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(credit: US Coast Guard)

In April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon exploded and began spewing oil into the US Gulf Coast. In all, this released some 134 million gallons of crude over a span of almost three months. Eleven workers were killed in the nation's worst offshore oil spill.

Today, federal prosecutors moved—and a judge agreed—to drop manslaughter charges against two supervisors aboard the Deepwater Horizon when it exploded. This development, in which prosecutors said they believed they no longer could meet the legal threshold for a conviction, means that nobody will go to prison for the disaster that soiled coastlines from Texas to Florida, killed nearly a dozen people, and was an environmental disaster that perhaps brings with it never-before-seen longterm consequences.

The government announced the legal move Wednesday in a New Orleans courtroom. Rig supervisor Donald Vidrine instead pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Water Act, a misdemeanor that likely will result in 10 months of probation and 100 hours of community service. Robert Kaluza, the other supervisor who also was being charged with 11 manslaughter counts, is going to fight a single misdemeanor charge that he also violated the Clean Water Act.

H1N1 flu virus (credit: NIAID/Flickr)

Ditching annual flu shots for a single stick that can protect year after year may be even harder to do than scientists thought—thanks to our own bamboozled immune systems.

Influenza viruses are infamous masters of mutation, changing themselves ever so slightly to dodge detection by immune cells. That viral variation drives the need for us to roll up our sleeves each fall instead of relying on our immune system’s memory of last year’s flu—or so researchers thought. A new study finds that although our immune systems naturally have the potential to detect and fight all flavors of flu virus, they get tricked into fighting only strain-specific battles. The finding, published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine, suggests that making a universal vaccine may require wising up our immune cells as well as outsmarting the virus.

The study, from a group of researchers led by Patrick Wilson of the University of Chicago, examined the immune responses of 21 people after exposures to the 2009 H1N1 virus (swine flu). Researchers specifically looked at participants’ B cells, which make antibodies that help fend off the flu by seeking out the virus and marking it for an attack, as well as seeking out the antibodies themselves.

(credit: California Air Resources Board)

Outside of a San Fernando Valley neighborhood northwest of Los Angeles, Southern California Gas Company sprung a leak in one of its natural gas wells on October 23.

Just last night at a Los Angeles City Council meeting, the CEO of the private utility said that it could be three to four months before SoCal Gas can plug the underground leak, which has sent tens of thousands of kilograms of methane per hour seeping up into the air.

According to Reuters, SoCal Gas is one of the biggest gas utilities in the country. Its natural gas storage field at Aliso Canyon is the second biggest storage area in the country after a location in Montana.

Actor/rapper Nick Cannon is also Radio Shack's new Chief Shirtless Officer, from the look of that Twitter profile photo. (credit: Twitter)

If you've seen actor, rapper, America's Got Talent host, and TeenNick chairman Nick Cannon in the news lately, you might have assumed it was due to his performance in an upcoming Spike Lee joint about violence in Chicago's south side. But on Wednesday, the entertainer had news from an entirely different dimension when he announced that he'd added another feather to his not-quite-Pharrell-sized hat: chief creative officer at Radio Shack.

Does this "hire" mean anything more than seeing Cannon's face on advertisements, as has been the case with many other major tech company celebrity hires? Radio Shack certainly wants us to think otherwise, as the company's announcement gave a vague list of Cannon's CCO duties, the biggest of which appears to be the "development of Radio Shack-exclusive products." Cannon will also be tasked with in-store music curation, event promotion, and helping the company "continue to grow" its educational and STEM-specific initiatives. Radio Shack didn't specify what existing educational initiatives it was running, and its home page currently offers no official information about such initiatives.

The announcement did recall a story from Cannon's youth, in which he broke a stereo that he'd taken apart then went to a Radio Shack in his home of San Diego to get help fixing it—where he eventually figured out how to assemble and modify his own sound systems. (In other interviews, Cannon has boasted that as a kid, he'd figured out how to connect telephones to turntables and "make hold music.")

Fig. 1: Even used DK2 units demand a premium price on resale sites like eBay.

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From the minute you buy most gadgets, you can expect their market value to go down as time and technology quickly make them obsolete. That hasn't been the case with Oculus' second Rift development kit (DK2). Instead, the opposite has happened; on auction sites like eBay, new and used DK2 units routinely resell for hundreds of dollars more than their original $350 asking price. Unopened DK2 units have sold for as much as $1,200 there in recent days.

Gathering up the data for the most recent successfully completed DK2 eBay auctions (we looked at about 80 new units and 50 used ones, just to keep the data collection manageable) shows just how much of a premium the hardware demands well over a year after it was first made available. The median eBay purchaser has to spend $786 for a new, unused Rift these days or a $565 median for a used unit.

Main Street in Stewart, British Columbia. (credit: District of Stewart)

In Stewart, British Columbia, there is no cell phone service, and aside from satellite, the town had just one option for anything resembling modern Internet access.

Unfortunately, that broadband provider has just shut down, leaving the remote Canadian district of about 500 residents with severely limited access to the Internet. Onewayout.net, a wireless home Internet provider that started in 1995, discontinued service at the end of November.

"The infrastructure required to deliver Internet and possibly cell service is extremely expensive—to do it effectively, Stewart needs a tower that can serve the entire community," Onewayout, a nonprofit organization, said on its website.