RoccamOccam sends this news from the Associated Press: "A landmark federal study on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, shows no evidence that chemicals from the natural gas drilling process moved up to contaminate drinking water aquifers at a western Pennsylvania drilling site. After a year of monitoring, the researchers found that the chemical-laced fluids used to free gas trapped deep below the surface stayed thousands of feet below the shallower areas that supply drinking water."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Israeler och palestinier har enats om en grund för att återuppta fredssamtalen, meddelar USA:s utrikesminister John Kerry.

dryriver writes "I am an intermediate-level programmer who works mostly in C# NET. I have a couple of image/video processing algorithms that are highly parallelizable — running them on a GPU instead of a CPU should result in a considerable speedup (anywhere from 10x times to perhaps 30x or 40x times speedup, depending on the quality of the implementation). Now here is my question: What, currently, is the most painless way to start playing with GPU programming? Do I have to learn CUDA/OpenCL — which seems a daunting task to me — or is there a simpler way? Perhaps a Visual Programming Language or 'VPL' that lets you connect boxes/nodes and access the GPU very simply? I should mention that I am on Windows, and that the GPU computing prototypes I want to build should be able to run on Windows. Surely there must a be a 'relatively painless' way out there, with which one can begin to learn how to harness the GPU?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Iron, key for ocean plant plankton growth, shows larger variations than previously recognised, with implications for models of climate.

A Norwegian woman has spoken out about the 16-month prison sentence she received after reporting the incident to police.

Bob Seldon Lady, ex-CIA Milan bureau chief, is heading back to US from Panama where he was detained on Italy's request.

US president offers first public reaction to Zimmerman verdict, who was acquitted on charges related to Martin's death.

Den före detta medarbetaren och älskarinnan till Tjeckiens förre premiärminister Petr Necas, som fick avgå efter en korruptions- och spionskandal, släpptes ur häktet i dag.