Sir Richard Branson is going to use one of his old Virgin Atlantic 747-400 jumbos to act as a platform to launch rockets into orbit.

US reports statistically show significant links between firearm ownership rates and the number of shooters per country.

Activists warn that arrests might not signal justice for Palestinian family killed in arson attack five months ago.

MojoKid writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) caused quite a stir this week when it alleged that Google is using its Chromebook platform, which has made a significant impact in education markets, to snoop on students. The charges were damning, with the EFF claiming that Google was violating its own corporate policies and using students' personally identifiable browsing data/habits to refine its services, in addition to sharing that data with partners. Obviously, Google would take such allegations seriously, and has thus responded to every claim brought forth by the EFF. "While we appreciate the EFF's focus on student data privacy, we are confident that our tools comply with both the law and our promises, including the Student Privacy Pledge..." said Jonathan Rochelle, the Director of Google Apps for Education. With respect to Google Apps for Education Core Services (GAFE), Rochelle asserts that all student data stored is "only used to provide the services themselves" and that student data isn't used for advertising purposes, nor are ads served to students. Rochelle also explains that personally identifiable data of students is removed, and only aggregated data of its millions of users is utilized to help improve its services.

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schwit1 writes: An expedition to the Indian Ocean is about to begin an effort to drill a core down through the Earth's crust and into its mantle. Geologists have been trying to drill through the contact between the crust and the mantle, called the Moho, since the 1960s, with no success. Either the projects have gone way over budget and been shut down, have failed due to engineering problems, or were stopped by the geology itself. This last issue is maybe the most interesting: "Expeditions have come close before. Between 2002 and 2011, four holes at a site in the eastern Pacific managed to reach fine-grained, brittle rock that geologists believe to be cooled magma sitting just above the Moho. But the drill could not punch through those tenacious layers. And in 2013, drillers at the nearby Hess Deep found themselves similarly limited by tough deep-crustal rocks." This new project hopes to learn from these past problems to obtain the first rock samples from below the Earth's crust. (Here's an eccentric introduction to the Hess Deep rift.)

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