A magnitude-5.3 earthquake has hit the Japanese prefecture that is home to the nuclear power plant crippled in the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The U.S. Geological Survey says the quake struck early Friday at a depth of about 13 miles under Fukushima Prefecture and about 110 miles northeast of Tokyo.The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center did not issue an alert and the Japanese news agency Kyodo News reported that the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., observed no abnormality in radiation or equipment after the quake.Magnitude-5.3 Earthquake Hits Japan's Fukushima By Mari Yamaguchi, Associated Press

A California resident has filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Chobani accusing it of negligence and breaching the implied warranty of merchantability for its yogurts following the recent mold outbreak. Chobani, which declined to comment on the legal action, first started fielding complaints about bloated and fizzy yogurt cups in late August, and issued a formal recall on selected products on September 5th after confirming they had been affected by a "common mold".It’s not clear how many people ate the affected products, but the FDA told reporters on Monday it had received more than 220 reports from people complaining of cramps, nausea, headache and diarrhea after eating Chobani products - although it stressed this did not prove that the yogurts made them sick.

Rhett Allain, Associate Professor of Physics at Southeastern Louisiana University, was fascinated by this bit in Nautilus...If two statisticians were to lose each other in an infinite forest, the first thing they would do is get drunk. That way, they would walk more or less randomly, which would give them the best chance of finding each other...so he set out to clear that up and basically do what no statistician, mathematician or all of the brains at UPS have really been able to do; figure out whether a random walk is the best way to put together two lost objects.Conclusion: Being drunk helps.

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and lots of other technology entrepreneurs share one thing in common, despite their generational differences; they discovered that their college education wasn't needed.After getting sympathetic members of Congress to declare a college education a 'right' in the early 1990s, and getting unlimited student loans to help, universities are in the pole position culturally. College-educated people make more money, they note, and you won't get a good job without one.Of course, that just means that once everyone can get a college degree, it is just a simple barrier to entry. It doesn't improve anyone's chances of getting a job, it just weeds out people really unqualified. 

A 20 year effort to allow avocados from Hawaii has paid off - the USDA lifted a ban that's been in place since 1992, after fruit fly larvae was found in a Sharwil avocados packing house in Hawaii. Avocados have been grown in Hawaii since being introduced by Australia in the 1950s.To prevent accidental introduction of oriental fruit flies to the U.S. after the larvae discovery, previous rules required fumigation and cold treatments that ruin the quality of the fruit.But scientists have determined that the avocados are poor hosts for fruit flies, lawmakers wrote in their letter.

You won't believe how many chickens live on this planet.On Wednesday, the Northern California animal sanctuary Animal Place will airlift—yes, you read that right: airlift—1,150 elderly laying hens from Hayward, California, to Elmira, New York, in an Embraer 120 turbo-prop.The price? $50,000.

The once-missing monarch Richard III, best known as the last Plantagenet king who murdered his nephews in London Tower in order to gain the throne, is in death involved in nastiness that was as ugly as his later life: a bitter fight over where his bones (minus his feet, lost at some point) will be interred.The War of the Roses redux? We'll see. The original war was within the Lancaster family, it just happened that a Tudor won because the Lancasters put themselves on the road to extinction and Richard III assured it by having the other heirs killed and then getting a spear through the skull.

Forget Indiana Jones or the more believable hours sifting through ancient documents and then misbegotten dig sites, archeology is going 21st century. In Egypt's northern Delta, Egyptologist Sarah Parcak is looking toward the stars. Parcak uses satellites, initially designed for use by the military, to identify potential sub-surface remains. The high-resolution satellites, with infrared and thermal capabilities, sit in orbit almost 500 kilometers above the Earth and can precisely pinpoint objects on terra firma less than a meter in diameter. The infrared light used by the satellites has longer wavelengths than visible light and thus can penetrate the earth's surface.

Cathy O'Neil at Mathbabe.org says she has evidence that betting on people could be in the works; data broker Acxiom is letting people see their warehoused data and another attempt at creating 'stocks' for celebrity athletes and such.

Why would a bill in Hawaii ban GMOs, except for the GMO Rainbow papaya crop, which is credited by scientists and independent experts for rescuing the papaya on Hawaii from extinction threatened by the ringspot virus?