Everyone’s suggesting gifts to teach the next generation of geeks about science, technology, engineering, and math. Slashdot reader theodp writes: In “My Guide to Holiday Gifts,” Melinda Gates presents “a STEM gift guide” [which] pales by comparison to Amazon’s “STEM…

Using XP a security risk and could also breach HIPAA, warn experts

Former staffer to pay $375,000 in restitution and faces sentencing in February

Your daily round-up of what else is in the news

Last year, Jouko Pynnönen scored $10k from Yahoo for helping it head off the risk of a Yahoo-wide email virus. This year… same again.

Bose has launched a new pair of earbuds called Hearphones that augment the sounds of the world around you, letting you select what kinds of outside noises you’d like to listen to. “Hearphones users can also pick which direction those…

An anonymous reader writes from a report via BleepingComputer: The security protocol that governs how virtual machines share data on a host system powered by AMD Zen processors has been found to be insecure, at least in theory, according to…

Google announced in a blog post today that it will be rolling out a feature over the next few months that starts disabling Flash and displaying HTML5 content instead on certain websites. Google notes, “This change disables Adobe Flash Player…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New York Post: Radiation from Japan’s 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster has apparently traveled across the Pacific. Researchers reported that radioactive matter — in the form of an isotope known as cesium-134 — was…

Jonathan Coleman’s research group at Trinity College Dublin discovered that Silly Putty “becomes an incredibly sensitive strain detector that can track blood pressure, heart rate, and even a spider’s footsteps” when mixed with graphene. Popular Science reports: That graduate student,…