Andrew M. sent us a link to an interesting post by Lewis Denby at Beef Jack about the video game APB. The game lets you customize the characters in a variety of ways, including height and weight. Denby noticed something interesting about the customization, however. Here's a male figure with the weight at the maximum level:

Complex interactions between Saturn and its satellites have led scientists using NASA's Cassini spacecraft to a comprehensive model that could explain how oxygen may end up on the surface of Saturn's icy moon Titan. The presence of these oxygen atoms could potentially provide the basis for pre-biological chemistry.

Why have American women become so active in the right wing Tea Party movement? Could it be that they are drawn to the new conservative Christian feminism publicized by Sarah Palin? Without its grassroots female supporters, the Tea Party would have far less appeal to voters who are frightened by economic insecurity, threats to moral purity and the gradual disappearance of a national white Christian culture.

Most Americans are not quite sure what to make of the sprawling right-wing Tea Party, which gradually emerged in 2009 and became a household name after it held nationwide Tea Party rallies on April 15th 2010, to protest paying taxes. Throwing tea overboard, as you may remember, is an important symbolic image of the colonial anger at Britain's policy of "taxation without representation."

When the anger of a prominent young thinktanker causes one of the world's largest web-hosting companies to shut down a site that monitors lobbying and transparency, it is time to start asking questions about online free speech and censorship.

Last week, as Hugh Muir reported in the Guardian diary, the website SpinProfiles was taken down by the domain name registrar, 1 & 1 Internet, following a complaint from Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, son of journalist Christopher.

SpinProfiles, run by sister organisation Spinwatch, aims to stitch together publicly available information to provide a detailed picture of who's who in the shadowy world of lobbying. It features close to ten thousand profiles of think tanks, lobbying organisations and those associated with them.

The Sunday Express, the paper that specialises in publishing stories that stretch the truth to breaking point, came up with another page one winner at the weekend, QUEEN NEEDS LOTTO CASH.

The article claimed that the Queen and the country were so strapped for cash that she would "have to rely on lottery handouts to fund her Diamond Jubilee celebrations."

I searched in vain for a justification for the claim. Indeed, on following the turn to page 3, the headline was altogether less certain: "Will lottery pay for Queen's Jubilee?" Answer, of course: no.

There was a quote from a spokesman for the Big Lottery Fund who pointed out that it had played "an active part" in the Golden Jubilee in 2002 - when there was no suggestion of the monarch's (alleged) poverty - and who said the fund would hope "to help communities across the UK to participate in Diamond Jubilee celebrations".

The Economist is in hot water over the cover of their June 19th issue, reports the New York Times. The cover, which features a despondent-looking President Obama standing alone on a beach, was meant to communicate the politically difficult times the President faces in light of the BP oil spill near the Gulf coast. However, the New York Times report shows that the original picture featured two other people standing next to the President that The Economist edited out for dramatic effect. The first figure, that of coast guard admiral Thad Allen, was removed by the cop of the photo, claims the Economist. The other figure, local parish president Charlotte Randolph, was removed "not to make a political point, but because the presence of an unknown woman would have been puzzling to readers."
Photo-editing has been a point of controversy for quite some time, with some arguing that it is a form of deliberate reader deception. Notably, in July 2008 Agence France-Presse retracted a digitally altered image of Iranian missiles. Also, last year, the New York Times removed a slide show from its web site after discovering that one of the photos was digitally edited.

Hannah Allam is having a baby shower. Her son, Bilal, is due in four months. And unlike most baby showers, the guests at this one are more accustomed to donning helmets and flak jackets than writing out advice for the new mother on small blue cards.

That's because Allam's shower is being held in Baghdad, where she is a veteran reporter for McClatchy Newspapers.

Allam isn't the first foreign correspondent this year to be pregnant in Iraq. Deborah Haynes from The Times of London paved the way, giving birth to a boy. Nada Bakri from the The New York Times was in her eighth month of pregnancy when she left to give birth a few months ago, also to a boy.

In a room festooned with blue bunting, Allam reflects on covering a war while pregnant.

Intense competition for graduate jobs means that more than three quarters of employers require at least a 2:1 degree grade, a survey suggests.

The Association of Graduate Recruiters says there are more graduates chasing fewer jobs - with vacancies down by 7%.

Applications have soared, with an average of 69 people chasing each graduate job.

In response, 78% of employers are now filtering out applicants who have not achieved a 2:1 degree.

A canister recovered from the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid and return to Earth, contains dust particles, say Japanese scientists.

Japan's space agency (Jaxa) began to open the Hayabusa craft's sample container on 24 June.

It has now revealed images of tiny dust particles inside the container.

Whether the particles are from the near-Earth asteroid, Itokawa, or from Earth is still unknown.

Jaxa released two photographs of the inside of the Hayabusa sample container.

A planned presentation about ATM security at the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam last week was cancelled following legal pressure from vendors.

Italian ethical hacker Raoul Chiesa intended to explain how vulnerabilities and security shortcomings that that cyber criminals were using to break into ATMs as part of his Underground Economy presentation at Hack in the Box. However, this talk was cancelled at the last minute in favour of a presentation on Side Channel Analysis on Embedded Systems by Job de Haas, Softpedia reports.

Oddly Chiesa had made the cancelled presentation at other security conferences without incident. The slides were even available online. The talk focused on security flaws that have been well understood among banking security experts, if not among the general public, for years. ENISA report, ATM Crime: Overview of the European situation and golden rules on how to avoid it, and published in September 2009, draws heavily from Chiesa's research.