In the news

"Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced late yesterday that U.S. commercial supplies of long-grain rice had become inadvertently contaminated with a genetically engineered variety not approved for human consumption" (link via jarandhel). There's no way of knowing if this little accident will cause any harm to people eating the rice, but it's going to hurt US exports for a while.

In other DNA news, a woman had to fight in court to prove that the children she gave birth to were her own because DNA tests "proved" otherwise (link via mynn).

By 2008, a "black box" in your car could tell Big Brother (or possibly interested corporations?) exactly where you are (link via another AOL user). While the privacy issues are something we all should all be concerned about, my first thought was how much of the data so assiduously collected will prove to be false. What I thought on reading this story was that this technology is brought to you by the same people who made that smart card which wouldn't let me out of the Metro system last week because it insisted I was already out. (Good thing the dental hygienist was very understanding.)