Those concerned with online privacy may soon get another weapon to defend it. Two Japanese scientists have designed glasses that confuse face recognition technology without affecting one's vision.

An associate professor at Tokyo's national Institute of Informatics, Isao Echizen, together with Professor Seiichi Gohshi from Kogakuin University, have created a pair of glasses preventing internet search engines, social networks and other services using face recognition technology from identifying photos of a wearer.

The device is equipped with near-infrared light sources which distort the features of one who wears the glasses for cameras and at the same time do not affect his or her vision.

The glasses are powered by a battery placed in the wearer's pocket. But the researchers say they are working on an improved version of their 'privacy visor' which would not need a separate battery.

New blog aims to show how those who share photos, personal information and 'likes' on Facebook could see privacy invaded.

Privacy concerns are mounting around Facebook's recently announced search tool, after it was used to unearth lists of people related to supporters of the outlawed Chinese group Falun Gong and companies employing self-declared racists.

Graph Search, Facebook's answer to Google's search engine, was launched last week by founder Mark Zuckerberg, who promised it would help people find friends who share their interests. Critics argued it could be also be used to unearth compromising information on Facebook's 1 billion members.

In a blog launched on Wednesday, a series of controversial search results have been made public, showing the extent to which those who share photos, personal information and "likes" on Facebook could have their privacy invaded.

A Dutch architect has designed a house "with no beginning or end" to be built using the world's largest 3D printer, harnessing technology that may one day be used to print houses on the moon.

Janjaap Ruijssenaars, 39, of Universe Architecture in Amsterdam, wants to print a Mobius strip-shaped building with around 1,100 square metres (12,000 square feet) of floor space using the massive D-Shape printer.

The printer, designed by Italian Enrico Dini, can print up to almost a six-metre-by-six-metre square (20-foot-by-20-foot), using a computer to add layers 5-10 mm (a quarter to half an inch) thick.

Ruijssenaars says the building could serve as a home or a museum and would have parts usually made from concrete printed using broken up rocks and an emulsion binding, while steel and glass would provide the facade.

"It's our ambition to have the first printed house, this printer has made art or objects for sea defences, but this is the first time to build something that can be lived in," he told AFP.

Researchers in Japan said Wednesday they have succeeded in growing human kidney tissue from stem cells for the first time in a potential breakthrough for millions with damaged organs who are dependent on dialysis.

Kidneys have a complex structure that is not easily repaired once damaged, but the latest findings put scientists on the road to helping a diseased or distressed organ fix itself.

Kenji Osafune of Kyoto University said his team had managed to take stem cells - the "blank slates" capable of being programmed to become any kind of cell in the body - and nudge them specifically in the direction of kidney tissue.

"It was a very significant step," he told AFP.

How should a regulatory agency announce they have discovered something potentially very important about the safety of products they have been approving for over twenty years?

In the course of analysis to identify potential allergens in GMO crops, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has belatedly discovered that the most common genetic regulatory sequence in commercial GMOs also encodes a significant fragment of a viral gene (Podevin and du Jardin 2012). This finding has serious ramifications for crop biotechnology and its regulation, but possibly even greater ones for consumers and farmers. This is because there are clear indications that this viral gene (called Gene VI) might not be safe for human consumption. It also may disturb the normal functioning of crops, including their natural pest resistance.

What Podevin and du Jardin discovered is that of the 86 different transgenic events (unique insertions of foreign DNA) commercialized to-date in the United States 54 contain portions of Gene VI within them. They include any with a widely used gene regulatory sequence called the CaMV 35S promoter (from the cauliflower mosaic virus; CaMV). Among the affected transgenic events are some of the most widely grown GMOs, including Roundup Ready soybeans (40-3-2) and MON810 maize. They include the controversial NK603 maize recently reported as causing tumors in rats (Seralini et al. 2012).

The researchers themselves concluded that the presence of segments of Gene VI "might result in unintended phenotypic changes". They reached this conclusion because similar fragments of Gene VI have already been shown to be active on their own (e.g. De Tapia et al. 1993). In other words, the EFSA researchers were unable to rule out a hazard to public health or the environment.

