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The Willamette Meteorite, featured above, is one of the treasures of the American Museum of Natural History’s permanent collection. Visitors are able to see and touch this 15.5 ton (14.1 metric ton) remnant of the ancient cosmos — the largest meteorite ever found in the U.S. It’s thought to be the iron-nickel core of a planet or moon that was shattered in a stellar collision more than a billion years ago. It crashed into the Earth thousands of years ago, traveling at more than 40,000 mph (64,374 km/h). The Museum purchased the Willamette Meteorite in 1906 and since then it’s been on almost continuous display and viewed by millions of visitors from around the world.

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In a literal application of the sharia law of an eye for an eye, Iran is ready for the first time to blind a man with acid, after he was found guilty of doing the same to a woman who refused to marry him.

Majid Movahedi, 30, is scheduled to be rendered unconscious in Tehran’s judiciary hospital at noon on Saturday while Ameneh Bahrami, his victim, drops acid in both his eyes, her lawyer said.

Bahrami who had asked for an eye for an eye retribution in the court, was disfigured and blinded by Movahedi in 2004 when he threw a jar of acid in her face while she was returning home from work. "He was holding a red container in his hand. He looked into my eyes for a second and threw the contents of the red container into my face," she told the court in 2008.

According to Iranian media, Bahrami’s lawyer, Ali Sarafi, has said: "A very good sentence has been given and an appropriate method has been adopted so that the convict will be blinded by few drops of acids in eyes after he is rendered unconscious."

I’m not going to judge a woman’s hatred toward the man who blinded and mutilated her with acid, but I will judge a society that finds no better way to help her deal with this hatred.

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You may recall that LimeWire was smote down by the RIAA in federal court over copyright infringement claims. The site’s appeals fell on deaf ears, and the service was ordered shut down.

The case has finally been wrapped up with a jury deciding on damages against the service. The jury in this case opted to arrange a settlement between LimeWire and the RIAA legal team, which would call for LimeWire to pay $10,808 USD per track for the 9,715 tracks the RIAA claimed LimeWire infringed, for a total fine of $105M USD.

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The settlement will do little to improve the major labels’ image, though, as they’re not giving any of the record windfall to the artists that actually had their work infringed.

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When members of Wasilla High School’s symphonic jazz choir heard Friday it wouldn’t be singing the popular Queen hit “Bohemian Rhapsody” at this year’s graduation ceremony after working on it all year, the students couldn’t get their heads around it.

WHS Principal Dwight Probasco reportedly had received complaints from at least one parent that the 1975 hit written by Freddie Mercury wasn’t appropriate for the ceremony simply because Mercury was gay.

Wasilla High School’s officials shouldn’t be allowed to use computers, because Alan Turing was gay.

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So what it comes down to is that Thomson, McCarron, and other iOS developers are being threatened by Lodsys for using Apple intellectual property under license from Apple, in such a fashion that they cannot even settle without violating the iOS Developer Program License Agreement. They can’t legally agree that Apple’s In App Purchase API violates Lodsys’s patents, and no matter what, there’s no way Apple would give permission for such a settlement due to the chilling effect it would have on iOS development in general.