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In May 2015, the US Department of Education announced that it would sunset its old e-signature system for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and replace it with a new system to authenticate FAFSA information. But the new system is apparently causing confusion and frustration among students.

Students who want to apply for most federal and state financial aid for higher education in the US must fill out a FAFSA by midnight March 2 (that's tonight, if you're a teen or if you have a teen applying to college). But filling out the form is not an easy process for students or their parents, who must also be registered with the Department of Education if the student can be claimed as a dependent.

The change that the Department of Education implemented was a seemingly small one, but it’s created some friction that wasn’t there before, the Los Angeles Times reported. Previously, students and parents had to apply for a Federal Student Aid PIN with their social security number to access their FAFSA online. If they later forgot their PIN, they had to recover it by reentering a social security number as well as a corresponding name and date of birth. Now, students and parents must create a Federal Student Aid ID (FSA ID), which allows users to access their FAFSA information through a user name and password. The setup of a FSA ID also requires that students and parents have social security numbers as well as a valid e-mail addresses.

(credit: Tidal)

John Emanuele, who plays in the ambient and electronic music group The American Dollar, has sued three different music streaming services in the past two weeks. Emanuele and his lawyers say that in different ways, Slacker Radio, Jay-Z's company Tidal, and now Google Play, have all ripped him off.

The lawsuits are all proposed class actions, as Emanuele's lawyers believe other artists have been cheated, too.

The complaint (PDF) against Tidal was filed on Saturday. It's received the most press attention, in part because Tidal's marketing is based on the idea that it will pay artists more generously than other streaming services. The lawsuit claims Tidal never served a "notice of intention," which is required to get the needed compulsory music license, and never paid the necessary royalties.

That's a big dish! The Arecibo radio telescope. (credit: NSF)

From nowhere, they appear as a sudden surge of power in the radio spectrum. Then, a few milliseconds later, they're gone—and as far as we could tell, they never come back. They've picked up the name "fast radio bursts," but nobody's entirely sure of what produces them. Follow-up observations have generally failed to find anything interesting in their direction, and the bursts didn't seem to repeat, leaving everyone who cares about these sorts of things a bit mystified.

One possible explanation for their one-time-only appearance would be that they're the product of a process that destroys the object that creates them. Thus, if they were produced by the collapse of a neutron star into a black hole (to give just one example), there'd be no way for that to happen twice.

But a new study suggests that at least one of them has repeated, which would take cataclysmic explanations off the table. There are enough differences between this burst and previously observed ones, however, to raise the question of whether there might be several processes producing similar surges in radio emissions.

Do not be afraid! Though it seems like you are underwater, you are not actually drowning. It is a virtual reality! (credit: Dr. Waldern/Virtuality Group)

Back in 2014, we were equal parts tickled and scared by the laundry list of legal-ese health warnings that accompanied the first consumer units of Samsung's Gear VR. The HTC Vive Pre comes with a booklet of Health and Safety Warnings that's largely similar, but HTC goes a bit further in warning about some surprisingly specific potential hazards of virtual reality.

The booklet includes the kind of boilerplate warnings you'd expect before using a device that requires physical activity: users should consult a doctor if they have a heart condition and/or are pregnant or elderly. But the Vive warnings booklet goes on to urge users with "psychiatric conditions (such as anxiety disorders or post-traumatic stress disorder)" to be cautious with the device:

"Content viewed using the product can be intense, immersive, and appear very life-like and may cause your brain and body to react accordingly. Certain types of content (e.g. violent, scary, emotional, or adrenaline-based content) could trigger increased heart rate, spikes in blood pressure, panic attacks, anxiety, PTSD, fainting, and other adverse effects. If you have a history of negative physical or psychological reactions to certain real life circumstances, avoid using the product to view similar content. (emphasis added)

That's not all that surprising, considering that doctors have been using virtual reality as an immersive PTSD treatment for years. Dr. Albert "Skip" Rizzo told Ars that even rudimentary, '90s-era VR was real enough for traumatized users to feel immersed in their memories:

Martin Smith

Detail of the Tortotubus fungus, which lived 440 million years ago in Sweden.

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Life oozed out of the seas onto land somewhere between 450 and 500 million years ago, but we have almost no fossils from this period on land. That may be about to change. A scientist in the UK believes he's identified the oldest terrestrial organism yet discovered, after careful analysis of 440-million-year-old microfossils gathered in Scotland and Sweden in the 1980s.

Durham University Earth scientist Martin Smith suggests in a new paper published in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society that a few fossilized filaments discovered in Scotland and Sweden are actually part of a root-like system used by fungus to gather nutrients from soil. They were long known as "problematic" fossils because nobody was sure what they were, nor where they fit into fungal evolution.

Smith identified the filaments as part of an ancient fungus called Tortotubus, which bears some resemblance to modern mushrooms—though we have no fossils that could prove that the fungus had fruiting bodies like mushrooms do.