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Ryan died while driving the Pacific Coast Highway when his Jeep Wrangler went off the road, landing on its rooftop. Only moments before, Ryan was sending pictures and updates to his Twitter page, including one about his dog, which read, “Border collie Jill surveying the view from atop the sand dune.”

Before that, Ryan wrote, “After 25 years of driving by, I finally hiked to the top of the giant sand dune on the PCH west of Malibu.”

U.S. Attorney Zane David Memeger says investigators have found no evidence of criminal intent by Lower Merion School District employees who activated tracking software that took thousands of webcam and screenshot images on school-provided laptops.

Following the president’s address, a car bomb ripped through an outdoor market in Baghdad killing eight Iraqis and wounding 32.

Pentagon officials also declared the mission, in a sense, kind of sort of accomplished Tuesday, citing the handful of Iraqi hearts and minds that may have been won over by the U.S. occupancy, and the fact that Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki had not yet been assassinated.

“In cases where we were unable to rebuild infrastructure or quell violent civil unrest, it wasn’t for lack of trying,” Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said during last Sunday’s taping of ABC’s This Week. “And trying your best, one could argue, is technically a triumph in and of itself.”

Assange told The Associated Press by telephone that contact was established this week between WikiLeaks’ lawyers and the General Counsel of the U.S. Army. WikiLeaks has asked the Pentagon for help in reviewing the documents to purge the names of Afghan informants from the files.

WikiLeaks already has published 77,000 classified U.S. military reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010, an extraordinary disclosure which some say could expose human rights abuses across the NATO-led campaign.

On Sunday, WikiLeaks said it will publish its remaining 15,000 Afghan war documents within a month.

The breakthrough has been made in the research of bit-patterned media, a magnetic storage technology that is being developed for future hard disk drives. In today’s drives, magnetic material is spread across the surface of the disk and bits of data are stored across several hundred magnetic grains, but the technology is reaching its limit.

Bit-patterned media breaks up the recording surface into numerous magnetic bits, each consisting of a few magnetic grains. Under a microscope, the magnetic bits look like thousands of tiny spheres crammed next to each another.

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Toshiba’s sample media is still in the prototype stage, but is built at a density equivalent to 2.5 terabits per square inch. Contrast that with Toshiba’s current highest capacity drive today, which is based on existing technology and has a density of 541 gigabits per square inch or about one fifth that of the new technology.

An unnerving variety of parasites have evolved the ability to control the brains of victims to help the parasites spread. For instance, the protozoan known as Toxoplasma gondii makes rats love cat urine so that it can spread among its feline hosts – and it may influence human culture as well, making people more prone to certain forms of neuroticism.

Another case of parasite mind control involves the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which essentially turns ants into zombies. It maneuvers the insects into biting down on the major veins of the undersides of leaves just before they die – the fungus then rapidly grows a stalk from their victims’ heads, releasing spores to infect more ants.

Now scientists have discovered what might be ancient evidence of such mind-control-induced death grips – scars on a roughly 48-million-year-old leaf.

“I thought it was a very, very long shot to find such a fossil, but indeed, as luck would have it, two paleobotanists, Conrad Labandeira at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and Torsten Wappler at the Steinmann Institute in Bonn, were sitting around wondering how that particular damage type might be explained,” said researcher David Hughes, a behavioral ecologist at Harvard University.

The leaf fossil came from what once were subtropical forests around a lake in Germany. The leaf bears 29 dumbbell-shaped scars centered around its veins. These differ from the kinds of snips resulting when insects drink plant sap, and match telltale scars made nowadays by the death grips of carpenter ants (Camponotus leonardi) infected with the mind-controlling fungus O. unilateralis.

“We are now realizing that half of life on Earth is parasitic — each free-living organism has at least one parasite,” Hughes said. “But very few manipulate behaviors and there is a reason for that — it is likely very costly. The fossil now challenges us to think of what past environments acted as selective forces for such cool tricks to evolve.”

Online selling has provided the springboard for products designed or made by new mums and demographic changes have also boosted them. They’ve been given a label; mumpreneurs.

According to Donald Light, Ph.D., a professor of comparative health policy at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey who authored the study, the pharmaceutical industry is a “market for lemons” and Big Pharma spends a fortune to sell those lemons to the public.

“Sometimes drug companies hide or downplay information about serious side effects of new drugs and overstate the drugs’ benefits,” Dr. Light, who presented his findings on August 17 in Atlanta at the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, said in a press statement. “Then, they spend two to three times more on marketing than on research to persuade doctors to prescribe these new drugs. Doctors may get misleading information and then misinform patients about the risks of a new drug. It’s really a two-tier market for lemons.”