Police can obtain huge quantities of social network data but must sort out the junk to glean useful information.

Within hours after the Boston marathon bombing suspects were identified, police probably obtained warrants to search extensive digital records from mobile phone networks and social media and e-mail providers.

A segment of associate professor of history Kate Brown’s recent book, “Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters,” was reprinted on April 18 in the online magazine “Slate” under the headline “Life in a Real Nuclear Wasteland.”

“In pop culture, irradiated wastelands are fascinating… Part of the fantasy is surviving alone in an abandoned place no longer fit for the living, but the sad fact is that there are irradiated zones that are fully inhabited, and have been since the first years of the nuclear arms race,” Brown writes.  “No one has lived longer on contaminated terrain than people in the village of Muslumovo in the southern Russian Urals located downstream from the Maiak plutonium plant, built in 1948 to produce Soviet bomb cores.”

Brown goes on to describe the conditions in Muslumovo, which often afflicted children: “hydrocephalic children, children with cerebral palsy, missing kidneys, extra fingers, anemia, fatigue, and weak immune systems.”

“[Soviet doctors] determined that radioactive isotopes weaken immune systems and damage organ tissue and arteries, causing illnesses of the circulation and digestive tracts and making people susceptible to conventional diseases long before they succumb to radiation-related,” she writes.

Hot on the heels of jQuery Mobile 1.3 comes jQuery 2.0, a brand new, full release version of the popular JavaScript library.

The big news — that we’ve known for a while — is that jQuery 2.0 has dropped the library’s support for Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8. These so-called legacy browsers are slowly creeping towards extinction and it’s certainly true that very few people still use IE6. However, there are still substantial numbers of clients requesting IE 7+ support.

The payoff for dropping IE6, 7 and 8 is a smaller core file (over 8kb for the minified file), with faster performance.

The developers state that jQuery 2.0 is intended “for the modern web” which is reflected in the lack of support for older IE versions. However, one of the key aspects of the modern web — albeit one we hate to acknowledge — is that people are still using legacy versions of IE, particularly in the developing world. In fact, there are so many people currently using IE8 as their browser of choice, it’s a little difficult justifying the label ‘legacy’ at all. Of course it would be nice to only consider the most up to date browsers, but this move by the jQuery development team feels a little premature.

If you’re one of the unlucky majority who still need to support IE6, 7 or 8 then you’ll need to stick with jQuery 1.9 for now, and hope that jQuery 1.10 — which will support legacy versions of Internet Explorer and is scheduled for release in the near future — will serve your purposes.

The dual fork of jQuery 2.0 and the upcoming 1.10 is almost certainly going to lead to confusion. The difficult question is which version of jQuery should developers be using? jQuery 2.0 is new and shiny, but do the performance gains really justify the price paid? jQuery 1.9 is also relatively new and most of the library’s key changes are included in 1.9.

It’s actually arguable that the new ’2.0′ label is a red herring, and the real changes took place with 1.9, when a number of inefficient methods were killed off. So perhaps jQuery 2.0 and jQuery 1.10 are merely new in name only, released as preparation for further developments down the road.

For the time being, 1.9 seems to be the sensible choice for the vast majority of jQuery developers. Whether or not that will be true for much longer remains to be seen.

Will you be using jQuery 2.0 in upcoming projects? Which is the oldest version of IE you develop for? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, legacy computing image via Shutterstock.

Beautiful Solomon Font Family (12 fonts) – only $9!