This Wednesday, the United States District Court in Manhattan came down in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in its case against the file-sharing service LimeWire, and founder Mark Gorton, over copyright infringement.

In a fairly unusual move, Judge Wood held Gorton personally liable. “The evidence establishes that Gorton directed and benefited from many of the activities that gave rise to LW’s liability,” she wrote [Wall Street Journal].

The decision was a long time in coming. Nine years have passed (seriously, nine years) since the federal ruling against Napster back in 2001. Most file-sharing services gave up after the 2005 decision against Grokster, the Journal says, but LimeWire held out. So the record companies sued in 2006, and finally won.

This looks like the end for LimeWire.

“It is obviously a fairly fatal decision for them,” said Michael Page, the San Francisco lawyer who represented file sharing service Grokster in the landmark case, MGM Studios vs. Grokster, and also represented LimeWire’s former CTO in the company’s most recent copyright case. “If they don’t shut down, the other side will likely make a request for an injunction and there’s nothing left but to go on to calculating damages” [CNET].

The hearing regarding compensation is scheduled for June 1. The RIAA is pretty clear about what it wants: money.

“We think a high-damage award would be appropriate,” said Steven Marks, the general counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group that represents music companies. “I think it’s very clear from the decision that there’s a lot of evidence of willful behavior by LimeWire and its principals” [The New York Times].

But while LimeWire is doomed, that’s not reason to think that legislation will catch up to the Internet, at least according to Eric Garland of BigChampagne. While LimeWire kept operating its peer-to-peer system over the last decade, other systems, like BitTorrent, sprang up.

And if you like permissive Internet laws, just be glad you’re not in Germany. A court there this week found that people can bear some responsibility if they fail to secure their wireless connection and it winds up being used to distribute copyrighted content.

The owner had proof that the householder was on holiday at the time but the court ruled that the network should have been password-protected. The court’s verdict was that the owner could be fined up to 100 euros (about $127) [BBC News].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: A Love Song for Napster
DISCOVER: Emerging Technology: The Internet, a look back on the Web in 2006
DISCOVER: Your Digital Privacy? It Might Already Be An Illusion
Gene Expression: Nature vs. Everyone Else? (on open-access publishing)

Image: LimeWire

It’s the open ocean, and a small animal is swimming home. Listening out for the hustle and bustle of a coral reef, the creature changes direction and heads straight towards the sound. If it eventually arrives at its destination, it will settle down and add to the reef’s mighty structures. This intrepid traveller is a baby coral.

We’re used to thinking of corals as inert hunks of intricately shaped minerals but these rocky structures are merely the corals’ homes. The animals that live within are small and tentacled, looking a lot like the sea anemones that they’re related to. As larvae, corals look even stranger. Less than a millimetre in length, they swim freely in the open ocean amidst other plankton. Only later do they find a suitable place to settle down and get on with the adult business of reef construction.

These young corals have an unexpectedly amazing way of finding their way to the right site. According to Mark Vermeij from the University of Amsterdam, they ‘listen’ for the sounds of a reef.

Other oceanic babies do the same thing. Stephen Simpson, who was also involved in this new discovery, has previously showed that the larvae of both fish and crustaceans can used sound to find a home. Chemical cues can also lead them down the final leg of the journeys, but the din of a noisy reef carries further and is independent of currents. These acoustic signposts help them point in the right direction at the start of their treks.

Vermeij discovered this uncanny homing ability by collecting newly fertilised coral eggs off the Caribbean island of Curacao. The youngsters were raised in a lab and placed in six Plexiglas tubes pointing towards three underwater speakers. The speakers churned out a compilation album that may well have been called Now That’s What I Call Reef Music 2009 – a mash-up of the crackling beats of snapping shrimps laid over a background of fish calls and grunts, all sampled from local reefs.

If the speakers were silent, the baby corals were evenly spread throughout the tubes. But when the underwater mix started playing, the corals headed towards it, with over 40% of them clustering at the end of the tubes closest to the speakers. And if the tubes were placed half a metre below the speakers, the larvae clustered towards their upper surface.

Many things could affect the movement of a coral larva, including the tides, moonlight and enticing smells. But none of these mattered in the tank, which was isolated from the wider ocean. The fact that all of the tubes were angled like the spokes of a wheel also rules out the possibility that all the corals were swimming in the same direction, influenced by some external pull. It’s clear that these future reef-builders are capable of hearing underwater sounds and swimming towards them.

It seems bizarre that a simple coral larva could hear sound but we’re probably still thinking about these animals as rocky reefs rather than the living animals they encase. Previous studies have shown that coral larvae can see (detect light), touch (respond to textures) and smell (detect chemicals). Now, we know that they can also hear. Vermeij thinks that they do it with tiny hairs called cilia that coat their bodies.

As sound waves move through the sea, they cause water molecules and other particles to move up and down. These jiggling particles waggle the cilia, telling the corals where to head.

For the moment, it’s not clear if the larvae can tell the difference between reef sounds and general underwater noises. That’s an important question because the oceans are becoming noisier places, thanks to shipping, industry, drilling and military tests. This cacophony can easily drown out the sound of shrimps and fish. Underwater noise pollution already poses a problem for many animals including whales and dolphins. Do corals, many of which are already facing extinction, face the same problems?

Reference: PLoS ONE http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010660.

