Bogeon

Enlarge / President Trump points to a map that has undergone some post-printing modifications. (credit: Chip Somodevilla )

President Trump not only refused to correct a tweet mistakenly stating that Alabama would “most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated” by Hurricane Dorian last September—he went as far as to display an official forecast map crudely modified with a black marker to defend his claim. The incident dragged the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration into the controversy.

The Birmingham office of the National Weather Service had quickly responded to questions by tweeting that Alabama was not forecast to be impacted. That in turn led to an unsigned statement released by NOAA leadership, intended to aid the White House in damage control. It read:

From Wednesday, August 28, through Monday, September 2, the information provided by NOAA and the National Hurricane Center to President Trump and the wider public demonstrated that tropical-storm-force winds from Hurricane Dorian could impact Alabama. This is clearly demonstrated in Hurricane Advisories #15 through #41, which can be viewed at the following link.

The Birmingham National Weather Service’s Sunday morning tweet spoke in absolute terms that were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time.

The statement set off a storm within NOAA, including several complaints being filed to its scientific integrity officer. On Monday, the officer's independent report was published. It finds violations of NOAA’s scientific integrity policy, but it recommends policy clarifications and better training rather than direct consequences for those involved in releasing the statement.

Enlarge / Hutchins, right, walks to court with his lawyers in 2017. (credit: Joshua Lott/Getty Images)

British security expert and onetime malware developer Marcus Hutchins has been sentenced to supervised released for one year, he announced in a Friday tweet.

Hutchins became famous in the security world in 2017 after he inadvertently stopped the WannaCry malware outbreak by registering a domain name that served as a kill switch for the sophisticated malware. Yet Hutchins, now in his mid-20s, had a dark past, having developed banking malware earlier in his life. At the time of his WannaCry efforts, Hutchins was already under investigation by US authorities for creating two banking trojans in the early 2010s.

Hutchins was arrested in August 2017 during a visit to the United States. He initially denied any role in developing malware. However, during his detention, federal prosecutors intercepted phone conversations in which he reportedly made incriminating statements. Under pressure from the authorities, Hutchins eventually came clean, admitting to his role in developing the malware. He took a plea deal in April.

Enlarge / New Caledonian crow uses a tool to grab insects deep inside a piece of wood.

Though we've long known that crows use tools to get food (and occasionally to amuse themselves), scientists have lacked definitive evidence. Which is why two intrepid researchers invented the crow tailcam, to record the inventiveness of these birds in the wild.

UK researchers Jolyon Troscianko and Christian Metz had observed crows making tools in the wild, as had some of their colleagues. But none of them ever caught this amazing feat of intelligence on video. A couple of years ago, Metz co-authored a paper about how crows make hooked tools, carefully fashioning them out of branches, in order to get at hard-to-reach grubs inside a piece of wood. But he was quick to point out that those feats of tool-making were done in captivity—where animals often develop a penchant for tool-making that they wouldn't have in the wild. In a paper out last week from Biology Letters, however, Troscianko and Metz describe how they finally caught wild crows making their hooked tools on video.

Not to put too fine a point on it, they put cameras on the crows' butts. More precisely, they used biodegradable rubber to attach tiny cameras to the birds' two strongest tail feathers, giving the researchers a below-the-belly view of the crow's activities. Because crows often lower their heads to foot level to eat and make tools, this was also an excellent vantage point to capture tool-making in action.