Hasta La Gadget!

The Centers for Disease Control has some dubious competition in the mishandling deadly pathogens business. A investigation by the Guardian reveals dozens of serious safety lapses in UK labs. In one case, a government lab shipped out live anthrax because someone had grabbed the wrong tubes.

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Ready to use the browser in your new Nintendo 3DS more than you likely ever have so far? As spotted by the Verge, Japanese user Guiro@Sumaburu found an Easter egg that lets you play a gloriously silly version of Breakout. All you need to do is open t…

On the heels of a financing round that raised the service another $1.2 billion, Uber says it’ll strive to be “a smarter and more humble company” in the coming months. The ride-sharing app’s massive growth in 2014 certainly hasn’t been without stumble…

I know that most of us have way too many USB flash drives, and for one simple reason – we have been “collecting” them all this while, from attending a conference here to a roadshow there, it all adds up after a while. So much so that it can be rather confusing as to which particular USB flash drive holds what content after you have formatted them for your personal use. Well, why not having a dedicated USB flash drive that you can recognize right from the get go, and use it only to store important information? This is where the $29.99 Firefly Serenity Flash Drive comes in handy, where it happens to be a die-cast metal replica of Serenity.

All that you need to do is to push the top button, and voila! Out pops an 8GB flash drive. Sure, 8GB is not much these days, especially when you have plenty of large video files to transfer from one device to another, making the Firefly Serenity Flash Drive more useful to carry details such as documents and perhaps several images which you need to print them out as photos. Literally and figuratively speaking, the Firefly Serenity Flash Drive is absolutely shiny. The engines themselves will also light up whenever it is plugged into a USB port for that added effect.
[ Firefly Serenity Flash Drive offers shiny portable storage copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

It’s happened again. Another endangered Hawaiian monk seal has been beaten to death in Hawaii.

Sunday’s death of this young female monk seal — known as RF58 – is the ninth suspicious death since 2009. Some have been shot, others bludgeoned.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy that’s being played out as part of a larger plight: Hawaiian monk seals are among the rarest mammals on Earth, with fewer than 1,000 seals remaining. For a species already flirting with extinction, even a few deaths can tip the balance out of their favor.

The death of RF58 is particularly heartbreaking. She was born in June on Kauai’s northeast coast, daughter to a popular seal nicknamed Rocky, who mostly lives on Oahu but breeds on Kauai. They’ve had their share of hardships. In July, a dog attacked RF58, Rocky and another pup. RF58 was wounded and survived, but the pup was killed.

RF58 made Kauai her home, and was frequently sighted. She’d been spotted less than 24 hours before she was found dead at Anahola beach. A necropsy showed she’d suffered severe blunt force trauma to her skull that killed her.

This isn’t how her life was supposed to turn out. RF58 was coming into her breeding years, bearing the promise of more pups and the hope of recovering this critically endangered species.

We don’t know who’s been killing Hawaiian monk seals or why (though it comes at a huge risk because killing an endangered species is a state and federal crime with a sizeable punishment). Even though they are native to Hawaii — it’s the only place they exist in the world — some view them as intruders. They’ve become a politicized species, spurring controversy over fisheries, habitat safeguards and even what level of protection they deserve. It is and should be an issue of national concern.

These deaths come at a critical time. Seals have been returning to the main Hawaiian Islands in recent years, even showing up on popular beaches like Waikiki and Poipu and having healthy pups. Their return is an important counterbalance to seals that are dying the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, where pups have a 1-in-5 chance of survival.

The main Hawaiian Islands remain one of the best places for their recovery. I’m hopeful that can still happen and there is still certainly some important work to be done among everyone on all sides of this issue. No one ever said saving species isn’t complicated or difficult. But while there may be disagreement over details and direction there should be no disagreement that seals like RF58 deserve better than a brutal death on the shores of paradise.

Photo courtesy Monica Bond on NOAA permit.