In a new scientific review paper published in World Neurosurgery, a group of Oxford neurosurgeons and scientists round up a set of dire, terrifying warnings about the way that neural implants are vulnerable to networked attacks.

[While I'm away for a week, I'm posting classic Boing Boing entries from the archives. Here's a gem from 2006.]

I've been playing with this time-stopping test off and on all day, with surprising results. The page has a little analog clock with a sweeping second hand. — Read the rest

This week, the scholarly publishing giant Elsevier filed suit against Sci-Hub and Library Genesis, two sites where academics and researchers practiced civil disobedience by sharing the academic papers that Elsevier claims — despite having acquired the papers for free from researchers, and despite having had them refereed and overseen by editorial boards staffed by more volunteering academics.

A new study in Current Biology has found an inverse correlation between the volume of howler monkeys' notoriously loud hoots and the size of their testicles.

A report on sedentary behavior among middle-aged Korean men links prolonged sitting to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

Published in the Journal of Hepatology, the research will increase attention to the effect of spending hours a day upon one's arse, working, watching TV or fooling around with phones and computers. — Read the rest

Why are screams so frightening? Because sounds with frequency modulations in 30-150 Hz range have a particular "roughness" to them that activates the fear circuit in the amygdala, according to research published in Current Biology, titled "Human Screams Occupy a Privileged Niche in the Communication Soundscape." — Read the rest

Only two known forms of cancer are contagious, affecting dogs and Tasmanian devils. Now a third has been discovered — infecting clams by spreading through the water in the Northeast Atlantic. — Read the rest

Effective January 17, all research funded in whole or in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation must be published in journals that are immediately free-to-access, under a Creative Commons Attribution-only license.

Jonathan Zdziarski's HOPE X talk, Identifying Backdoors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices, suggests that hundreds of millions of Iphone and Ipad devices ship from Apple with intentional back-doors that can be exploited by law enforcement, identity thieves, spies, and employers.

An anonymous Boing Boing reader says, "Here's an email that academic publishing company Elsevier is sending around to advertise to scientists. Notice anything about the pictures of scientists they chose?" — Read the rest

Workers at the Dutch offices of DSM, a chemical company, report finding USB sticks in the company parking lot, which appeared to have been lost. However, when the company's IT department examined the sticks, they discovered that they were loaded with malware set to autorun in company computers, which would harvest employee login credentials. — Read the rest

In the Observer, John Naughton unloads both barrels on the "academic publishing racket" in which giant multinational publishers get free, state-subsidized research to publish, use free, state-subsidized labor for peer-review, require assignments of the scholars' copyrights as a condition of publication, then charge astounding sums to the scientists and academics they are "serving" for the right to read the work they're all engaged in producing. — Read the rest

If you are a powerful corporation or individual and someone parodies you, challenging them with copyright infringement will not make the whole thing quietly go away. Scientists are boycotting the scientific publishing giant Elsevier. @FakeElsevier is a twitter account that mocks the real Elsevier's IP and paywall practices. — Read the rest

Here's another SOPA supporter for you to boycott: Elsevier, publisher of many medical and scientific journals. You might also remember them from a 2009 scandal where Elsevier published fake journals as covert advertisements for pharmaceutical companies. Maybe it's time for scientists to consider not submitting papers to Elsevier journals or serving as peer reviewers for their journals. — Read the rest

A paper from James M. Donovan (U Kentucky) and Carol A. Watson (U Georgia) analyzes the pattern of citations in law journals and finds that legal scholars who publish in open access (free and freely copyable) journals are 50 percent more likely to be cited in subsequent papers than those who publish in traditional journals, which can be very expensive. — Read the rest

The Open University's Martin Weller looks at the Peer Review Survey 2009's numbers on free participation by UK academics in the peer review process for commercial science journals and concludes that 10.4m hours spent on this amounts to a £209,976,000 subsidy from publicly funded universities to private, for-profit journals, who then charge small fortunes to the same institutions for access to the journals. — Read the rest

A paper by Mark Changizi in Elsevier's journal Medical Hypotheses cleverly suggests that hospitals issue gowns matched to skin-tone for new patients, so that it's easy to tell if skin-tone has shifted (an urgent warning sign of many urgent health conditions):

One potential solution, Changizi said, is for hospitals to outfit patients with gowns and sheets that are nude-colored and closely match their skin tone.

Galleycat's asked former publisher Richard Nash for some predictions for the next ten years of publishing and he came up with eight extremely sensible and thought-provoking prognostications. This has got it all: an acknowledgement of the hubris of prediction, globalism, nostalgia, realism, and a dash of vision. — Read the rest

New research shows that people with insomnia are five times more likely to be highly paranoid than those who are well-rested. The study was conducted by Wellcome Trust fellow Daniel Freeman who has co-written what promises to be a fascinating new book, Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear. — Read the rest

Clay Shirky says:

Over at the Britannica weblog, Michael Gorman, the former American Library Ass'n head, has an anti-internet rant entitled "Web 2.0: The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters", to which a number of of us have now replied:

"The success of Wikipedia forces a profound question on print culture: how is information is to be shared with the majority of the population?