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Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has genetically manipulated the 2009 strain of pandemic flu in order for it to “escape” the control of the immune system’s neutralising antibodies, effectively making the human population defenceless against its reemergence.

Most of the world today has developed some level of immunity to the 2009 pandemic flu virus, which means that it can now be treated as less dangerous “seasonal flu”. However, The Independent understands that Professor Kawaoka intentionally set out to see if it was possible to convert it to a pre-pandemic state in order to analyse the genetic changes involved.

The study is not published, however some scientists who are aware of it are horrified that Dr Kawaoka was allowed to deliberately remove the only defence against a strain of flu virus that has already demonstrated its ability to create a deadly pandemic that killed as many as 500,000 people in the first year of its emergence.

Kite Bricks has developed “Smart Bricks” (S-Bricks) made out of high-strength concrete that can be used to make buildings rapidly, cheaply and energy efficiently.

The bricks — which are patent pending — are much like Lego in that they come in a variety of forms for different purposes and can easily connect together, with rows of knobs along the top of bricks that slot into voids along the bottom of other bricks. A special adhesive — which works like a super-strong double-sided sticky tape, a bit like 3M VHB — dispenses with the need for cement. They can be delivered to building sites in a kit complete with traditional doors and windows allowing for structures to be assembled with a minimum of debris and labour. Steel bars can be slotted through dedicated channels in the bricks to provide the same support as traditionally reinforced concrete.

The bricks feature open internal spaces for insulation, which means that buildings made with the bricks require less energy for heating and cooling. The spaces also allow for infrastructure elements — whether it’s plumbing or wiring — to run through them. Removable panels allow for easy access to these infrastructure elements so that portions of walls don’t need to be torn down for maintenance. The bricks can be used to make floors, walls and ceilings and the company says that if it constructs the average five storey building using the bricks it can save around 30 percent energy compared with traditional construction methods. Kite Bricks also claims to be able to reduce the cost of construction by as much as 50 percent.

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The study, Gardeners Beware 2014, shows that 36 out of 71 (51 percent) of garden plant samples purchased at top garden retailers in 18 cities in the United States and Canada contain neonicotinoid (neonic) pesticides — a key contributor to recent bee declines. Some of the flowers contained neonic levels high enough to kill bees outright assuming comparable concentrations are present in the flowers’ pollen and nectar. Further, 40 percent of the positive samples contained two or more neonics.

The study is a larger follow up to a first-of-its-kind pilot study released by Friends of the Earth last August. The new study expanded the number of samples and number of locations where plants were purchased, and also assessed the distribution of neonic pesticides between flowers and the rest of the plant.

U.S. production of crude oil, along with liquids separated from natural gas, surpassed all other countries this year with daily output exceeding 11 million barrels in the first quarter, the bank said in a report today. The country became the world’s largest natural gas producer in 2010. The International Energy Agency said in June that the U.S. was the biggest producer of oil and natural gas liquids.

“The U.S. increase in supply is a very meaningful chunk of oil,” Francisco Blanch, the bank’s head of commodities research, said by phone from New York. “The shale boom is playing a key role in the U.S. recovery. If the U.S. didn’t have this energy supply, prices at the pump would be completely unaffordable.”

Two servers in Germany – in Berlin and Nuremberg – are under surveillance by the NSA.

Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the person doing the search. Not only are German privacy software users tracked, but the source code shows that privacy software users worldwide are tracked by the NSA.

Among the NSA’s targets is the Tor network funded primarily by the US government to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states.

Tor (“The Onion Router”) works by bouncing traffic off a series of servers so that it’s near-impossible to trace who’s browsing what. It’s partly funded by the U.S. Department of State because it’s handy for dissidents in repressive regimes, but Edward Snowden’s leaks already showed last year that the NSA has been targeting Tor because it believes terrorists also use it.

The German reports on Thursday were based on source code related to XKeyscore, believed to be the front-end system for searching data held by the NSA and its partners. This code includes the IP address for a server run by Hahn, who explained to me by email:

“I saw some source code which appears to belong to an XKeyscore plugin.The IP address was embedded in that source code. We’re not talking about the main tool, just a plugin.”

Hahn, who has been involved in the Tor project for around 6 years, runs one of the Tor “directory authorities”, which list all the roughly 5,000 Tor servers out there. These authorities keep users’ Tor clients up to date. Thursday’s reports say it’s not known whether Hahn’s server was monitored by the NSA as such, or by the agency’s German partners.

The source code includes the IP address of another German target too, according to the reports – the Chaos Computer Club. The CCC is Europe’s oldest and largest hacker collective, and it runs communications services for activists (which is why it’s one of several communications providers suing the British signals intelligence agency GCHQ over surveillance).

Meanwhile, according to an English-language ARD article published later on Thursday — and partly written by members of the Tor project — the NSA “tracks all connections to a server that hosts part of an anonymous email service at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

The comments are the first detailed public acknowledgement of a U.S. military presence in Somalia dating back since the U.S. administration of George W. Bush and add to other signs of a deepening U.S. commitment to Somalia’s government, which the Obama administration recognized last year.

So what’s Kamen’s vision for the future of these things? Well the one in Crane’s basement is far too big for the average American home, generating 10 continuous kilowatts, while most of us only draw about 2 kw. “I love bulldozers, but I wouldn’t put one in my garage,” quips Kamen.

Kamen believes that aside from mansion owners, the Beacon 10 is just right for businesses like laundries or restaurants that use a lot of hot water. With commercialization partner NRG Energy, he’s so far deployed roughly 20 of the machines.

IBM’s Watson and Apple’s Siri stirred up a hunger and awareness throughout the United States for something like a Star Trek computer that really worked — an artificially intelligent system that could receive instructions in plain, spoken language, make the appropriate inferences, and carry out its instructions without needing to have millions and millions of subroutines hard-coded into it.

As we’ve established, that stuff is very hard. But Cycorp’s goal is to codify general human knowledge and common sense so that computers might make use of it.

Cycorp charged itself with figuring out the tens of millions of pieces of data we rely on as humans — the knowledge that helps us understand the world — and to represent them in a formal way that machines can use to reason. The company’s been working continuously since 1984 and next month marks its 30th anniversary.

“Many of the people are still here from 30 years ago — Mary Shepherd and I started [Cycorp] in August of 1984 and we’re both still working on it,” Lenat said. “It’s the most important project one could work on, which is why this is what we’re doing. It will amplify human intelligence.”

The Cambridge researchers managed to ‘trap’ a magnetic field with a strength of 17.6 Tesla – roughly 100 times stronger than the field generated by a typical fridge magnet – in a high temperature gadolinium barium copper oxide (GdBCO) superconductor, beating the previous record by 0.4 Tesla. The results are published today in the journal Superconductor Science and Technology.