The team has so far identified 14 vulnerable HTML5-based apps from three types of mobile systems, including Android, iOS and Blackberry. Developers of those vulnerable apps have been informed and in an effort to give them time to fix the problem, researchers have decided not to disclose the names of the vulnerable apps.

"Imagine you're at the airport and you want to find the free Wi-Fi. When you scan, your phone is going to display the Wi-Fi access points. That could be an easy channel for a hacker to inject malicious worm code into your smartphone," Du says. "Once the worm takes control, it can duplicate itself, and send copies to your friends via SMS messages, multimedia file sharing, and other methods."

Want to find the flaws in a study? Ask a competitor, just like you would ask a competitor about the flaws in an iPhone or any other product.

And if you really want to see griping about the flaws in a study, ask someone who happens to believe just the opposite. 

When a paper comes out that uses the exact same terminology as studies that advocates happen to like, conservative scientific verbage like using the word "possible" is touted as a weakness and they will insist there is no "clear" correlation. When culturally contradictory papers are published, we are told cross-sectional studies can't tell us anything at all about causality, exactly the opposite of what we read about papers confirming a position.

The legacy of European science and biotechnology is good - Europeans say that health research is important - but modern acceptance of science remains lacking. However, a new survey by Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale - Inserm - shows that Europeans may discard their recent stance against science and embrace progress again. It will take a culture of science literacy on par with the United States and a culture that shakes off government control, according to the results.

On the less glamorous side of space exploration, there's the more practical problem of waste — in particular, what to do with astronaut pee. But rather than ejecting it into space, scientists are developing a new technique that can turn this waste burden into a boon by converting it into fuel and much-needed drinking water. 

Humans are unique in their ability to acquire language. But how? A new study published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences shows that we are in fact born with the basic fundamental knowledge of language, thus shedding light on the age-old linguistic "nature vs. nurture" debate.

While languages differ from each other in many ways, certain aspects appear to be shared across languages. These aspects might stem from linguistic principles that are active in all human brains. A natural question then arises: are infants born with knowledge of how the human words might sound like? Are infants biased to consider certain sound sequences as more word-like than others?

BLA, ShBA, LBA

A giant chunk of America may want to regulate, restrict and drive out business but this is still the best place to be for entrepreneurs. The USA remains the most entrepreneurial economy in the world, according to the 2014 Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI).  Australia and Sweden came in second and third place.

The GEDI index combines data on entrepreneurial activities and aspirations with data describing how well the country supports entrepreneurial activity in the US and 119 other countries across the world and was carried out by researchers from Imperial College Business School in association with the London School of Economics and Political Science, University of Pécs and George Mason University. 

Most stars with masses similar to that of our Sun will end their lives as white dwarfs; small, very dense, and hot bodies that slowly cool down over billions of years. On the way to this final phase of their lives the stars throw their atmospheres out into the space and create planetary nebulae, colorful glowing clouds of gas surrounding the small, bright stellar relics.

An captured by ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), shows the remarkably round planetary nebula Abell 33, located about 1,500 light-years from Earth. A round appearance is uncommon. Usually something - for example, the way the star spins, or if the central star is one component of a double or multiple star system - disturbs the symmetry and causes the planetary nebula to display irregular shapes.

A breakthrough could speed recovery and limit disfigurement for patients who have suffered large soft tissue trauma, as occurs with serious injury or cancer surgery.  

By biomedically engineering a muscle flap that includes a patient's own blood vessels, the team created tissue that could be transferred to other parts of the body along with the patient's blood supply. Current techniques – including grafts and synthetic material – for reconstructing such trauma often fail because of lost blood supply.  The scientists fabricated the flap using a variety of added cells and connective tissues to strengthen it. They tested it by reconstructing deep abdominal wall tissue defects in mice.

Global health funding hit an all-time high of $31.3 billion in 2013, five times greater than in 1990, but its 3.9% growth from 2012 to 2013 shows it is at least slowing down a little, according to a new analysis by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Health Affairs.

As funding from many bilateral donors and development banks has declined, growth in funding from the GAVI Alliance, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, non-governmental organizations, and the UK government is counteracting these cuts.

Global health funding remains small relative to what high-income countries spend on their own health, representing only 1% of these countries' health expenditure.

Yesterday I was in Rome, at a workshop organized by the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), titled "What Next". The event was meant to discuss the plan for basic research in fundamental physics and astrophysics beyond the next decade or so, given the input we have and the input we might collect in the next few years at accelerators and other facilities.