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Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, in an Amnesty International ad that will be distributed by Adblock. (credit: Amnesty International via Mashable)

Users of the Adblock browser extension may see something today they're not used to when they surf the web: ads.

The ad-blocking giant, which claims to have 50 million users, will still remove advertisements from the web. But instead of showing the "peaceful, blank spaces you're accustomed to not noticing," Adblock will replace publishers' ads with banners supporting Amnesty International.

The Amnesty ads, which mark March 12 as the "World Day against Cyber Censorship," are a cause that Adblock believes is worthy enough to, well, advertise. The company says the messages, from US whistleblower Edward Snowden, Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, and Russian punk band Pussy Riot, are a one-day exception to its business as usual.

(credit: Hernán Piñera)

The Department of Justice has opened another legal front in the ongoing war over easy-to-use strong encryption.

According to a Saturday report in The New York Times, prosecutors have gone head-to-head with WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Facebook. Citing anonymous sources, the Times reported that "as recently as this past week," federal officials have been "discussing how to proceed in a continuing criminal investigation in which a federal judge had approved a wiretap, but investigators were stymied by WhatsApp’s encryption."

The case, which apparently does not involve terrorism, remains under seal.

(credit: Getty Images)

In vitro fertilization (IVF) accounts for up to five percent of babies born in developed countries, and the technique has yielded some five million people ever since Louise Brown was born in the UK on July 25, 1978. And that’s just humans; the technology has been a huge boon in breeding farm animals. Yet there are hints that the procedure can have some unwanted effects on the resultant embryos. One such indication is a skewed sex ratio.

The sex ratio of a population should be roughly fifty-fifty. That ratio is sensitive, and possibly adaptive, to a number of environmental factors like maternal nutrition and population density. It's thus viewed as an indicator of reproductive health.

But in 1991, it was noted that IVF generates more bulls than heifers; the same skewing towards males has since been seen in pigs, mice—and, yes, people. A new paper in PNAS offers an explanation of what is going on and how to fix it.

(credit: Mitchell Weinstock)

Director Gavin Hood is bursting to talk about his new project, Eye in the Sky. That's probably because his film, which debuts this weekend, involves many modern-day topics of discussion—things like the evolution of drone technology or the ethical implications of autonomous warfare.

What catches your eye first about Eye in the Sky is the tech. Even though Hood's movie is about drone warfare, the military-grade drone cruising over Kenya is not really what Eye in the Sky is about. Besides a few quick CGI-ish shots of a Reaper in flight, the bulk of the spying is done by an amusingly mechanical hummingbird drone and a tiny, camera-rigged mechanical beetle. Hood said that while the two drones aren't exactly plucked from a current military reality, both are based on prototypes that have been built (in the case of the hummingbird) or described as micro-air vehicles or MAVs (in the case of the beetle).

The director added that he didn't want to get too hung up on what's current today, because drone technology is changing quickly: