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Last week, the bitcoin community heard about UCLA professor Bhagwan Chowdhry, who had been invited by the Prize Committee for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to nominate someone for the 2016 Prize, suggesting nominating bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto for the Nobel Prize in Economics. But, as we also reported, the nomination by Chowdhry itself proved counterproductive when a comment underneath the professor’s post explained that Nobel Foundation rules forbid public disclosure of nominations for 50 years i.e. the finance professor’s announcement meant he couldn’t nominate Nakamoto.

 Apart from Chowdhry’s disclosure, it seems Nakamoto wouldn’t be eligible for the Nobel Prize without a verified identity. Hans Reuterskiöld, Nobel Press Officer of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, told Inverse that the prize cannot be awarded anonymously or posthumously.

 There’s always the possibility of Nakamoto revealing his identity sometime over the next year. However, given that he’s remained anonymous for this long, it’s probably a long shot.

 Image source ||||| Even as his face towered 10 feet above the crowd at the Bitcoin Investor’s Conference in Las Vegas, Craig Steven Wright was, to most of the audience of crypto and finance geeks, a nobody.

 The 44-year-old Australian, Skyping into the D Hotel ballroom’s screen, wore the bitcoin enthusiast’s equivalent of camouflage: a black blazer and a tieless, rumpled shirt, his brown hair neatly parted. His name hadn’t made the conference’s list of "featured speakers." Even the panel’s moderator, a bitcoin blogger named Michele Seven, seemed concerned the audience wouldn’t know why he was there. Wright had hardly begun to introduce himself as a "former academic who does research that no one ever hears about," when she interrupted him.

 "Hold on a second, who are you?" Seven cut in, laughing. "Are you a computer scientist?"

 "I’m a bit of everything," Wright responded. "I have a master's in law…a master’s in statistics, a couple doctorates..."

 "How did you first learn about bitcoin?" Seven interrupted again, as if still trying to clarify Wright’s significance.

 Wright paused for three full seconds. "Um. I’ve been involved with all this for a long time," he stuttered. "I—try and stay—I keep my head down. Um..." He seemed to suppress a smile. The panel’s moderator moved on. And for what must have been the thousandth time in his last seven years of obscurity, Wright did not say the words WIRED’s study of Wright over the past weeks suggests he may be dying to say out loud.

 "I am Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of bitcoin."

 Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he's a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.

 Since that pseudonymous figure first released bitcoin’s code on January 9th, 2009, Nakamoto’s ingenious digital currency has grown from a nerd novelty to a kind of economic miracle. As it’s been adopted for everything from international money transfers to online narcotrafficking, the total value of all bitcoins has grown to nearly $5 billion. Nakamoto himself, whoever he is, appears to control a stash of bitcoins easily worth a nine-figure fortune (it rose to more than a billion at the cryptocurrency’s peak exchange rate in 2014). But the true identity of bitcoin’s creator remains a cipher. Media outlets from the New Yorker to Fast Company to Newsweek have launched investigations into unmasking Nakamoto that were either inconclusive or, in Newsweek’s case, pointed to a man who subsequently denied having anything to do with cryptography, not to mention cryptocurrency. Altogether, the world’s Satoshi-seekers have hardly put a dent in one of the most stubborn mysteries of the 21st century, one whose answer could resonate beyond a small sphere of crypto geeks and have real economic effects.

 In the last weeks, WIRED has obtained the strongest evidence yet of Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity. The signs point to Craig Steven Wright, a man who never even made it onto any Nakamoto hunters’ public list of candidates, yet fits the cryptocurrency creator’s profile in nearly every detail. And despite a massive trove of evidence, we still can’t say with absolute certainty that the mystery is solved. But two possibilities outweigh all others: Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.

 The Evidence

 The first evidence pointing to Wright appeared in mid-November, when an anonymous source close to Wright began leaking documents to Gwern Branwen, a pseudonymous, independent security researcher and dark web analyst. Branwen provided those documents to WIRED, and they immediately led to several direct, publicly visible connections between Nakamoto and Wright:

 An August 2008 post on Wright’s blog, months before the November 2008 introduction of the bitcoin whitepaper on a cryptography mailing list. It mentions his intention to release a "cryptocurrency paper," and references "triple entry accounting," the title of a 2005 paper by financial cryptographer Ian Grigg that outlines several bitcoin-like ideas.

 A post on the same blog from November, 2008. It includes a request that readers who want to get in touch encrypt their messages to him using a PGP public key apparently linked to Satoshi Nakamoto. A PGP key is a unique string of characters that allows a user of that encryption software to receive encrypted messages. This one, when checked against the database of the MIT server where it was stored, is associated with the email address satoshin@vistomail.com, an email address very similar to the satoshi@vistomail.com address Nakamoto used to send the whitepaper introducing bitcoin to a cryptography mailing list.

 An archived copy of a now-deleted blog post from Wright dated January 10, 2009, which reads: "The Beta of Bitcoin is live tomorrow. This is decentralized... We try until it works." (The post was dated January 10, 2009, a day after Bitcoin’s official launch on January 9th of that year. But if Wright, living in Eastern Australia, posted it after midnight his time on the night of the 9th, that would have still been before bitcoin’s launch at 3pm EST on the 9th.) That post was later replaced with the rather cryptic text "Bitcoin - AKA bloody nosey you be…It does always surprise me how at times the best place to hide [is] right in the open." Sometime after October of this year, it was deleted entirely.

 WIRED

 In addition to those three blog posts, we received a cache of leaked emails, transcripts, and accounting forms that corroborate the link. There’s a leaked message from Wright to his lawyer date June 2008 in which Wright imagines "a P2P distributed ledger"—an apparent reference to bitcoin’s public record of transactions known as the blockchain, long before it was publicly released. The email goes on to reference a paper called "Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party" that Wright expects to release in 2009.

