In what will be a puzzle for the segments of society that claim everything is about race and racism, a new study by Harvard and UCLA sociologists shows, that at least among the current generation in college, race is a non-issue in Facebook friendships.

Of course, some Facebook friendships result from the social pressures of being in a polite society - if someone requests to be an online friend, they are likely to get it and the results showed the tendency to reciprocate a friendly overture is seven times stronger than any perceived attraction of a shared racial background.

Black Hat Abu Dhabi, running from the November 8th - 11th at Emirates Palace, Abu Dhabi, will discuss some of the major security concerns faced by the IT world - and even demonstrate them live. 

1950s horror movies were primarily irradiated monsters but they also contained a bit of a cultural slam - the heroes were often scientists but they were battling other scientists who were often not even evil, just in love with their data.    Science was the problem because it did not concern itself with ethics, was the mentality - it was even more confusing than that good Jedi versus bad Jedi stuff (really, since the 'Dark Side' had more power and was much easier and mostly meant taking orders from some old guy and not much actual evil, why wouldn't anyone choose the so-called Dark Side?) but it lent itself to philosophical discussions.

Dracula orchids tempt flies by masquerading as mushrooms. Goblin spiders lurk unseen in the world's leaf litter. The natural world is often just as haunting as the macabre costumes worn on city streets, as highlighted by two studies published this year by curators in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History, David Grimaldi and Norman Platnick.

Biogeochemists say new evidence linking glacial events during the "Snowball Earth" period to the rise of early animals. 

The controversial Snowball Earth hypothesis, which originated in 1964 due to the discovery of glacial deposits near the equator, posits that on several occasions the Earth was covered from pole to pole by a thick sheet of ice lasting for millions of years.   These glaciations, far more severe than the usual Ice Ages, occurred from 750 to 580 million years ago, and in their aftermath, the oceans were rich in phosphorus, a nutrient that controls the abundance of life in the oceans, according to new research.

Sharpening tools is no easy task.  If you've ever tried to do it yourself you know that prehistoric man had to have developed real skill to sharpen stone tools - using pressure flaking, no less.

Pressure flaking is a technique where implements shaped by hard stone hammers strikes and then softer wood or bone strikes are carefully trimmed by directly pressing the point of a tool made of bone on the edges of the tool.   A new study says pressure flaking was being used at Blombos Cave in South Africa during the Middle Stone Age by anatomically modern humans and involved the heating of silcrete (quartz grains cemented by silica) used to make tools.