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(credit: Garry Knight)

The online news and gossip site Gawker has begun the process of appealing the $140 million verdict a jury ordered it to pay last month for publishing a sex tape of Terry Bollea, better known as former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan.

The Gawker appeal is no surprise, as the company has said it will appeal since the verdict was delivered. In motions filed late Monday, the online media outlet has asked for the verdict to be thrown out or the damages "greatly reduced," according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Gawker lawyers argue the $25 million in punitive damages that was added on to the $110 million in compensatory damages would be "ruinous." The jury was told that Gawker Media was worth $83 million while its founder Nick Denton was worth $121 million.

It's bash, it's Windows, it's not a virtual machine.

Perhaps the biggest surprise to come from Microsoft's Build developer conference last week was the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

The system will ship as part of this summer's Anniversary Update for Windows 10. WSL has two parts; there's the core subsystem, which is already included in Insider Preview builds of the operating system, and then a package of software that Canonical will provide. The core subsystem is what provides the Linux API on Windows, including the ability to natively load Linux executables and libraries. Canonical will provide bash and all the other command-line tools that are expected in a Linux environment.

Microsoft is positioning WSL strictly as a tool for developers, with a particular view to supporting Web developers and the open source software stacks that they depend on. Many developers are very familiar with the bash shell, with building software using make and gcc, and editing text in vi or emacs. WSL will give these developers versions of these tools that are equal in just about every regard to the ones you get on Linux, because they'll be the ones you get on Linux running unmodified on Windows.

(credit: Nick Saltmarsh)

While waiting for an organ donor, patients in need of a transplant may one day have the option of taking out a loaner organ—from a pig.

Researchers report Tuesday that they were able to keep pig hearts alive and beating in the abdomens of five baboons for record amounts of time—a median of 298 days and a max of 945 days. Previous benchmarks were set at a median of 180 and a max of 500 days, respectively.

Data from the prolonged ticker swap, published in Nature Communications, highlights scientists’ progress at breaking down the biological barriers of cross-species organ donation, inching closer to using animal organs in humans in desperate need of transplants. Currently in the US, 22 people die every day just waiting for organs, which are in constant short supply.