More on corals:

• Overfishing gives toxic seaweeds an edge in their competition with corals
• Clock gene and moonlight help corals to co-ordinate a mass annual orgy
• Worrying slowdown of coral growth in the Great Barrier Reef
• Corals survive acid oceans by switching to soft-bodied mode
• Fishing bans protect coral reefs from devastating predatory starfish
• One in three species of reef-building corals face extinction

One pest withers; another takes its place.

The Chinese government in 1997 approved Bt cotton. The crop, produced by U.S. agribusiness giant Monsanto, is genetically modified to produce a toxin that kills the bollworm, which has wreaked havoc on cotton crops. For its intended use, Bt cotton worked great: As DISCOVER covered in 2008, bollworms were in steep decline not only in cotton fields, but also in neighboring fields of corn and soybeans. But nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum, and targeting just one pest opens the door for others to come in. According to a decade-long study published in Science this week, it’s happening.

The new pest plaguing the 4 million hectares of Bt cotton in China is the mirid bug, research leader Kongming Wu says.

Numbers of mirid bugs (insects of the Miridae family), previously only minor pests in northern China, have increased 12-fold since 1997, they found. “Mirids are now a main pest in the region,” says Wu. “Their rise in abundance is associated with the scale of Bt cotton cultivation” [Nature].

Operating in northern China, Wu’s team monitored how much insecticide farmers used from the early 1990s up through 2008. They also tracked the mirid population from the time Bt cotton was introduced up to 2008.

Before switching to GM cotton, farmers used more broad-spectrum insecticides to kill bollworms and other pests. But as more farmers began growing Bt cotton, their use of sprays declined, leading to a steady rise in pests, including mirid bugs [The Guardian].

Farmers have always been playing cat-and-mouse with pests and weeds, of course. The reports last week of weeds becoming increasingly resistant to the weed-killer Roundup was another reminder that nature adapts to our tricks, so while GM crops are often great at the their initial purpose, circumstances change. Cotton itself has been through many cycles of this before.

For example, the boll weevil was once the main worldwide threat to cotton. As farmers sprayed pesticides against the weevils, bollworms developed resistance and rose to become the primary pest. Similarly, stink bugs have replaced bollworms as the primary pest in southeastern United States since Bt cotton was introduced [Nature].

Related Content:
80beats: Genetically Modified Cotton Plants Protect Their Neighbors from Pests
80beats: Evolution in Action: Roundup-Ready Crops Create Roundup-Resistant Superweeds
80beats: Biotech Potato Wins European Approval; May Signal a Larger Shift on GM Crops
80beats: India Says No to Genetically Modified Eggplants

Image: flickr / J. Coelho

This is without doubt the single greatest thing on Earth, and the very reason the Internet was invented.

Sure, I came for the one about Doctor Who, but stayed for the rest of the magnificence that unfolded before me.

My hat is off to you, sir. Kudos. Kudos, indeed.

Tip o’ the brain and brain, what is brain? to BABloggee Oliver X for making my life so wonderfully better with this.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Atlantis makes its final trip into space.  The launch looked to be picture perfect.  The video goes from JUST before lift off to external tank separation just over 9 minutes.

It’s a sad day for US manned spaceflight.  The term “Lucky Dog” was used by the Atlantis crew as it turned into a heads up position prior to external tank separation.

Fighting infection is one of the more important parts of medicine, but the doctors of tomorrow get to treat it like a game when they play The Healing Blade. In this card game, developed by a gaming company led by two San Francisco physicians, students take on roles of characters like the Lord of Pestilence or Apothecary Healer in a fantasy world called Soma. According to The Scientist:
"A Lord of Pestilence, for example, might play Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a highly opportunistic, gram-negative bacterium that commonly causes infections in hospitals. An appropriate counter-play by the Apothecary Healer would be to play ciprofloxacin or ticarcillan, two antibiotics that have action against P. aeruginosa.
The Lord of Pestilence can also play a multi-drug resistant card against the Healer, who might have to choose whether to use a narrow- or broad-spectrum antibiotic against the infection. Just like in other role-playing games, such as Wizards and Warriors, students have to use the information they have about their environment and the characters in play in order to win the game. Only this time, they're learning important facts and critical thinking skills they could potentially use in their jobs. If fun and games help med students learn how to most ...

Life is uncertain--eat the head first. That's the philosophy behind every meal a Zodarian spider eats, and there's a strategy behind it. Consuming certain body parts first ensures the spiders consume the maximum concentration of vital nutrients during the meal, according to research published in the journal Animal Behavior. LiveScience reports:
"When chowing down on ants, the spiders consistently began with the protein-packed front parts before getting to the fattier hind segment, called a gaster or abdomen. The picky eating seemed to pay off: Spiders reared on just front-end ant pieces grew faster and bigger, and they lived longer than those served only gasters or even whole ants."
Of course, the spiders can't sit down to dinner until they've injected their prey with a fearful venom that leaves the ants completely paralyzed in a matter of minutes. Then it's time to liquefy the ants' inside and slurp up the yummy goo. But the ants' hind parts don't go totally to waste; when given an entire ant to eat, the spiders would eat some of that, too, perhaps because certain nutrients are found chiefly in the gaster.
The findings jibe with the emerging view that for predators, achieving proper nutrition is ...