The BBC has sent out revisions to its linking policy to its online staff, and among more blogger and website friendly policies, they have included the provision that all science articles must link to the primary source, i.e., the published scientific study.

We’ve heard about this from second hand sources, but no one was able to produce the actual e-mail, until The Guardian picked up the story.

From a Guardian profile of Guy Consolmagno, an astronomer for the Pope:

He would be “delighted” if intelligent life was found among the stars. “But the odds of us finding it, of it being intelligent and us being able to communicate with it – when you add them up it’s probably not a practical question.”

Speaking ahead of a talk at the British Science Festival in Birmingham tomorrow, he said that the traditional definition of a soul was to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions. “Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has – has a soul.” Would he baptise an alien? “Only if they asked.”

(via The Guardian.)

TIL A New Word: Nurdle (Reuters)

Happy Birthday, Ray Bradbury! (GeekDad)

The Cosplay of Gamescom (Kotaku)

Adrien Brody as Mr. Fantastic? (ScreenRant)

DJ Hero 2 Dated (GameRant)

2,000 Year Old Hellenistic Paintings Discovered (The Guardian)

Somebody Made a Wacom for the Wii? (Joystiq)

(image via Reddit.)

A warrant has been issued for the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, on suspicion of rape and molestation. Swedish authorities are calling for him to contact the police for questioning. Assange’s first comment on the accusations (seen above) linked to the Swedish tabloid Expressen, who apparently broke the story. Later tweets denied the accusations and with the implication that they were part of an effort to damage Wikileaks itself.

If you’ve got a cell phone and at least one friend with same, chances are you’ve run into the phenomenon known as textspeak. Phrases such as “I’ll see you before tomorrow” can be shortened to “C U B4 tmw” or similar, mainly to overcome the traditional 160-character limit of SMS, or simply to speed up the otherwise arduous task of typing words into a tiny, poorly laid out phone keypad. If you were to ask the average person when this trend started, many would probably say the late ’90s or ’00s. But as Guardian.co.uk points out, those people would be wrong.

Estranged member of the original group that put Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back together, producer Gary Kurtz has some strong but ultimately unsurprising words for The LA Times, regarding George Lucas and the creative motivations behind the later Star Wars movies.

Instead of bittersweet and poignant [Lucas] wanted a euphoric ending with everybody happy. The original idea was that they would recover [the kidnapped] Han Solo in the early part of the story and that he would then die in the middle part of the film in a raid on an Imperial base. George then decided he didn’t want any of the principals killed. By that time there were really big toy sales and that was a reason.

Well, we can’t say that we don’t prefer Han alive at the end of the trilogy, but gee, George Lucas makes bad writing decisions for the wrong reasons?

We are shocked.

“Investigative reporting” or creeping, you decide: To show Guardian reporter Leo Hickman was able to track down a woman selected at random with her Foursquare account, recent tweets, and personal details acquired from Google searches, including a photo. Needless to say, Louise was quite “unnerved” when a reporter showed up at the central London pub she was in.

Ok, so they travel by bike and by foot, not by umbrella, and they don’t exactly babysit; but the InfoLadies of northern Bangladesh answer questions about agriculture, disease, contraception, hygine, and even domestic violence on their weekly visits to rural communities. All with the help of the Internet.

From The Guardian:

“An InfoLady’s netbook is loaded with content especially compiled and translated in local Bangla language,” says Mohammed Forhad Uddin of D.Net, a not-for-profit research organisation that is pioneering access to livelihood information. “It provides answers and solutions to some of the most common problems faced by people in villages.”

In the face of dwindling numbers of French priests and an international child abuse scandal that many feel has not been addressed strongly enough by the Vatican, the Catholic Church in France has created a Facebook page as a part of a two-week marketing campaign to “to attract young people to the priesthood.”

Maybe they should also spend some time preventing the opposite! Hey-oo -

Er, sorry. We’ll try to keep those sorts of things to a minimum.

Well, it seems that lawmakers in the UK are feeling quite favorable to science-type persons this week! The BBC is reporting that Simon Singh, the high-profile science writer who was forced from The Guardian as the result of legal attacks from a medical industry pressure group, has won a temporary victory today.