(Reuters) - Twitter Inc was forced to nix a change to its "block" feature on Thursday after attracting a wave of protest from users who said the new policy empowered perpetrators of online abuse.

The humbling reversal on one of the most sensitive policy issues facing the social network came as Twitter encountered user revolt for the first time as a public company.

Under the short-lived change on Thursday, a blocked Twitter user could view or tweet at the person who blocked him or her, but that activity would have been rendered invisible to the victim as if the offending account did not exist.

Under the re-instated policy, users could prevent their harassers from following them or interacting with their tweets. Users are also explicitly notified if they are blocked.

After 3 years of meticulous attempts, I finally have an answer to the question, "What makes a competitive faculty application package?"

Let me take you back to 2004, the year I completed my Ph.D. A competitive faculty application package, I was told, should include publications in prestigious journals such as Cell, Nature, or Science; evidence of fundraising such as travel grants and in-kind research support; and teaching experience as a teaching assistant or guest lecturer. The only thing my CV was missing was the prestigious publications.

During my postdoctoral training (from 2005 to 2008), I took care of that. My project produced a co-first author publication in Nature, along with five other first-author publications in peer-reviewed journals and seven other publications.

With my publication record reinforced, I cast myself onto the faculty job market. The result? No interviews. My postdoctoral adviser was encouraging: He told me that faculty positions come in waves and that the job market will be better in the next couple of years. So I accepted a time-limited position at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS), where I could develop an independent research program and create an even stronger research record than I had before. By 2010, I figured, I would be a really strong candidate for a faculty position.

Dec. 12, 2013 -- In the classical view of evolution, species experience spontaneous genetic mutations that produce various novel traits -- some helpful, some detrimental. Nature then selects for those most beneficial, passing them along to subsequent generations.

It's an elegant model. It's also an extremely time-consuming process likely to fail organisms needing to cope with sudden, potentially life-threatening changes in their environments. Surely some other mechanism could enable more rapid adaptive response. In this week's edition of the journal Science, a team of researchers from Harvard Medical School and Whitehead Institute report that, at least in the case of one variety of cavefish, that other agent of change is the heat shock protein known as HSP90.

"It's a very cool story in terms of the speed of evolution," says Nicolas Rohner, lead author of the Science paper and a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Harvard Medical School Genetics Professor Clifford Tabin.

Rohner notes that at some point many thousands of years ago, a population of Astyanax mexicanus (a fish indigenous to northeastern Mexico) was swept from its hospitable river home into the unfriendly confines of underwater caves. Facing a dramatically different environment, the fish were forced to adapt. Living in near total darkness, the fish did away with their pigmentation, developed heightened sensory systems to detect changes in water pressure and the presence of prey and, perhaps most strikingly, they lost their eyes.

Team hopes superconducting cable design saves fusion experiment

The superconducting cables designed for the ITER fusion reactor (cost: 16 billion euros) are unable to withstand the planned forty to sixty thousand charge cycles. Barring a solution, the troubled mega-experiment will suffer still more delays and cost overruns. About one third of total expenditures for the reactor are devoted to the superconducting magnet system. UT researcher Arend Nijhuis thinks he has the solution. He has calculated that a different configuration will make the cables more robust.

Today I read in Dutch newspapers, the experiment with a new design of superconductor cables was a succes.

Arend Nijhuis is groupleader Superconductors at University Twente