In general, viral genes expressed in plants raise both agronomic and human health concerns (reviewed in Latham and Wilson 2008). This is because many viral genes function to disable their host in order to facilitate pathogen invasion. Often, this is achieved by incapacitating specific anti-pathogen defenses. Incorporating such genes could clearly lead to undesirable and unexpected outcomes in agriculture. Furthermore, viruses that infect plants are often not that different from viruses that infect humans. For example, sometimes the genes of human and plant viruses are interchangeable, while on other occasions inserting plant viral fragments as transgenes has caused the genetically altered plant to become susceptible to an animal virus (Dasgupta et al. 2001). Thus, in various ways, inserting viral genes accidentally into crop plants and the food supply confers a significant potential for harm.

Betelgeuse is one of my favorite objects to look at, partly because of its pure red color, and mostly because my imagination fills in the rest. That bright red star, the shoulder of Orion is a supergiant, with dozens of times the mass of the Sun, and ready to detonate as a supernova any day now (any day within the next few million years).

But look at Betelgeuse with a really powerful telescope, like the European Space Agency's Herschel telescope, and you'll see something like this: the red supergiant Betelgeuse in all its glory, smashing its ferocious solar winds into its environment.

In this photograph, just released from the European Space Agency, you can see the powerful solar winds creating a bow shock around the star as it ploughs through the interstellar medium at a speed of 30 km/s. Closer into the star there are asymmetric structures, where the star shed material in fits and starts into its surroundings, like convective bubbles randomly popping to the top of a pot of boiling water.

Long awaited, Comet PanSTARRS could still become a fine comet for Northern Hemisphere skywatchers. Or not.

As we report in S&T, Comet PanSTARRS (C/2011 L4) will emerge from the Sun's glare low in the western twilight in early and mid-March of 2013. But how bright will it be?

Probably fainter than we originally predicted.

Using recent brightness estimates now coming from Southern Hemisphere observers, Seiichi Yoshida, editor of Weekly Information about Bright Comets, has changed his magnitude formula for Comet PanSTARRS. His new predicted light curve has the comet peaking at only magnitude +3 in early March.

Other recent fits to the data have it reaching anywhere from 1.8 to 4.

A US company said Tuesday it plans to send a fleet of spacecraft into the solar system to mine asteroids for metals and other materials in the hopes of furthering exploration of the final frontier.

"Using resources harvested in space is the only way to afford permanent space development," said David Gump, chief executive of Deep Space Industries, noting that more than 900 new asteroids that pass near our planet are discovered each year.

"In this case, metals and fuel from asteroids can expand the in-space industries of this century. That is our strategy."

In a first step, the company plans to send "asteroid-prospecting spacecraft" into the solar system, with the first - 55-pound (25-kilogram) "FireFlies" - to be launched in 2015 on journeys of two to six months.

It's been an exciting weekend of discoveries for NASA and its Mars Curiosity rover.

First, there was an update from NASA engineers operating the one-ton rover, who expressed excitement over a set of rocks discovered in a region dubbed "Yellowknife Bay." The rocks, which are thought to hold evidence that shows Mars was once a much wetter place, were discovered just days before a team of researchers announced findings showing that minerals found underground on Mars are the 'strongest evidence yet that water once flowed across the Red Planet. Meanwhile, on Friday, researchers working in conjunction with the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) team announced they had identified an ancient river system - now considered one of the most important geological sites on Mars.

And that was just the weekend.

Back in July of 2011, we reported on an odd occurrence in Windsor, Ontario that was annoying the hell out of the city's residents: a low, droning hum, the source of which has remained unknown even to now. Well, it appears that after several years of fielding complaints, the Canadian government is finally ready to do something about the buzzing.

The University of Windsor and Western University have announced an ongoing study into the droning noise, funded by Ottawa, with an intent to discover it's source.

"Our government takes this issue seriously and is following up on our commitment to find a solution that works for the people of Windsor," parliamentary secretary for Foreign Affairs Bob Dechert said in a statement Monday.

"Our government will continue to work with the people of Windsor and others to hopefully pinpoint the source of the Windsor hum," said Dechert. "We want to protect citizens' quality of life. To get a solution, we first need to find the source. This study is a step in the right direction."

The "Hum" has been a source of frustration for years, particularly in Windsor's west end, where it's been known to buzz so loudly it rattles windows, even shaking things off of some people's walls.