KRISTIN KAINING: Parents of video-gaming children, take heart: Your kid is not destined to become an anti-social hermit who lives at home until he’s 35. In fact, a new study shows that all that game time could actually be making him a better citizen. No, this isn’t a study funded by the video-game association. It’s from the respectable folks at the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And it’s the first, says study co-author Joe Kahne, to track the sorts of things kids do when playing — not just how much time they spend playing. “It’s really valuable...

MICHAEL PERRY: The Australian government has issued its first license allowing scientists to create cloned human embryos to try and obtain embryonic stem cells. The in vitro-fertilization firm Sydney IVF was granted the license and reportedly has access to 7,200 human eggs for its research. If the firm is successful it would be a world first, the Australian government's National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), which granted the license, said on Wednesday. Scientists in other countries have made stem cells they believe are similar to embryonic cells using a variety of techniques, but...

PALLAB GHOSH (BBC): The internet needs a way to help people separate rumour from real science, says the creator of the World Wide Web. Talking to BBC News Sir Tim Berners-Lee said he was increasingly worried about the way the web has been used to spread disinformation. Sir Tim spoke prior to the unveiling of a Foundation he has co-created that aims to make the web truly worldwide. It will also look at ways to help people decide if sites are trustworthy and reliable sources of information. READ IT ALL...

ANDREW HEAVANS: Sudanese forces on Sunday launched fresh attacks on a base held by Darfur rebels who signed a 2006 peace deal with the government, the faction's leader said. Minni Arcua Minnawi, leader of the Sudan Liberation Army group, said he did not know why his headquarters in the East Jabel Marra area was attacked on Saturday and Sunday. The rebel leader, who became a presidential assistant under the 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement, said he was closing his office in Sudan's presidential palace in protest. No one was available from Sudan's armed forces to comment. Other rebels say the fighting...

ALEX FELSINGER: After the Viacom-owned network finished filming their new treasure-hunt themed “Real World/Road Rules Challenge” on a remote, uninhabited island in the Republic of Panama, locals returned to find their beach tattered and abused. The television show, which premieres on September 17 th , took over the neighboring, inhabited island in militant style by hiring the local police to prevent residents from accessing a public beach. As it turned out, according to local witnesses, MTV had cleared a small patch of rainforest to build a tiki-hut structure near the beach, developed...

KEITH JOHNSON: There’s a good reason the famous “White Towns” of Andalusia, in southern Spain, are all white-washed. The sun is hot in Andalusia, and white paint reflects the heat, keeping interiors cool. Could that age-old Mediterranean remedy help fight global warming? Increasingly, a lot of scientists think it could, if big chunks of the earth’s urban rooftops and paved surfaces were covered with light colors that reflected—rather than absorbed—the sun’s rays. Researchers at the Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory in California just presented new work...

BRIAN X. CHEN: Your iPhone is watching you. If you've got an iPhone, pretty much everything you have done on your handset has been temporarily stored as a screenshot that hackers or forensics experts could eventually recover, according to a renowned iPhone hacker who exposed the security flaw in a webcast Thursday. While demonstrating how to break the iPhone's passcode lock in a webcast, iPhone hacker and data-forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski explained that the popular handset snaps a screenshot of your most recent action -- regardless of whether it's sending a text message, e-mailing or browsing...

CARRIE JOHNSON: The Justice Department will unveil changes to FBI ground rules today that would put much more power into the hands of line agents pursuing leads on national security, foreign intelligence and even ordinary criminal cases. The overhaul, the most substantial revision to FBI operating instructions in years, also would ease some reporting requirements between agents, their supervisors and federal prosecutors in what authorities call a critical effort to improve information gathering and detect terrorist threats. The changes would give the FBI's more than 12,000 agents the ability at...

DANI COOPER: The world's intellectual property (IP) system is broken and the benefits of biotechnology are being blocked by patent laws, according to the authors of a seven-year study. The Canadian-led study outlines ways to improve the system and help deliver lifesaving technologies to "the people who need it most". It comes ahead of the close of public submissions next week into a review of Australian patent laws and what matters should be patentable. The report, by the International Expert Group on Biotechnology, Innovation and Intellectual Property, finds a fixation on patents and...

CARA DEGETTE: I’m just trying to envision the exchange between the reporter and his editors over at the Rocky Mountain News that led to their decision to live blog the funeral today of Marten Kudlis , the 3-year old boy killed at an ice cream store last week. And you know what? Whatever their rationale, it’s unconceivable. Utterly, and unforgivingly, unconceivable. For those of you who don’t know Twitter, it’s a social networking service designed mostly so pals can text easy and quick messages to each other — things like “What are you doing?” and “Hey...