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Air conditioning is one of the biggest costs in running data centers. Traditional data centers use as much electricity for cooling as they do for running the actual IT equipment. Accordingly, much of the innovation seen in the high-density cloud server space has been to develop data centers that are cheaper to cool and hence cheaper to run. With its much higher heat capacity than air, water has become the coolant of choice, pumped around and between the computers to transport their heat outside.

Microsoft has demonstrated an experimental prototype of a new approach: instead of pumping water around the data center, put the data center in the water. Project Natick is a research project to build and run a data center that's submerged in the ocean. The company built an experimental vessel, named the Leona Philpot, and deployed it on the seafloor about 1 kilometer off the Pacific coast. It ran successfully from August to November last year.

As well as the obvious cooling advantage this brings, Microsoft argues that this kind of data center will bring other benefits, too. About half of the world's population lives within 200km of the ocean, and so the ability to put data centers in the water means that they can always be located close to major population centers. This in turn ensures that they offer low latency connections. The company also says that the self-contained units can be deployed quickly, within 90 days, rather than the 2 years it takes to build a conventional building, or the 1 year that Microsoft says its fourth generation data centers take. The units could also be paired with tidal power generation to further reduce their environmental impact.

Oklahoma's Oral Roberts University opened in 1965 with a fitness course requirement for its newest incoming freshman and transfer students—a rarity among American universities. That requirement became even more unique to the evangelical university in January when the school added a technological requirement to the course: mandatory Fitbit ownership, whose fitness tracking must also be synced to the school's grading system.

The school formally announced the change in early January, and the news became better known around the country late last week as college-minded outlet The College Fix wrote about students' thoughts on the change. An Oral Roberts representative confirmed to Ars that students in the course, known as "Health Fitness I," have a student requirement of 10,000 steps a day, and the app-tracked targets account for 20 percent of a student's grade in the course.

In its formal press release, Oral Roberts University confirms that over 550 Fitbit units have been sold through its on-campus bookstore, and it describes the initiative as "literally transport[ing] digital electrons from student’s wearable band anywhere on campus into the secure Learning Management System."

The mosquito-spread Zika virus linked to a spike in birth defects and neurological syndromes is a public health emergency of international concern, the World Health Organization declared Monday.

The declaration followed an emergency meeting in Geneva, in which health experts from around the world reviewed the data on the outbreak blazing through South and Central Americas. In some areas, infection with the Zika virus has been associated with a paralyzing neurological condition, known as Guillain-Barré syndrome, and microcephaly, in which babies are born with severely shrunken and deformed heads and brains.

In Brazil, which reported its first case of Zika last May, the virus has infected an estimated million people and been linked to a 20-fold increase in microcephaly cases. Since the outbreak began, health officials there have reported around 4,000 confirmed and suspected cases of microcephaly, compared to just 147 in 2014.

A report from The Information (subscription required) states that Google wants to take "greater control" over the design and building of Nexus phones. Currently, a Nexus device is a co-branded partnership between Google's Android team and an OEM, but this report says Google wants to move to a more "Apple-like" approach.

The report says that in the future, "hardware makers will be much more like order-takers, similar to the way contract manufacturers like Hon Hai (Foxconn) follow Apple’s directions for producing the iPhone." Apple designs its phones, SoC, and other parts and then ships the plans off to third-party factories to have them built.

Currently it's easy to draw comparisons to Pixel devices, which are also designed and branded by Google and built by third parties. Would this device be called a "Pixel Phone?" Pixel brand devices have typically come from the Chrome group, while Nexus has been from the Android Team. The branding isn't just about the operating system, it's also about which team inside of Google the product comes from. The Pixel group did recently create its first Android device, the Pixel C, but that seems to be more of a last-ditch effort to get the hardware out the door. The two operating systems are reportedly merging, though, so the line between teams and brands could get messier.

If you don’t pay $99 each year for an Amazon Prime membership, which promises two-day shipping on all orders, regular shipping on Amazon purchases might be slower than it was last year, according to a study from customer service metrics company StellaService.

In an interview with Forbes, StellaService vice president of research Kevon Hills said the company tracks how quickly orders from 40 companies are fulfilled. Amazon fell outside of the top 10 fastest companies for the first time this year, losing ground to companies like BestBuy and Apple.

Hills said the speed of shipments to Prime customers is unchanged, indicating that Amazon is throwing considerable investment at serving its rapidly growing Prime base—which increased by 51 percent in 2015. Although Amazon does not reveal numbers about how many customers are Prime members, analysts have estimated that Prime membership totals at least 46 million people and could be as high as 80 million.

Websites that rely on the Tor anonymity service to cloak their server address may be leaking their geographic location and other sensitive information thanks to a setting that's turned on by default in many releases of Apache, the world's most widely used Web server.

The information leak has long been known to careful administrators who take the time to read Tor documentation, but that hasn't prevented some Tor hidden services from falling victim to it. To plug the hole, darkweb sites that run Apache must disable the mod_status module that by default sets up a server status page displaying a variety of potentially sensitive information about the servers. Details include the number of requests per second sent to the server, the most recent HTTP requests received, CPU usage, and in some cases the approximate longitude of the server.

It would appear some hidden services still haven't figured out that many Apache installations display the data by default. In a blog post published over the weekend, an anonymous poster wrote:

The so-called "going dark" problem—which various government officials claim will be the death knell to the US because Silicon Valley won't bake crypto backdoors into its wares—is greatly overblown. That's because crime fighters are not in the dark, at least technologically, and are now presented with a vast array of spy tools at their disposal. Specifically, modern espionage is piggybacking on the Internet of Things (IoT) tools, from televisions to toasters, that enable wanton spying.

"The audio and video sensors on IoT devices will open up numerous avenues for government actors to demand access to real-time and recorded communications," according to a Berkman Center for Internet & Society report published Monday.

The report added: