,” he began. “I suspect these two men of being warlocks. What do you say? Another turn of the rack, executioners.” The Jesuits couldn't believe what they heard next. “No, no!” the woman groaned. “You are quite right. I have often seen them at the Sabbat. They can turn themselves into goats, wolves and other animals.... Several witches have had children by them. One woman ...

A trial, by the University of Glasgow, to assess the effects of playing video games on young people concludes gaming can help young people develop the desired higher education skills sometimes referred to as ‘graduate attributes’. Research by Matthew Barr, a lecturer in Information Studies, shows that playing video games actually improved student communication skills, resourcefulness and adaptability and may have a role to play in higher education. Over an eight-week period, undergraduate students in the Arts and Humanities were randomly assigned to either an intervention or a control group. Previously validated, self-report instruments to measure adaptability, resourcefulness and communication skills were administered to both groups.

A  new website hopes to answer a question  in the minds of many people — “Will my job be automated?” If you’re a priest, podiatrist, dentist, or photographer, you can expect to stay employed, according to the site. If you’re a technical writer, taxi cab driver, or accountant, you might want to start retraining. Willrobotstakemyjob.com  was created by a developer and graphic designer,  Mubashar Iqbal  and  Dimitar Raykov  respectively, who’d read a paper by a pair of Oxford economists who set out to predict which jobs were most likely to be automated in the future. Iqbal and Raykov decided to make the results of the paper more accessible. On the site, users can type an occupation, such as teacher, and select from a list of associated professions, like teacher assistants (56 percent chance of automation), choreographers (0.4 percent), or animal trainers (10 percent). You’re also free to view jobs at random. We did, and...

Portable apps are programs that don't have to be installed, and don't change your PC's settings. Provided there’s enough space available, you can store portable apps anywhere – an internal drive, an external storage device like a USB stick or SD card, on a networked drive, or a cloud storage service like OneDrive or DropBox.  Portable apps have several advantages: they make it easy to switch between different computers because you can take your software with you; they don't interfere with any other programs installed on your PC; and they can be used on PCs with restricted user permissions (at work or school, for example). Some portable apps have an ‘installer’, but don't worry – this just unzips a compressed file archive and saves the extracted files to a location of your choice; it doesn’t make any changes to your system files. Other portable apps are provided as a regular ZIP file for you to extract yourself.  The program itself is an EXE file, but the ...