With about one billion people on Earth without access to reliable drinking water, there is an obvious need to remedy that problem in economical fashion.  Meet the LifeStraw, a $3 contraption that will theoretically provide instant drinking water from nearly any source for a year.  It filters out most bacteria, viruses and parasites most commonly associated with impure water sources.

Before you go out and start drinking from the urine-soaked public pool, it is not primed for mass production, as only 2000 LifeStraws have been sold, mainly to various aid programs.  It will need further fine-tuning, including the need to improve its filtering capabilities to trap more common parasites, such as the Giardia lamblia, a must for everyday campers. 

Once it reaches mass production, it will become a major boon for the far, darkest corners of the Earth without the most basic of needs.

According to Symantec, a new and malicious worm is spreading (dare I say it?) like wildfire within OpenOffice documents. "The worm can infect Windows, Linux and Mac OS X systems," according to a Symantec Security Response advisory. "Be cautious when handling OpenOffice files from unknown sources."

The worm was first spotted late last month, but at the time, it was not thought to be "in the wild."

Once opened, the OpenOffice file, called badbunny.odg, launches a macro that behaves in several different ways, depending on the user’s operating system.

On Windows systems, it drops a file called drop.bad, which is moved to the system.ini file in the user’s mIRC folder. It also executes the JavaScript virus badbunny.js, which replicates to other files in the folder.

On Apple Mac systems, the worm drops one of two Ruby script viruses in files respectively called badbunny.rb and badbunnya.rb.

On Linux systems, the worm drops both badbunny.py as an XChat script and badbunny.pl as a Perl virus.

Symantec rates the worm as a "medium risk."

That is, only if it is not on your computer :)