Boeing has filed papers with the FCC to develop a smartphone for people in the business of secrets. The phone, simply called "Black," will run an Android-variant operating system, be compatible with other technology, and - like any good spy phone - will self-destruct if you try to figure out its secrets.

This filing comes two years after the original news leaked that the company was working on the smartphone, which will support all the world's major communications (GSM, LTE, and WCDMA), storage (USB, HDMI, SIM), and wireless (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi) standards.

What it won't support is any snooping, journalistic or otherwise. Boeing is claiming that its hardware specs are exempt from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests because they contains "trade secrets" and are vital to national security.

Anyone who is issued a Boeing Black will have to agree in a non-disclosure agreement to stay mum about the phone's hardware, software, performance, applications, and anything else Boeing decides is "proprietary information."

A magic formula of physics is propelling animals across the planet, from birds and sharks to jellyfish, according to a new discovery by researchers at Texas A&M University.

While people struggle with fixed-wing aircraft and solid propellors, animals triumph with flexible wings, fins and tails and now we know that despite their other vastly differing characteristics, they are all moving in essentially the same way.

"We found insects, birds, bats, whales, fish, dolphins, even smaller molluscs are all using the same basic mechanics," said Marine Biologist Nathan Johnson from A&M at Galveston who did the study with colleagues from Harvard, California Institute of Technology, Indiana University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

It shows just how advanced Mother Nature's designs are compared to human engineering. Scientists hope their findings will help technology catch up with millions of years of evolution.

In 2010, workers widening a remote stretch of highway near the northwestern coast of Chile uncovered a trove of fossils, including the skeletons of at least 30 large baleen whales. The fossils - which may be up to 9 million years old - are the first definitive examples of ancient mass strandings of whales, according to a new study. The work also fingers a possible culprit.

"This is a fantastic paper," says Jeremy Goldbogen, a marine biologist at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California, who wasn't involved in the study. The new findings "are revealing something that we didn't know anything about," he notes. "This is an awesome snapshot of deep time."

The area where the fossils were found has long been known locally as Cerro Ballena ("Whale Hill" in Spanish) due to other remains found there years ago, says Nicholas Pyenson, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Two of the species that Pyenson and his colleagues discovered in the mix - an aquatic sloth and a particular type of shark - suggest that the fine-grained material that entombed the fossils was deposited as sediment on a tidal flat sometime between about 6.5 million and 9 million years ago, when the site sat on the coast of a south-facing bay.

Barcelona - Smartphone makers are fighting for space on your wrist and your head, lucrative real estate for a new wave of high-tech devices if only they can persuade you to wear them.

Manufacturers unleashed a battery of new wearable devices at the world's biggest mobile fair in Barcelona, Spain, trying to carve out new revenue sources in developed markets where smartphone sales are slowing.

From smart bracelets that track your fitness to watches and glasses that let you take a call or check text messages and email, these gadgets are the new stars of the February 24-27 Mobile World Congress.

Wearable devices first became commercially viable in 2013, said David Sovie, head of electronics and technology at Dublin-based consultancy group Accenture.

"I think 2014 is when you will start to see more mass market, or at least wider adoption of these technologies," he said.

According to an Accenture study of 23,000 consumers in 23 countries, there is a large appetite for such products, with 46 percent saying they were interested in smart watches and 42 percent in smart glasses.

The first target is fitness fanatics, wooed with bracelets that record the number of steps they take, the distance travelled, calories used, or even their heartbeat.

US firm Fitbit, leader with more than 60 percent of the market for wearable fitness devices, has invited congress visitors to join a contest by strapping on a bracelet during their stay in Barcelona. The winner is the competitor who has moved most.

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.

Among the works were, for example, a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China. (The conference website says that all manuscripts are "reviewed for merits and contents".) The authors of the paper, entitled 'TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce', write in the abstract that they "concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact". (Nature News has attempted to contact the conference organizers and named authors of the paper but received no reply*; however at least some of the names belong to real people. The IEEE has now removed the paper).

*Update: One of the named authors replied to Nature News on 25 February. He said that he first learned of the article when conference organizers notified his university in December 2013; and that he does not know why he was a listed co-author on the paper. "The matter is being looked into by the related investigators," he said.

Do you believe in free will? Are people able to decide their own destinies, whether it's on what continent they'll live, who or if they'll marry, or just where they'll get lunch today? Or are we just the unwitting pawns of some greater cosmic mechanism at work, ticking away the seconds and steering everyone and everything toward an inevitable, predetermined fate?

It might sound like the realm of pure philosophy but MIT researchers are actually looking to get to the bottom of this age-old debate once and for all, using some of the most distant and brilliant objects in the Universe.

