Are you among the 60% of UK television viewers who admit to a Television Tryst behind your partner's back?

A survey of Netflix customers found that the freedom to watch what we want, when we want can be a romantic minefield.  Netflix has 36 million members in 40 countries so the pool of people is obviously there.

A group contends that the journal impact factor (JIF), which ranks scholarly journals by the average number of citations their articles attract in a set period, has increasingly become an obsession in science. Impact factor of articles is used in evaluating research for funding, hiring, promotion, or institutional effectiveness. 

Over the past few years, demand from the surveillance market and huge spending by governments across the globe on biometric technologies has caused the facial recognition technology market to become more accurate, less costly and significantly more mainstream.

More accurate technology and the brighter economic future it can bring has led to more traction and investment from the commercial sector. The development of 3-D face recognition technology, backed by improved imaging solutions like middleware and fast analytics, has helped the technology to overcome its traditional flaws such as poor results in low lights, pose variation and image reconstruction 

In a previous article, I demonstrate how to build an alcohol burner for a home chemistry set. In my article, I mention that "second-hand stores like Goodwill, Salvation Army, and local mom&pop shops are treasure troves of things to hack or repurpose."

I would like to mention too that close-out stores like Dollar General are also fertile ground for modding.

The downside to concerns about manure contaminating ground water is that, as manure pit storage to protect water has increased, so have fatalities due to toxic gas buildup.

Researchers estimate that about 10 people die each year in North American animal-manure pits. That doesn't sound like a lot but the number of manure storage facilities on farms is steadily growing, because the average farm size is increasing, the number of farms is decreasing and that will mean more manure pits. These deaths are entirely preventable, it was just not a problem in the past, so Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences have published a standard for ventilation in confined animal-manure storage facilities used at large livestock operations.

Are 'smart' objects the future?

People certainly like so-called smart phones, and almost every home in America has a computer, and making everything 'smart' might be a future trend, say humanities scholars at Penn State University.

 As sensors and computers increasingly become smaller and cheaper, smart objects will appear in more homes and offices and not be hidden or shielded from interacting with people, according to the researchers. For example, smart refrigerators could talk or send tweets to signal when certain food items are almost out, or when expiration dates are nearing.

Elsevier and the Integrated Earth Data Applications facility at Columbia University have announced a competition to improve preservation of and access to research data in the earth sciences. 

Members of the international geosciences community who have worked on preservation and improved access of research data, particularly dark data, can share their work and advise on ways that these data are being processed, stored and used. 

Second-hand stores like Goodwill, Salvation Army, and local mom & pop shops are treasure troves of things to hack or repurpose. When you hack something you’re probably using it in a way in which it was never intended to be used so, there is always a risk that things might not go the way you planned. But since you can get items from second-hand stores on the cheap, you don’t care too much if you are disappointed with the results. Luckily, this "MacGyverism" was successful.