Vile though their crimes may be, pedophiles and hit men have figured out something vital when it comes to communicating. Lots of them - the ones with any security sense - use a Darknet. These are networks of secretive websites that can't be viewed on the "regular" Internet.

Darknet sites are hosted on regular servers, but to access them you need special software, usually something that encrypts all users' traffic and allows them relative anonymity. Get set up with the right technology and presto: You can see a second, parallel Internet. Right now it's full of nasty (or, at the very least, illegal) activity like illicit drug or arms sales, or pedophile rings.

The Darknet is populated by precisely who you'd expect to be skulking in the darkest corners of the online world. They have something to hide.

But the Darknet, by itself, isn't evil. And now that all of us have, in a sense, something to hide - the details of our humdrum, legal, everyday lives - it's time to put the Darknet to good use.

Scientists recently discovered a new type of botulinum toxin (a.k.a. botox) that they believe is the deadliest substance known to man. Because they've yet to discover an antitoxin, researchers won't publish the details of gene sequence due to security concerns - a first for the scientific community. Thank God.

When scientists say this stuff is deadly, they mean it. It takes an injection of just 2 billionths of a gram or inhaling 13 billionths of a gram to kill an adult. A spoonful of the stuff in a city's water supply could be catastrophic. The toxin, which comes from the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, blocks the chemical that makes nerves work, causing botulism and death by paralysis. In a comment accompanying a newly published journal article on the new botox, Stanford Medical School professor David Relman said the substance posed "an immediate and unusually serious risk to society."

Thousands of people worldwide are expected to join the Global Frackdown protest on October 19. 'Fracktivists' from over 20 countries will gather to demand an end to fracking and "dangerous" shale gas drillings.

Numerous events are scheduled to take place mainly across the US and Europe. The global movement will be also joined by activists from Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and Indonesia. So far, a total 26 countries are listed to be taking part in the protest.

"Climate scientists warn that continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels will lead to catastrophic climate change," the Global Frackdown protest organizers said in press release.

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is the extraction of oil and gas by injecting water to break rock formations deep underground.

Fracking a single well can require between two and nine million gallons of water combined with sand and chemicals. Much of the used water returns to the earth's surface, but contains radium and bromides - cancer-causing, radioactive substances. The toxic chemicals can then float into lakes and rivers or contaminate the ground.

US oil giant Chevron says the company has suspended the search for shale gas in Romania after anti-fracking protests took place across the country.

"Chevron can today confirm it has suspended activities in Silistea, Pungesti commune, Vaslui County," the company said in a Thursday statement.

The company's priority was to "conduct these activities in a safe and environmentally responsible manner."

Over the past few days, hundreds of locals have protested at the location where the company planned to search for shale gas. Villagers blocked access to the site.

Around 200 people stayed overnight, equipped with food, warm clothes, and tents. They were accompanied by NGO representatives from across Romania.

Approximately 2,000 people also took to the streets in the country's capital of Bucharest.

The demonstrators clashed with police, making it the most violent protest to take place in the capital since the beginning of September, when the series of street rallies began.

Environmentalists say that pumping water and chemicals at high pressure into deep rock formations to free oil and gas could contaminate groundwater, AP reported.

Technocracy is slowly replacing Democracy in the West. In debt crippled countries, such as Italy, Greece and Spain, no politician dares press the default reset button, so the Anaconda debt is delivering slow inexorable death.

Because our political representatives lack the spine to bite that bullet, elections have become a charade. Financial markets, the shadowy Gnomes of Zurich, have begun choosing our political leaders.

But these Goldman Sachs friendly, loan shark, technocrats are only one arm of an octopus that is emerging as the real power in the Western world. Lesser known are the companies that own valuable patents and, like conjurers, roll out dazzling new scientific gadgets. This is the technology which, in public hands, should now be liberating us all from drudgery and freeing up our leisure time, but in private hands it is doing precisely the opposite.

When our MPs, journalists and lawyers store their phone contact book data using a 'Synch' service, or back up documents in 'The Cloud' they have no idea where their precious work will end up. They share that data unthinkingly with businesses that can quietly copy it, sell it on, or even corrupt it before they let them have it back.

These technocrats of the 'digital revolution' are planning decades ahead. They steal a march on elected governments using 'commercial confidentiality' to keep press, politicians and the public in the dark. In the age of mass surveillance and communication trawling, they can buy intelligence on what elected politicians are about to do, or even thinking of doing, and pour vast resources into counter-moves.

A potentially catastrophic asteroid has been discovered by astronomers, who say there's a slim chance that the 410-meter-wide minor planet will crash into Earth in 2032, creating a blast 50 times greater than the biggest nuclear bomb.

The asteroid, described as 2013 TV135, was found in the Camelopardalis (Giraffe) constellation by the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in southern Ukraine, the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomers Union said.

"On the night of October 12, I was watching the Giraffe constellation, it was an in-depth monitoring as part of the comet search program," Gennady Borisov from the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory told Itar-Tass news agency. "This is when the asteroid... was discovered. The first observations show that it moves quickly and is relatively close."