Rather than the ancient musings of Plato and Aristotle, researchers at MIT were trying to determine how to get past a more recent conundrum in physics: Bell's Theorem. Proposed by Irish physicist John Bell in the 1964, the principle attempts to come to terms with the behavior of "entangled" quantum particles separated by great distances but somehow affected simultaneously and instantaneously by the measurement of one or the other - previously referred to by Einstein as "spooky action at a distance."

The problem with such spookiness in the quantum universe is that it seems to violate some very basic tenets of what we know about the macroscopic universe, such as information traveling faster than light. (A big no-no in physics.)

(Note: actual information is not transferred via quantum entanglement, but rather it's the transfer of state between particles that can occur at thousands of times the speed of light.)

Here's a simple truth: the internet has radically changed the world. Over the course of the past 20 years, the idea of networking all the world's computers has gone from a research science pipe dream to a necessary condition of economic and social development, from government and university labs to kitchen tables and city streets. We are all travelers now, desperate souls searching for a signal to connect us all. It is awesome.

And we're fucking everything up.

Massive companies like AT&T and Comcast have spent the first two months of 2014 boldly announcing plans to close and control the internet through additional fees, pay-to-play schemes, and sheer brutal size - all while the legal rules designed to protect against these kinds of abuses were struck down in court for basically making too much sense. "Broadband providers represent a threat to internet openness," concluded Judge David Tatel in Verizon's case against the FCC's Open Internet order, adding that the FCC had provided ample evidence of internet companies abusing their market power and had made "a rational connection between the facts found and the choices made." Verizon argued strenuously, but had offered the court "no persuasive reason to question that judgement."

Then Tatel cut the FCC off at the knees for making "a rather half-hearted argument" in support of its authority to properly police these threats and vacated the rules protecting the open internet, surprising observers on both sides of the industry and sending new FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler into a tailspin of empty promises seemingly designed to disappoint everyone.

"I expected the anti-blocking rule to be upheld," National Cable and Telecommunications Association president and CEO Michael Powell told me after the ruling was issued. Powell was chairman of the FCC under George W. Bush; he issued the first no-blocking rules. "Judge Tatel basically said the Commission didn't argue it properly."

Washington -- Federal health regulators will consider this week whether to green light a provocative new fertilization technique that could eventually create babies from the DNA of three people, with the goal of preventing mothers from passing on debilitating genetic diseases to their children.

The Food and Drug Administration has framed its two-day meeting as a "scientific, technologic and clinical" discussion about how to test the approach in humans. But the technique itself raises a number of ethical questions, including whether the government should sanction the creation of genetically modified humans.

The FDA panel will hear from several prominent critics who oppose any human testing of the approach, arguing that it could be a slippery slope toward "designer babies," - in which parents customize traits like eye color, height and intelligence.

But the field's leading U.S. researcher will be on hand to explain and defend his work, which he describes as "gene correction," rather than "gene modification."

"We want to replace these mutated genes, which by nature have become pathogenic to humans," says Dr. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, who will present on Tuesday. "We're reversing them back to normal, so I don't understand why you would be opposing that."

The FDA meeting was prompted by Mitalipov's research at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, where he and his staff have produced five healthy monkeys using the DNA-replacement technique. He is seeking FDA approval to begin testing in a handful of women who carry defective genes that can lead to devastating diseases in children, including blindness, organ failure and epilepsy.

On Jan. 28, 2014, NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, witnessed its strongest solar flare since it launched in the summer of 2013. Solar flares are bursts of x-rays and light that stream out into space, but scientists don't yet know the fine details of what sets them off.

IRIS peers into a layer of the sun's lower atmosphere just above the surface, called the chromosphere, with unprecedented resolution. However, IRIS can't look at the entire sun at the same time, so the team must always make decisions about what region might provide useful observations. On Jan. 28, scientists spotted a magnetically active region on the sun and focused IRIS on it to see how the solar material behaved under intense magnetic forces. At 2:40 p.m. EST, a moderate flare, labeled an M-class flare -- which is the second strongest class flare after X-class - erupted from the area, sending light and x-rays into space.

Following the U.S. snooping revelations, there is a growing interest in a range of mobile phone products with one central selling point: privacy.

The latest contender is the Blackphone, which runs on a customised version of Google's Android software and encrypts texts, voice calls and video chats was launched in the Spanish Pavilion at the annual Mobile World Congress industry fair in Barcelona on Monday.

It aims to tap into the market for so-called mobile security management (MSM) products which was estimated to be worth $560 million in 2013 and is expected to nearly double in size to $1 billion a year by 2015, according to ABI Research.

Separately Deutsche Telekom said it is also preparing to launch a smartphone app that encrypts voice and text messages, making it the first major network operator with a mass market-compatible product that will be rolled out to all its users.