Hot Links: Cyanide Grass Kills Cows, Utah's Gun Problem, the Tech Apocalypse

Welcome back to Hot Links, Motherboard’s weekly roundup of some of the coolest stories you missed from the weekend.

Holy crap cyanide grass: a herd of cattle in Texas recently died. That’s right, all the cows keeled over in one fell swoop. The culprit? Hybrid grass that emits cyanide gas. Really. And apparently that same grass has been found releasing cyanide in other places, but no one really knows why.

Update: the grass in question is a hybrid, not GMO as CBS reported, and it’s thought that the release of hydrogen cyanide is the result of Texas’ long drought.

Yes, air conditioning is really bad for the environment: A great NYT stories discusses the explosion of A/C use in India, and notes that A/C gasses are pretty much terrible.

Writer argues why her kid will be your kid’s boss: Coddling our children is turning them into a subservient class of entitled ninnies.

Guns! Target shooting has caused at least 19 wildfires this year in Utah, and there’s nothing the Utah government can do except for plea for shooters to use more common sense because the state’s gun laws don’t allow for any emergency shooting restrictions.

This wouldn’t happen in the U.S., but in Japan, the Fukushima nuclear disaster has resulted in very few lawsuits, with most citizens receiving payouts directly from Tepco, who operated the plant.

The TSA is testing out new screening systems that it promises will get rid of lines. Take that with a grain of salt, but the story is worth reading just for the _Post_’s image: a skeleton holding an x-ray assault rifle. As if you’d need a screener to stop that.

Rest in peace Lonesome George: the last example of a Galapagos giant tortoise subspecies has died at the young age of 100.

Hilarious celebrity news: Madonna hires a “DNA team” to wipe down any trace evidence she leaves behind in her dressing rooms. Sure, why not.

A massive solar project in the Mojave desert is being sieged with questions, including whether or not massive heat updrafts could flip planes over. It’s one hell of an ambitious project, and makes for a fascinating read.

Sea levels are rising faster than previous expected, according to a new study.

Because “globalization” has centered nearly all tech production in Southeast Asia, we’re setting ourselves up for the tech (manufacturing) apocalypse.

A challenger has appeared to the commonly-accepted story that Turing killed himself, with the argument being that Turing accidentally ingested the cyanide that killed him.

A Canadian typosquatter (people that, say, own pepsy.com or cocacola.cm) has been sued regarding some wild-ass scam he was running in which he tried to convince corporations that he’d found security breaches by showing them mis-addressed emails.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.