Rachel Brown, owner of the small Need a Cake bakery, became a victim of the old adage, "Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it." More than 8,500 people took Rachel up on her Groupon offer of a 75% discount on a dozen cupcakes, forcing her to make over 100,000 cupcakes to fill all the orders. In the end Brown lost almost $20k. "We take pride in making cakes of exceptional quality but I had to bring in agency staff on top of my usual staff, who had nowhere near the same skills. I was very worried about standards dropping and hated the thought of letting anybody down. My poor staff were having to slog away at all hours — one of them even came in at 3 a.m. because she couldn't sleep for worry," she told The Telegraph. "We are still working to make up the lost money and will not be doing this again."

Parents with students at Hale Elementary School in Minneapolis have found something interesting on the back of their children's pictures hanging on the fridge, detailed medical information. From the article: "Jennifer Kane was tidying her dining room when she found the drawing by her daughter, Keely, who goes to Hale Elementary School. On the back of the paper was the name, birth date and detailed medical information for a 24-year-old St. Paul woman named Paula White. 'The more I read it, the more alarmed I became about the amount of information I had about this person,' said Kane." The security lapse has been blamed on a paralegal donating the paper to the school.

New Kohath writes with this news from The Guardian: "Bottled water producers applied to the EU for the right to claim that 'regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration'. The health claim was reviewed by a panel of 21 scientists on behalf of the European Food Standards Authority. The application was denied, and now producers of bottled water are forbidden by law from making the claim. They will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the EU edict."

An anonymous reader writes "Canadian robotic design house eatArt has released a video of its latest project: the Titanoboa, a robotic snake based on a 50-foot long prehistoric serpent. The video pits the basilisk-like robot against the Mondo Spider, a walking machine large enough to hold a man, and there's obvious competition between the two. While eatArt showed a shorter version of the snake rollerblading at the Burning Man festival earlier this year, at 35 feet this is the largest version of the robot so far, with the team aiming to reach the full length in the next year or so."

In an attempt to finally "think of the children," Earl Beatty Public school has prohibited students from playing with balls after a "few serious incidents" in which students and staff were hit or almost hit by balls. From the article: "The happy days of kicking a ball around at recess ended Monday after students took home a letter advising that henceforth, no child could bring a soccer ball, football, volleyball or even tennis ball to the junior and senior school in the area of Coxwell and Danforth Aves." I assume all lunches will soon be taken via feeding tube to minimize choking hazards.

Coolhand2120 writes "Gamers always felt they had more grey matter. The LA Times reports there is now proof: 'Fourteen-year-olds who were frequent video gamers had more gray matter in the rewards center of the brain than peers who didn't play video games as much — suggesting that gaming may be correlated to changes in the brain much as addictions are. European scientists reported the discovery Tuesday in the journal Translational Psychiatry. Psychologist Simone Kuhn of Ghent University in Belgium and colleagues recruited 154 healthy 14-year-olds in Berlin and divided them into two groups. Twenty-four girls and 52 boys were frequent gamers who played at least nine hours of video games each week. Fifty-eight girls and 20 boys were infrequent gamers, who played less than nine hours a week. Structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed differences in the test subjects' brains. Frequent gamers had more gray matter in a portion of the brain known as the left ventral striatum, which affects the interplay of emotions and behavior. Previous research identified striatal function as a 'core candidate promoting addictive behavior.'"

phaedrus5001 wrote in with a story about an unusual plan to regulate the temperature of Ulan Bator, the capital city of Mongolia. The article reads: "The city of Ulan Bator will attempt to capture some of the cool winter temperatures in huge ice blocks that will slowly melt over the summer and cool down the city. The aim is to build artificial ice shields — or 'naleds' — that occur naturally in far northern climates and can grow to be more than seven meters thick. They grow when river water pushes through cracks in the surface of the ice during the day and then freezes to add an extra layer of ice when night falls. Engineering consortium EMI-ECOS will try to replicate this process by creating holes in the ice that is forming over the Tuul river. This will be repeated over and over again until the ice is much thicker than it would be if left alone."

redletterdave writes "PETA believes Nintendo's iconic plumber Mario takes a 'pro fur' stance" because he 'wears the skin of a raccoon dog to give him special powers' in the new handheld game released Nov. 13. PETA illustrated its disgust with Nintendo in an online campaign called 'Mario Kills Tanooki.' The page includes a side-scrolling Super Mario-style game called 'Super Tanooki Skin 2D,' where you play an angry, skinless tanuki that must chase a bloody raccoon-pelt-wearing-Mario across a 16-bit world and try to reclaim its fur."

snydeq writes "Active Directory object catalogs, quad-core processors, Debian default configurations, Star Trek TNG guest appearances — find out how much you know where it really counts by taking InfoWorld's 2011 Geek IQ Test."

formaggio writes "Designer Chris Hoffmann developed the Ryno, a heavy duty electric unicycle with a top speed of 25 mph, a range of up to 30 miles and an impressive 25-inch thick tire. The cost for a pre-production Ryno is a whopping $25,000, and Hoffmann already has five orders, but he expects the market model to cost about $3,500."