The discovery has been confirmed by astronomers in Italy, Spain, the UK and Russia. In Russia, it was seen with telescopes at the Master Observatory in the Siberian republic of Buryatia, the IAU Minor Planet Center said.

The asteroid has been added to the List of the Potentially Hazardous Asteroids, which includes celestial bodies with orbits closer than 7.5 million kilometers from the Earth's orbit.

However, the threat posed by 2013 TV135 is minor, as it only has a one in 63,000 chance of colliding with our planet, according to available estimates.

Astronomers say the asteroid's orbit will be about 1.7 million kilometers away from the Earth's orbit on August 26, 2032.

If the asteroid hits Earth, it would create an explosion equivalent to 2,500 megatons of TNT, which is 50 times greater than the biggest nuclear bomb ever detonated.

Massachusets and Georgia Insititute of Technology researchers have developed a method to log computer keystrokes by placing a smartphone next to a computer keyboard and major its sound and vibration using the smartphone accelerometer. The researchers employed an iPhone 4 for this and noted that sensors in older models are not good enough to pick up remote vibrations.

Mobile devices accelerometers are used to re-orient your screen using a differential capacitor to measure changes in gravitational pull. Researchers used it to listen in to typing sounds and translate them into text by estimating volume and force produced during keystroking.

The phone was enginereed to interpret what dictionary words sounded like and translate them into text. Accuracy was next to 80% and it only went down after an extensive number of dictionary words were added. Since an attacker might now what kind of information they are after, a customised dictionary with likely terms can be built to increase accuracy.

How will future alien scientists know whether life existed in our solar system? One method may be to sift through the planetary debris left when our sun becomes a white dwarf. Astronomers are doing just that with a far-distant white dwarf, GD 61; in research they've published today in Science they point to an unusually high amount of oxygen among the debris, and discuss what that might mean for life outside our solar system.

White dwarfs' meals reveal past solar systems

In the very distant future our sun will run out of fuel and, after billions of years of spectacular evolution, it will turn into an extremely hot stellar remnant, a white dwarf. Almost half its current mass will be squeezed into a volume slightly bigger than the Earth.

Before reaching that stage the sun will gradually brighten and first become a red giant, with dire consequences for life on our planet.

Turbulent events in the final phases of solar evolution will obliterate our inner solar system, leaving behind only the giant planets and their numerous moons. If our star is merciful in this monstrous phase, then the asteroid belt might just survive as well. No guarantees.

Given all this cosmic devastation, would future astro-archaeologists even be able to recognise that life once thrived in this stellar system? Or would there be no memory of a long-gone rocky planet that once travelled in orbit around a much younger yellow star?

The earliest, now-extinct human lineages, once thought to be multiple species, may actually have been one species, researchers now controversially suggest.

Modern humans, Homo sapiens, are the only living member of the human lineage, Homo, which is thought to have arisen in Africa about 2 million years ago at the beginning of the ice age, also referred to as the Pleistocene Epoch. Many extinct human species were thought to once roam the Earth, such as Homo habilis, suspected to be among the first stone-tool makers; the relatively larger-brained Homo rudolfensis; the relatively slender Homo ergaster; and Homo erectus, the first to regularly keep tools it made.

To learn more about the roots of the human family tree, scientists investigated a completely intact, approximately 1.8-million-year-old skull excavated from the medieval hilltop town of Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia. Archaeological excavations there about 30 years ago unexpectedly revealed that Dmanisi is one of the oldest-known sites for ancient human species out of Africa and the most complete collection of Homo erectus skulls and jaws found so far. The world's largest, extinct cheetah species once lived in the area, and scientists cannot rule out whether it fed on these early humans.

This fossil, the most massively built skull ever found at Dmanisi, is the best-preserved fossil of an early human species discovered yet. It probably belonged to a male, and its right cheekbone has signs that it healed from a fracture.

"We can only guess how the fracture was inflicted on the individual - it could be that it had an argument with another member of the group it lived in, or it could be that it fell down," study co-author Christoph Zollikofer, a neurobiologist at the Anthropological Institute and Museum in Zurich, Switzerland, told LiveScience.

Chimpanzees "catch" yawns from humans, scientists have discovered in one of the first examples of cross-species "yawn contagion".


Chimpanzees can "catch" yawns from humans as they grow older, according to scientists who say the behaviour is most likely an attempt to bond with their keepers.

'Contagious' yawning, which happens when one person's yawn sets off the same reaction in others, is thought to be a measure of empathy, or sharing others' emotions.

Humans are more likely to catch yawns from people they are close to, and the only previously documented example of contagion between humans and animals has been between dogs and their owners.

Now researchers from Lund University in Sweden have found that chimpanzees exhibit the same behaviour, according to a study in the PLOS ONE journal.

Like young human children, infant chimpanzees are unaffected by the yawning of others but pick up the habit at about the age of five, they concluded.