If you want to know whether you are dating your cousin, there’s an app for that — in Iceland, at least.
It turns out that Iceland, in addition to having the most affirmatively unappealing country name in the world, has an issue with inadvertent incest. It is a small, isolated, sparsely populated land where the residents have lived for thousands of years. As a result, the forces of nature dictate that most of the 330,000 citizens share some common ancestry. But what if you want to make absolutely certain that you avoid consorting with someone with uncomfortably close degrees of sanguinity? Fortunately, Google is offering an Android app that allows Icelanders to use their smart phones to access the Book of Icelander — an ancestry log that includes some 720,000 names — to determine their exact relations with that attractive person they met at work.
This is the kind of practical app that not only facilitates the avoidance of awkward social situations, but also could have changed the course of classical literature. If only Oedipus had that helpful smartphone app!
No word yet on when the app will be rolled out in Appalachia.
What is 4DX? Basically, it sounds a lot like a theater version of a theme park ride. 
The case involves the legality of a patent that one company, Myriad Genetics, holds on genes that can identify an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancers. Myriad uses the patents to 
I don’t know how scientific the survey is, but the results really shouldn’t surprise anyone. Incivility increases with each step we take that is farther away from face-to-face interaction. That is because it is not easy to be hurtful and insulting to someone’s face. You see their reaction, physically, and you think that you wouldn’t want someone to say something mean to your face, either. The natural tendency therefore is to tone down the rhetoric. It’s somewhat easier to be rude over the phone, but even then you can hear the hurt in the other party’s voice.
Oh, and here’s the kicker: Baxter costs only $22,000. That’s less than the salaries of most industrial workers. And Baxter doesn’t require employers to worry about absenteeism or tardiness, he doesn’t take sick days or file workers compensation lawsuits, he doesn’t need to be insured or provided with a pension or vacation days, and he won’t steal from the supply room, grouse about the boss at the break table, or try to unionize the workplace. 
A Dutch researcher tried to determine if there are patterns to the generation of malicious email used in spam, phishing, and other fraudulent scams. It was a huge task, because there are more than 42,000 internet service providers worldwide. The researcher found, surprisingly, that 
The FBI requests are called National Security Letters. For some time, FBI headquarters had been permitted to use NSLs in connection with espionage investigations. In 2001, the Patriot Act broadened the circumstances in which NSLs may be used, and also authorized FBI offices around the country to issue NSLs. Under current procedures, the FBI may issue NSLs to obtain name, address, length of service, and other information about computer users. No court approval or warrant is necessary. Companies receiving the FBI requests aren’t permitted to disclose the existence of the requests, although the recipient can challenge the NSLs in court.
Consider electronic writing — emails and texts — for example. In the old days, when you wrote a letter to a friend, you expected that someday you would get a letter in response. Do the same rules apply to email and texts? With email and texting being virtually instantaneous, is there an expected response time after which you need to apologize and offer a reason for not responding sooner? In my view, often the speed of a response isn’t as important as getting an answer that is thoughtful — and thoughtfulness usually takes time. But if I’m infuriating someone because I haven’t responded within two hours, I’d sure like to know that.
But perhaps there’s still a chance for 50-something space traveler wannabes like me. 
The arguments for an increasingly dim-witted human race are based upon a kind of reverse Darwinism — the world is now so safe, the theory goes, that the mutated dunderheads among us aren’t killed off and culled out, and therefore survive to reproduce where they wouldn’t have survived before — in combination with studies that show that certain common substances, such as fluoride in the water supply, pesticides, and processed foods, reduce intelligence.
The face chocolatizing process is straightforward. You 
