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(credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The advent of plastics has given humanity a prominent materials footprint on the world. Plastics provide lots of benefits, such as convenience and low cost, but proper recycling or disposal of plastics is an ongoing challenge.

Most conventional plastics do not undergo appreciable biological degradation. Plastic that is not properly disposed of ends up in the environment, where it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. In the ocean, plastic often ends up in fragments less than five millimeters in size.

This microplastic debris can be ingested by marine biota, and it affects life both physically and chemically. But little is known about the overall effect of plastic pollution on marine animals or the mechanisms that would drive any effects. In a recent investigation published in Science, researchers from Sweden explored the influence of plastic microparticles on the development and survival of a fairly typical fish.

(credit: Matthew Keys)

The jury is still out, but at this early stage, there's good reason to doubt the legitimacy of claims that more than 32 million Twitter passwords are circulating online.

The purported dump went live on Wednesday night on LeakedSource, a site that bills itself as a breach notification service. The post claimed that the 32.88 million Twitter credentials contain plaintext passwords and that of the 15 records LeakedSource members checked, all 15 were found to be valid. Twitter Trust and Info Security Officer Michael Coates has said his team investigated the list, and he remains "confident that our systems have not been breached."

Lending credibility to Coates's claim, Twitter has long used the bcrypt hash function to store hashes. Bcrypt hashes are so slow and computationally costly to crack that it would have required infeasible amounts of time and effort for anyone to decipher the underlying plaintext. As of press time, there were no reports of a mass reset of Twitter users' passwords, either.

The adventurous vervet monkey, sitting on a transformer at Gitaru power station. Little did he know that millions of Kenyans were suffering as a result of his curiosity. (credit: KenGen)

A monkey, falling onto a transformer at the Gitaru hydroelectric power station in Kenya, caused a nationwide blackout on Tuesday.

KenGen, the operator of Gitaru dam and Kenya's largest electricity producer, posted a photo on Facebook of the dastardly monkey still perched atop the transformer. Using our crack zoological skills, it appears to be a vervet monkey, which is native to Kenya.

The monkey climbed onto the roof of the Gitaru power station and then dropped onto a transformer, tripping it. This then caused the other transformers to overload and trip, which in turn caused the whole power station to go offline. The loss of 180MW from the hydro plant was enough to cause a national blackout, according to KenGen.

Don't you want your business to be as futuristic as this stock art? Buy today! (credit: HTC)

Virtual reality can be used for much more than some interesting gaming experiments, and HTC wants users in "business and commercial environments" to be able to take advantage of its Vive VR hardware. Thus, the company announced its new Vive Business Edition (Vive BE), a full Vive system being sold for the low, low price of $1,200—or 50 percent more than the $800 consumer Vive.

Despite the increased cost, there doesn't seem to be anything different about the physical hardware you get with the Vive BE. The "business" system still comes with a headset, two controllers, two base stations, and all the necessary cables and face cushions you could need. All that extra money will instead help pay for a 12-month limited warranty and a "dedicated Vive Business Edition customer support line" (as well as "commercial licensing," if that's something your lawyer says you need for some reason).

That support line might be useful when one of your employees can't figure out how to plug the headphones into the little dongle on top of the headset, we suppose. Still, the $400 markup is a pretty dear price to pay for support on a system that's already pretty user-friendly. The "limited warranty" doesn't even cover things like "physical damage," "rough handling," or "accidents" that might arise from the headset being exposed to the general public in a business setting.