A new study conducted by Professor Jonathan Zittrain and law student Kendra Albert—both of Harvard—says nearly half of the hyperlinks in Supreme Court decisions (49%) no longer work. What this means is that footnotes and citations become lost, making them unavailable to legal professionals. Since 1996, there have been 555 instances in which the Supreme Court justices cited materials only found on the Internet.   read more

To celebrate the first airmail flight, the Post Office decided to issue a commemorative 24-cent stamp, with a picture of a Curtiss JN-4 biplane, or “Jenny,” the aircraft being used to carry the mail. The Post Office accidentally issued 100 Jenny stamps showing the biplane flying upside down. Printing inspectors and the postal clerk who sold the sheet to a collector missed the error, the clerk later explaining, “How was I to know the thing was upside down? I never saw an airplane before.”   read more

Kant’s categorical imperative rules out torture, which can never be moral or ethical; in contrast, utilitarian ethics says that torture might be acceptable when its goal is important enough. In rejecting this idea that “the end justifies the means,” Kant urged that human beings are ends in themselves. In contemporary terms, in debating the U.S. use of torture in the years after 2001, Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) is a Kantian, while Vice President Dick Cheney (R) is a utilitarian.   read more

The researchers concluded that differences in levels of sanitation, infectious disease and urbanization accounted statistically for about a third of the discrepancy in Alzheimer’s rates between countries. In other words, people need to be exposed to enough bacteria so their immune systems can fully develop and fight off disease, which doesn’t happen in countries obsessed with hand sanitizers and other germ-killing methods.   read more

In the Brazilian case, a group of hackers upset over the recent revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) had spied on their country decided to infiltrate a U.S. government website. Only it wasn’t the NSA’s website that got hacked—it was NASA’s (short for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration). Among the pages hit were those for the Center for Astrobiology and the Office of Planetary Protection.   read more

Over the Labor Day weekend, another 20,000 gallons was stolen from the county, this time from the Bridgeville Elementary School. The thief pumped the school’s water tank dry using a garden house and either a water truck or a trailer fitted with tanks, according to police. School officials were forced to cancel school for the day, while maintenance workers replenished the tank with water from an underground well.   read more

Veronica Valdez, who had worked at the hospital for 13 years, was on the operating table for finger surgery. While she was out cold, Yang cut up medication labels, colored them and stuck them on her face to create teardrops on her cheek and a mustache. Everyone who was conscious had a good laugh.   read more

“He and his fellow troops were constantly under attack by insurgent extremists whose word for the American soldiers was ‘infidel.’ Seeking to reclaim or reappropriate this term as a source of American pride and patriotism, Sergeant Matwyuk and other soldiers came to embrace their identity as ‘infidels.’ He and other American veterans proudly refer to themselves as ‘infidels’ as a reminder of the bond they share as survivors of a bloody war in a hostile part of the world.”   read more

Another fact hard to comprehend is that it is still working and sending back data (which takes about 17 hours to reach earth). Consider this: It stores readings about cosmic rays, ionized gas and magnetic fields on an 8-track tape recorder, and its computers can process only about 8,000 instructions per second. In comparison, a typical smartphone can manage 14 billion instructions a second.   read more

There’s still plenty of helium in the ground at this reserve, about 370 billion liters of it. But Congress will have to reauthorize the reserve in order for it to sell helium next month and beyond. Helium is essential for all kinds of industries, including aerospace, the military, electronics manufacturing, medical imaging and others.   read more

Residents of Iowa don’t need 20/20 vision to legally own firearms or carry them in public. In fact, they don’t have to possess the ability to see at all. For at least two years now, Iowans who are legally or completely blind have been entitled to receive permits for gun purchases. They also can obtain permits to carry firearms into public places. The Des Moines Register reported that visually impaired citizens have been able to own guns for quite some time.   read more

New York City decided to dust off its old, non-computerized voting machines and use them in time for Tuesday’s local elections. The move was prompted after some local leaders lost confidence with the newer, electronic voting machines that encountered troubles during the 2012 election. The state legislature and the NYC Board of Elections authorized 5,100 lever voting machines to come out of retirement, undergo maintenance and be set up in voting precincts for the September 10 balloting.   read more

Beale’s fraud began as far back as 2000, while he served as a senior policy adviser in the Office of Air and Radiation making $164,700 a year. He spent a lot of his time over the next 12 years away from his job, telling his superiors that the CIA needed him on clandestine missions. Another colleague of Beale, speaking anonymously to the Post, agreed. “We all actually believed that maybe there was something going on.” Indeed there was.   read more

Medical experts decided to test the effects of gut bacteria. They transferred the bacteria from human twins—one lean, the other obese—into mice. The result: mice with bacteria from fat twins grew fat, and those that received bacteria from lean twins stayed lean. Fischbach said he was “very excited” by the work, and insisted the next step should be to use gut bacteria to treat obesity by transplanting feces from thin people.   read more

Resident attitudes reflect, to some extent, the frustration of living in a rural community that is answerable to a state which is attentive to a much larger urban electorate. But the rural life that compels their desire for independence is also the tie that binds them to the state. “Siskiyou is one of the largest counties with one of the smallest populations,” Mark Lovelace told a local reporter. “It is also full of state roads that they won't be able to maintain.”   read more

The program is designed for those who describe their lives as spiraling out of control because of their obsession with online activities. During their 10-day stay at the hospital, participants go through a “digital detox,” in which they are cut off from all Internet access for 72 hours. This period can produce withdrawal symptoms, including depression, irritability and in some cases violence.   read more