Romanian authorities say at least 25 people died and dozens more were wounded in the incident.

An anonymous reader writes: Scientists and the developers of space MMORPG EVE Online are working on a project to harness the power of the game's huge playerbase to do useful scientific work. The Human Protein Atlas has 13 million images to map, and there's no way a small team of scientists can manage that task alone. CCP Games, the makers of EVE, will try to encourage contribution by creating a mini-game within EVE to train players and get them to do some cataloging. To start, "Project Discovery will feed about a 250,000 images of microscopic cells and tissue that players will then study to identify basic shapes and structures, categorizing the images in a way that will help scientists deduce a given protein's purpose." The developers are confident that the EVE community, which has already come together to support various charity endeavors, will rally behind this noble cause as well. To get players to participate, the devs reward players with loyalty points that have some sort of positive effect within EVE.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Beijing abandons its controversial policy after concerns about ageing population

Dozens of US special forces operatives to be stationed inside Syria with "moderate" rebel groups, to help fight ISIL.

Lasrick writes: Hugh Gusterson thinks a symposium sponsored by the U.S. Energy Department was the first sign that the Administration is readying a push to finally ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). "Conceding that the earlier drive to ratify the treaty in 1999 ended in a humiliating defeat for the Clinton Administration, [Secretary of State John Kerry] said that "the factors that led some senators to oppose the treaty have changed, so [senators'] choices should change too." The article goes into the technology that has developed over the last 15 years that make testing unnecessary.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

itwbennett writes: The U.S. Army, curious about the potential threat and usefulness of off-the-shelf drones, brought consumer quadcopters and octocopters to the Network Integration Evaluation war games that concluded earlier this month at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, and Fort Bliss, Texas. "During the exercise, which is used by the Army to help evaluate new technology, the drones were deployed as a swarm to simulate a threat,' writes Martyn Williams. 'Later, the Army expanded the trials to discover whether it might be able to make use of the same technology." The results are pretty much what you'd expect: "It has been proved that consumer [drones] can be used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, distraction tactics and, in the future, the ability to drop small munitions," said Barry Hatchett with the Army's Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Parse and evaluate mathematical expressions

Easy thumbnails creating with Dancer and GD

Perl extension for reading MS Excel 2007 files;