A newly released study from the National Toxicology Program, a division of the National Institutes of Health, has found a link between the kind of radiation emitted by cell phones and cancer in rats.

Those rats were exposed to the same kind of radiation cell phones emit for nine hours a day, every day, over a period of two years. Researchers found that male rodents experienced low incidences of two type of tumors: gliomas, in the brain, and schwannomas, in the heart. It’s unclear if female rats experienced the same issue or were part of the the study.

Consumer Reports notes that these results seem to support earlier findings from epidemiological studies, which found the same kinds of tumors in humans. That led the International Agency for Research on Cancer to classify radiation as a possible human carcinogen in 2011.

So what do these results mean? On the one side, there are industry leaders and others who say that evidence has shown cell phones don’t pose any risks to human health.

But then there are scientists and some health officials who argue that more research needs to be done but point to available evidence as enough to suggest that there’s a possible connection between cell phone use and brain cancer. That’s enough to justify taking precautions when you’re yapping away with your phone up to your ear, some say.

A PROVISION SNUCK INTO the still-secret text of the Senate’s annual intelligence authorization would give the FBI the ability to demand individuals’ email data and possibly web-surfing history from their service providers without a warrant and in complete secrecy.

If passed, the change would expand the reach of the FBI’s already highly controversial national security letters. The FBI is currently allowed to get certain types of information with NSLs — most commonly, information about the name, address, and call data associated with a phone number or details about a bank account.

Since a 2008 Justice Department legal opinion, the FBI has not been allowed to use NSLs to demand “electronic communication transactional records,” such as email subject lines and other metadata, or URLs visited.

The spy bill passed the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, with the provision in it. The lone no vote came from Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who wrote in a statement that one of the bill’s provisions “would allow any FBI field office to demand email records without a court order, a major expansion of federal surveillance powers.”
It’s unclear how or when the provision was added, although Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C., — the committee’s chairman — and Tom Cotton, R-Ark., have both offered bills in the past that would address what the FBI calls a gap and privacy advocates consider a serious threat to civil liberties.

More young adults in the U.S. are living with their parents than at any time since around 1940, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of census data. This trend is not, as you might assume, solely a consequence of the 2007-09 Great Recession, nor is it limited to the U.S.

Across much of the developed world, researchers have noted that more young adults are living at their parents’ homes for longer periods – in some cases because they never left, in others because they moved back after being on their own in college or the working world.

A report into the state of the US government, released by congressional investigators, has revealed that the country is spending around $60bn (£40.8bn) to maintain museum-ready computers, which many do not even know how to operate any more, as their creators retire.

The Defense Department’s Strategic Automated Command and Control System (DDSACCS), which is used to send and receive emergency action messages to US nuclear forces, runs on a 1970s IBM computing platform. It still uses 8in floppy disks to store data.

We’re not even talking the more modern 3.5in floppy disk that millennials might only know as the save icon. We’re talking the OG 8in floppy, which was a large floppy square with a magnetic disk inside it. They became commercially available in 1971, but were replaced by the 5¼in floppy in 1976, and by the more familiar hard plastic 3.5in floppy in 1982.

Shockingly, the US Government Accountability Office said: “Replacement parts for the system are difficult to find because they are now obsolete.”

The program has been in effect for both domestic and foreign catfish species only since April 15, and it may be drawing fire from Capitol Hill because it is finding dangerous carcinogens and antibiotics in fish shipments from Asian nations.

Too much of that might not be good for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an Obama legacy agenda item. U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) did not address TPP when going for the catfish inspection kill on Wednesday but referenced what he called “classic farm bill politics.” Inspection of all foreign and domestic catfish species was mandated in the farm bill.

Three years ago, Obama and Congress agreed to kill the Microbiological Data Program (MDP). That ended about 80 percent of the fresh produce testing in the U.S.