According to a recent study that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, nearly one in three Americans believes that they have at least one food allergy. In reality, the same study found, less than one in twenty has a food allergy. This disparity is due, in large part, to the difficult nature of determining if one actually has a food allergy.

Everybody is wondering who is in charge at Wikipedia ever since Fox News reported that founder Jimmy Wales has relinquished some control over the site's material. The story claimed that, following Wales' alleged attempt to delete a slew of pornographic images from the site, he has been denied the right "to delete files, remove administrators, assign projects or edit any content."

"Aperture 3.0 came out a few months ago, so you're probably wondering why this review is so late. I had hoped to do a simultaneous review of Lightroom 3 and Aperture 3, but I was thinking that Lightroom 3 would come out at the same time as the CS5 applications, which came out just recently. It now looks like Lightroom 3 is not due out until June or July, judging from the winds (that's hippy talk for "when the beta program expires").

"The FCC has set a 4Mbps download target for universal US broadband—but how to get those (modest) speeds to underserved areas? According to a new report (PDF) from the Commission, we can forget about fiber—it costs too much. Underserved areas would be served best by DSL, some 4G wireless coverage, and satellite service for those who truly live in the boondocks.

But the price for all this non-cutting-edge tech is still steep: $23.5 billion.
We're going to fund... DSL?

It's simple to say that piracy is a problem in the game industry, and particularly so in PC gaming. No extra hardware (like a mod chip) is required to pirate a PC game—just a fast Internet connection or a burnt disc. What isn't simple is finding out how many real-world sales are lost due to piracy (a problem that has bedeviled the content industries for some time). The question: if a pirate couldn't get his or her game for free, would he or she pay for it?

When pressing Congress to ratchet up the legal screws on infringers, copyright holders are fond of touting apocalyptic reports about how piracy is destroying their industries—and the US economy.

But strengthening the nation's intellectual property laws isn't just a matter of cracking down ever harder, of limiting the limitations and giving increasing power to rightsholders. Fair use and other limitations on copyright themselves generate significant economic activity—$4.7 trillion in 2007.

As many Ars readers know, iFixit has long been a source for detailed teardowns of the latest Apple gear. The company's teardowns not only provide information about the chips and other components in each new MacBook Pro or iPhone, the company also gives users the necessary information about tools and techniques needed to get inside the devices. iFixit now hopes to build a compendium of quality, trusted online repair manuals for almost anything you own that might need fixing.

We've found lots of technically challenging ways to monitor brain activity, but scientists may have come up with an easier one. A paper published in Nature last week describes a new method for placing electrodes onto soft, curvilinear biological surfaces: embed them them on a flexible, silk-based substrate that can be resorbed into tissue.

"Photoshop turned twenty years old this year. That may seem like nothin' but a number, but when you look at the Mac platforms it's migrated to and from, and the fact that it's had 12 versions, Photoshop's twenty years have seen a lot of changes for one application. From System 6 on the Motorola 68000, it was then ported to PowerPC, then to OS X, then to OS X Intel, and now to Cocoa and 64-bit. All this while adding the features that make it the meaty image editor it is today.