Art and design Collection of the National Museum of Norway, now online. My test downloads of pictures gave Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial copies at large 2400px + sizes. Large enough for use in a free magazine or non-profit open access journal, for instance.

Instapaper has added a new feature on their Download option. As well as downloading as a Kindle .mobi or an .ePub ebook file of the latest 10 articles, you can now also get an RSS feed for your latest 25 unread articles. The articles appear in the order you saved them into Instapaper, and each Web link goes to the newspaper/magazine original article URL rather than to your Instapaper copy. At present I’m uncertain if the 25 links are “fixed”, or if the feed is a rolling dynamic one that will update as I add more articles to Instapaper.

Update: yes, it’s rolling RSS, updating as new articles are saved.

Google’s new $165m journalism Innovation Fund, part of their Digital News Initiative, is looking for…

projects that demonstrate new thinking in the practice of digital journalism; that support the development of new business models, or maybe even change the way users consume digital news. Projects can be highly experimental, but must have well-defined goals and have a significant digital component.”

Open to entrants from the UK and Europe, with a deadline of 4th December 2015.

Coming soon, a new search-engine that will search across the already-existing digital indexes of food crop plant genetics. Such as the contents of the famous Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the index of the International Rice Research Institute and many others. Approved today by the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

Very cool, a molecular-level search engine that works via a tiny spectroscopy sensor which syncs with your phone…

In a live demo at … London’s Tobacco Dock, WIRED saw the lighter-sized sensor scan a Viagra pill and create a chemical fingerprint that was sent, via Bluetooth, to a smart phone. The phone then connected to a ‘database of matter’ in the cloud and verified that the pill was, indeed, Viagra.”

SCiO is now shipping its developer kits, having been in development since 2014 using £1.7m from Kickstarter. The proposed $150 price point makes it potentially useful, I’d guess, in helping small retailers in the fight against food origin fraud (“is it really a Californian plum, or actually from former rainforest land in Paraguay?”), detecting illegal wildlife products (“fur, or fake?”), and perhaps even for art conservation (“what exactly is that odd 18th century material we need to conserve?”).

Perhaps also useful for mis-labelled museum Herbarium specimens, of which there are possibly a great many.

The “world’s first database of matter” doesn’t appear to be formally CC open access via a geolocated Google map (though that sort of “What Stuff Is Where?” website will no doubt come in time, and would be especially useful if the sensor could be made to work as a mobile sensor of air-quality or if the site could show rolling plant-testing results from a group of farmers or citizen ecologists). For now it’s more of an open platform…

SCiO Developers have access to any database uploaded to our servers that was made public by its owners and are encouraged to create their own new and exciting models and mobile applications based on the database.”

Even more zero-day security holes found in Flash, remaining exploited and unpatched even after this week’s latest patches. If your journal has a landing page that requires a Flash movie to be shown before entry (e.g. the digital theory journal www.intelligentagent.com), or a Flash sidebar menu, or an old Flash-based page-viewer, then an ever-larger proportion of your potential audience can’t get in that way — they’ve uninstalled Flash and are not coming back.

Times Higher on allegedly rampant thesis plagiarism / ghost-writing in Russia…

PhD forgery is now an “integral part of Russia’s statehood”, rather than a “fringe phenomenon”, according to the analysis published in Higher Education in Russia and Beyond, a quarterly newsletter published by the country’s National Research University Higher School of Economics.”

Mass-production of PhDs is generally centred in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where “conveyor [belt] units” were found for “PhDifying” politicians, public officials and teachers”

NASA has kindly placed over 8,000 Moon Landing photos on Flickr, made by NASA astronauts during the Apollo missions. Hi-res too, at over 4000px. The pictures are at the Project Apollo Archive albums.