TMB writes "In a move that The Simpson's foretold, thieves have begun stealing inedible kitchen grease for use in biofuels. From the article: 'It's known as inedible kitchen grease, or IKG, which was once deemed waste and used in animal feed, though now is "an elixir in the booming green economy," according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture. "The grease’s value as a biofuel is being increasingly recognized," the agency said last month. "IKG is now coveted, which makes it a target for theft.."

Zothecula writes "Although police officers in most countries are issued bulletproof vests, they don't necessarily wear them at all times — would you want to heave one of those things around for an entire shift? What they do often carry, however, are clipboards. Taking the "every little bit helps" approach, Ohio's IMPACT Armor Technologies has put two and two together, and come up with something that should actually offer some protection — a Ballistic Clipboard."

greenrainbow writes "Philips just unveiled a new concept for an urban beehive that would allow anyone to become an amateur bee keeper – even those who live in apartments with no backyards. Best of all you pull a little string and all the fresh honey you want comes out. Hopefully no bees come with it!"

Soon the loud passenger who's had too much to drink on your red-eye flight will be the least of your travel worries. Ryanair Airlines chief Michael O'Leary plans to launch an app that will allow passengers to watch porn on their tablets and smartphones during flight. Mr O'Leary told the Sun: "I'm not talking about having it on screens on the back of seats for everyone to see. It would be on handheld devices. Hotels around the world have it, so why wouldn't we?" Best of all, the app could also be used to gamble or play games in case you got bored during the speaking parts of your in-flight adult movie.

Hugh Pickens writes "James Fallows writes tongue in cheek that U.S. Department of Fear, led by Secretary of Fear Malcolm P. Stag III, is running a poll. To what should we re-name the Department of Homeland Security? 'Possibilities include Department of ScaredyCatLand Security, reflecting the prevailing mentality of an era, and Department of Fatherland Security, to make us sound strong,' writes Fallows. 'There are many more to choose from, plus you can write in your own nominees. But act now, because the polls close Tuesday.'"

MrSeb writes "With a slightly weird world first, scientists have formed a feedback loop between common, baking and brewing yeast, and a computer. The computer can trigger the yeast to produce a protein, and the yeast then feeds back to the computer how much of the protein is being produced — the computer has exact control over the yeast's production. This work, performed by scientists at the Automatic Control Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, is exceptional because of its simplicity: The computer turns the yeast on by flashing a red light, and it turns the yeast off by flashing a deeper red light. Connected to the yeast is a 'reporter' molecule that fluoresces when the protein is produced. The computer can see this fluorescence and alter the light it emits, thus creating a full feedback loop. The simplicity is significant because of the role of yeasts and bacteria in the production of antibiotics, biofuels, and more. The problem is controlling those organisms — so far, scientists have tried to genetically add synthetic control circuits, with limited success... and now the Swiss have shown that it can be done by simply shining a couple of lights."

ronaldm writes "Trigger-happy Scottish pyromaniacs celebrating Guy Fawkes Night last night ended up watching their creation go spectacularly wrong, when all the fireworks were triggered at the same time — resulting in the show being 29 minutes shorter than the 30 minutes it was supposed to last." The fireworks in suburban Baltimore were much more sedate, but lasted longer. How did you spend your Bonfire Night?

mikejuk writes "French computer scientists have finally proved that sorting pancakes is hard — NP hard. No really — this isn't a joke. Well, it is slightly amusing but that's just because it is being presented as pancake flipping. The algorithm in question is sorting a permutation using prefix reversal — which is much easier to understand in terms of pancakes. Basically you have to sort a pancake stack by simply inserting your spatula and flipping the top part of the stack. We now know that if you can do the this in polynomial time then you have proved that P=NP."

sciencehabit writes "Researchers have discovered the fossil remains of a 94-million-year-old squirrel-like critter with a long, narrow snout and a pair of curved saber-fangs that it would have likely used to pierce its insect prey. The creature, pieced together from skull fragments unearthed in Argentina and dubbed Cronopio dentiacutus, was not ancestral to us or any living mammal. Instead, it belonged to an extinct group called dryolestoids, a cadre of fuzzy mammals that scurried about in the shadow of long-necked dinosaurs."

itwbennett writes "In today's edition of David v. Goliath, Apple lawyers have sent cease and desist letters to a tiny health food restaurant in Luxembourg named AppleADay. For their part, the owners of AppleADay, with help from a lawerly friend, have promised that they would continue to sell only food, not computers. Of course, Apple knows as well as anyone that promises are made to be broken, having famously promised Apple Corps, the Beatles' production company, they would never get into the music business."