Update: Valve has updated its auction site to note that the Gem auctions will return “shortly” and that “an issue with Gems… means we need to reset and start again.” Specifically: All gems created by you will be returned to your Inventory. All Gem purchases from the Community Market will be reimbursed. All Auction bids have been canceled and the Auction will be reset. Trades involving Gems are being investigated on a case-by-case basis. Original Story The virtual “Holiday Auction” Steam first announced yesterday evening seemed like a cute idea at the time. For a limited time, users would be able to trade in unused or unwanted Steam Inventory items for “gems,” which could in turn, starting Monday, be used to bid against others on codes for 2,000 Steam games, 200,000 copies in all. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Steam’s first “Holiday Auction” halted after dupe bug ruins market [Updated]
TaleSlinger sends this news from Space.com: Astronomers may finally have detected a signal of dark matter, the mysterious and elusive stuff thought to make up most of the material universe. While poring over data collected by the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton spacecraft, a team of researchers spotted an odd spike in X-ray emissions coming from two different celestial objects — the Andromeda galaxy and the Perseus galaxy cluster. “The signal’s distribution within the galaxy corresponds exactly to what we were expecting with dark matter — that is, concentrated and intense in the center of objects and weaker and diffuse on the edges, ” [assuming that dark matter consists of sterile neutrinos] study co-author Oleg Ruchayskiy, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, said in a statement. “With the goal of verifying our findings, we then looked at data from our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and made the same observations, ” added lead author Alexey Boyarsky, of EPFL and Leiden University in the Netherlands. The decay of sterile neutrinos is thought to produce X-rays, so the research team suspects these may be the dark matter particles responsible for the mysterious signal coming from Andromeda and the Perseus cluster.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
iOS: With apps like Drafts and Launch Center Pro , automation on iOS has been possible for a while, but it’s also been a very heady, complex experience. Workflow’s a new app that makes automation a lot easier to understand. Read more… 
American forces in Afghanistan have long complained of a significant drawback in their M320 rifle-mounted grenade launchers : enemies positioned behind the low, mud brick walls ubiquitous to the region’s architecture could easily avoid incoming 40mm grenade rounds simply by ducking. You’d need a direct line of sight to enemy forces in order to inflict maximum damage. But not anymore. Read more… 
We now live in an age where radical technology can help the blind to see , an impressive enough accomplishment in its own right that gets even more mind-bending when you consider what’s it means for the future. UV vision? Eyeballs that zoom in and out like a camera lens? It’s coming! Read more… 
The popular torrent site Isohunt just launched a new fully functional website — oldpiratebay.org — that lets you search through the Pirate Bay archives. This is a little bit silly, since Pirate Bay’s archives have been public for years . But it’s also a little bit useful if you’ve been having Pirate Bay withdrawal since the site got raided by Swedish police . Read more… 
It’s a vast understatement to say that Crossrail, London’s newest subway line, is big. It’s massive: 23 miles of huge tunnels below an ancient city, dug by a team of 10, 000 workers, to form the city’s biggest transit project since World War II. Read more…