Although two months remain in what should be the wet season, California may face a drought that will continue through the spring. With a key reservoir holding less than 50 percent of average capacity and snow holding only 61 percent of the normal water volume, the Department of Water Resources estimates that some regions may receive only 15 percent of the requested amount of water for residents and farmland.

Last Monday, a professor at Colorado State University, José Del R. Millán, presented a wheelchair that moves in response to mental commands. The wheelchair receives commands from nodes within a cap worn by the user, which detect the electrical fields from certain thought patterns, and relay this information to a computer within the wheelchair, which then causes it to move.

Burger King ended an advertising campaign offering 37 cents towards a free Whopper to anyone who deleted 10 friends on Facebook. While some people dropped and then re-added friends – as Burger King may have expected – others felt that Facebook friends were worth more than 3.7 cents each, and passed on the offer. Over 23,000 friends were dropped for the promotion, and some Facebook users have suggested petitioning Burger King to continue the campaign.

The House of Representatives recently passed a bill creating the National Center for Campus Public Safety, which would compile research and issue grants to promote public safety. Some of the groundwork for this bill may have been laid by testimony from Princeton’s Public Safety, who testified before the house one week after the April, 2007 Virginia Tech shooting.

In an event benefitting the North Carolina Children’s Hospital, students from Duke University and North Carolina State University engaged in a race to run two miles to a Krispy Kreme store, eat 12 glazed donuts, then run another two miles. While 5,519 began the race, fewer than 1,100 finished.

Blackboard Sync, a program being tested at Miami-Ohio University, allows students to view content from Blackboard while at the URL www.facebook.com. Integration of these two websites seems like a good idea, but it is uncertain if the program will cause students to pay more attention to academics while on Facebook, or procrastinate while on BlackBoard.