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Bren Smith, executive director of nonprofit GreenWave, took home $100,000 for his 3D ocean farming model, designed to address overfishing, mitigate climate change, restore marine ecosystems and provide jobs for fishermen.

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Each of Smith’s model farms includes hurricane-proof anchors on the edges. Within its boundaries, seaweed, mussels and scallops hang from floating ropes. Oysters grow in cages below the ropes, and cages of clams hang beneath them. GreenWave farms also harvest salt.

Kelp soaks up five times as much carbon as land-based plants while oysters filter 50 gallons of water a day, pulling out nitrogen, according to Smith. He also said GreenWave is capable of producing 30 times more biofuel than soybeans and five times more biofuel than corn – without polluting the food chain.

“I think it allows us to take the crisis of climate change and flip it into an opportunity to really innovate in sustainable ways,” he said. “Anybody with 20 acres, a boat and $30,000 can start a farm and be up and running within a year.”

GreenWave provides new farmers with grants, low-cost seed, free outdoor gear from Patagonia and training for two years. And they guarantee to purchase 80% of crops over five years at triple the market rate. The crops are then sold to restaurants around the country.

But what the Sonnenburgs’ experiment suggests is that by failing to adequately nourish key microbes, the Western diet may also be starving them out of existence. They call this idea “starving the microbial self.” They suspect that these diet-driven extinctions may have fueled, at least in part, the recent rise of non-communicable diseases. The question they and many others are now asking is this: How did the microbiome of our ancestors look before it was altered by sanitation, antibiotics, and junk food? How did that primeval collection of human microbes work? And was it somehow healthier than the one we harbor today?

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No one understands much about the dizzying variety documented so far—which microbes are good, which harmful, which irrelevant. One constant, though, is that people living subsistence lifestyles have tremendous diversity compared to westernized populations—up to 50 percent more species than North Americans or Europeans. That includes not only bacteria but eukaryotes—single-cell protists and large, multicellular worms. These organisms, which are often missing in the West, have historically been considered pathogens. But some evidence now suggests that they can favorably shape the microbiome, benefiting the host.

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The Sonnenburgs think fiber is so important that they’ve given it a new designation: microbiota-accessible carbohydrates, or MACs. They think that the mismatch between the Westernized, MAC-starved microbiome and the human genome may predispose to Western diseases.

Two of the driverless buses, created by startup BestMile and launched under the banner of Swiss bus company PostBus, will enter service in the city of Sion, in the French-speaking canton of Valais.

The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can’t be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.

Cross-device tracking raises important privacy concerns, the Center for Democracy and Technology wrote in recently filed comments to the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC has scheduled a workshop on Monday to discuss the technology. Often, people use as many as five connected devices throughout a given day—a phone, computer, tablet, wearable health device, and an RFID-enabled access fob. Until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to track activity on one and tie it to another.

“As a person goes about her business, her activity on each device generates different data streams about her preferences and behavior that are siloed in these devices and services that mediate them,” CDT officials wrote. “Cross-device tracking allows marketers to combine these streams by linking them to the same individual, enhancing the granularity of what they know about that person.”

When people are scared about the economy and financial markets, they rush to gold. Boy, were they worried in recent months.

U.S. demand for gold bars and coins surged 207% during the third quarter, the World Gold Council said on Thursday.

The skyrocketing demand signaled a level of interest in gold investment “not seen since the global financial crisis,” the group said.

80 million jobs in the United States are at risk of being taken over by robots in the next few decades, a Bank of England (BoE) official warned on Thursday.

With U.S. data showing that total nonfarm employment hit 142.6 million in October, that’s roughly over half of the total jobs at risk.

And the U.S. isn’t the only one who’d be at the mercy of the mechanical hands.

In a speech at the Trades Union Congress in London, the bank’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, said that up to 15 million jobs in the U.K. were at risk of being lost to an age of machines, which is almost half of the employed population currently.

To come to its conclusion, the Bank of England conducted a U.K. study which organized occupations into three categories: high, medium and low probability of automation, and demonstrated the share of employment these jobs represented.

Its misuse is so routine that the bulk of court cases reported in the local papers are drug related. Just about everyone in Beattyville has a story of the human cost. Some mention the decline of the town’s homecoming queen, Michele Moore, into addiction in the 1990s. Moore struggled by as a single mother living in a trailer home before she was stabbed to death by a man while the two were taking drugs.

At about that time, Beattyville’s police chief, Omer Noe , and the Lee County sheriff, Johnny Mann, were jailed for taking bribes to protect drug smugglers. Five years later, the next Lee County sheriff, Douglas Brandenburg, went to prison for a similar crime.

Amid the relentless destruction of life, there is little that shocks. But four years ago residents of Harlan County – a couple of hours’ drive to the south-east – were shaken by a series of deaths over six weeks of parents of members of the local boys and girls club. Eleven of the children watched a parent die.

Getting the drugs isn’t difficult. Elderly people sell their prescription drugs to supplement some of the lowest incomes in the US. The national average retirement income is about $21,500. In Beattyville it is $6,500.

Last year, a pharmacy owner in nearby Clay County, Terry Tenhet, was jailed for 10 years for illegally distributing hundreds of thousands of pills after police tied the prescriptions to several overdose deaths. In 2011 alone, he supplied more than 360,000 OxyContin pills in a county with only 21,000 residents. Those prescriptions were mostly written by doctors in other states.

Prosecutors alleged that for years a single pain clinic nearly 1,000 miles away in south Florida had provided the prescriptions for a quarter of the OxyContin sold in eastern Kentucky. The bus service to Florida is known to police and addicts alike as the “Oxy Express”.

In 2012, Dr Paul Volkman was sentenced to four life terms for writing illegal prescriptions for more than 3m pills from a clinic he ran in Portsmouth, Ohio, on the border with eastern Kentucky. Prosecutors said the prescriptions had contributed to dozens of overdose deaths.

The Tor Project on Wednesday afternoon sent WIRED a statement from its director Roger Dingledine directly accusing Carnegie Mellon of providing its Tor-breaking research in secret to the FBI in exchange for a payment of “at least $1 million.” You can now read the full statement on the Tor Project’s blog.1 And while Carnegie Mellon’s attack had been rumored to have been used in takedowns of dark web drug markets that used Tor’s “hidden service” features to obscure their servers and administrators, Dingledine writes that the researchers’ dragnet was larger, affecting innocent users, too.

“Apparently these researchers were paid by the FBI to attack hidden services users in a broad sweep, and then sift through their data to find people whom they could accuse of crimes,” Dingledine writes. “Such action is a violation of our trust and basic guidelines for ethical research. We strongly support independent research on our software and network, but this attack crosses the crucial line between research and endangering innocent users.”