 'I did my best to try and hide the fact that I've been running bitcoin since 2009. By the end of this I think half the world is going to bloody know.' Craig Steven Wright

 Another leaked email from Wright to computer forensics analyst David Kleiman, a close friend and confidant, just before bitcoin’s January 2009 launch discusses a paper they’d been working on together. Wright talks about taking a buyout from his job and investing in hundreds of computer processors to "get [his] idea going." There’s also a PDF authored by Kleiman, who died in April of 2013, in which he agrees to take control of a trust fund, codenamed the "Tulip Trust," containing 1.1 million bitcoins. The PDF is signed with Kleiman’s PGP signature, a cryptographic technique that ensures it couldn’t have been altered post-signature.

 That million-coin trove—The Tulip Trust—is the same size as a mysterious bitcoin fortune that’s long been visible on bitcoin’s blockchain and widely attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. No one but Nakamoto is known to have assembled such a massive hoard of the cryptocurrency, and only Nakamoto could have generated so many bitcoins so early in its evolution, when a bitcoin could be “mined” with relatively small amounts of processing power. Only one such bitcoin megapile exists, and the closely-watched coins haven’t moved in bitcoin’s entire history.

 Another clue as to Wright’s bitcoin fortune wasn’t leaked to WIRED but instead remains hosted on the website of the corporate advisory firm McGrathNicol: a liquidation report on one of several companies Wright founded known as Hotwire, an attempt to create a bitcoin-based bank. It shows that the startup was backed in June 2013 by $23 million in bitcoins owned by Wright. That sum would be worth more than $60 million today. At the time of the company’s incorporation, Wright’s investment in that one firm alone represented more than 1.5 percent of all existing bitcoins, a strangely large stash for an unknown player in the bitcoin world.

 The giveaways go on: There’s a leaked email from Wright to an associate in January 2014 about a tax dispute with the Australian government. In it, he seems to consider using Nakamoto’s name to wield influence with New South Wales Senator Arthur Sinodinos "Would our Japanese friend have weight coming out of retirement?" Wright asks. It includes a draft email to the senator signed "Satoshi Nakamoto." And a leaked transcript of Wright’s meeting with attorneys and tax officials in February 2014 quotes him in a moment of exasperation: "I did my best to try and hide the fact that I've been running bitcoin since 2009," Wright says. "By the end of this I think half the world is going to bloody know."

 Making Contact

 On December 1st, WIRED sent an encrypted email to Wright suggesting that we knew his secret and asking for a meeting. A few hours later, we received a wary response from the address Tessier-Ashpool@AnonymousSpeech.com, a cyberpunk reference to a rich and powerful corporate dynasty in William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. Wright had referenced the same fictional family in the bio of his private twitter profile. The email’s IP showed that it came from an IP address in Panama controlled by Vistomail, the same service that Satoshi Nakamoto had used to send his emails introducing bitcoin and to run Bitcoin.org. “This is a throw away account. There are ways even with [the anonymity software] Tor, but the people in Panama are exteremly [sic] good and do not violate people's desired privacy,” the email read. “You are digging, the question is how deep are you?” The message ended, “Regards, the Director of Tessier-Ashpool”

 After WIRED sent an encrypted email to Wright suggesting that we knew his secret, we received a perplexing message: 'You seem to know a few things. More than you should.'

 A few hours later, we received another, even more perplexing message from the same account. “The nature of this moniker is selected for a purpose. I now have resources. This makes me a we now. I am still within that early phase of learning just what my capabilities happen to be. So, even now with resources I remain vulnerable,” it read. “You seem to know a few things. More than you should.”

 When we responded by describing the three blog posts that showed Wright’s clear connection to bitcoin’s creation and asking again for a meeting, he gave a revealing answer. “Although we all desire some level of credit, I have moved past many of these things,” read his response from the same Tessier-Ashpool account. “Too many already know secrets, the world does not need to know. There are other means to lead change than to be a dictator.”

 After our second followup message asking for a chance to talk, Wright responded that he would consider our request. Then he stopped responding altogether.

 Dropping Breadcrumbs?

 Despite that overwhelming collection of clues, none of it fully proves that Wright is Nakamoto. All of it could be an elaborate hoax—perhaps orchestrated by Wright himself. The unverified leaked documents could be faked in whole or in part. And most inexplicably of all, comparisons of different archived versions of the three smoking gun posts from Wright’s blog show that he did edit all three—to insert evidence of his bitcoin history. The PGP key associated with Nakamoto’s email address and references to an upcoming "cryptocurrency paper" and "triple entry accounting" were added sometime after 2013. Even the post noting bitcoin’s beta launch is questionable. While it was ostensibly posted in January 2009, it later seems to have been deleted and then undeleted—or possibly even written for the first time—sometime between October 2013 and June of 2014.

 Wright’s blog, his public records, and his verified writings on mail lists and Twitter sketch a man who matches with Satoshi Nakamoto's known characteristics well enough to place him leagues above other candidates.

 Why those breadcrumbs were dropped remains a mystery. Is Wright trying to falsely steal Nakamoto’s glory (or money)? Is he quietly revealing himself as bitcoin’s creator?

 But this much is clear: If Wright is seeking to fake his Nakamoto connection, his hoax would be practically as ambitious as bitcoin itself. Some of the clues added to his blog were made more than 20 months ago—a very patient deception if it were one. His references to Grigg’s "triple entry accounting" paper would represent an uncannily inventive lie, representing a new and obscure possible inspiration for bitcoin. And there’s little doubt Wright is a certified bitcoin mogul. Even the $60 million portion of his cryptocurrency stash that’s verifiable in McGrathNicol’s public audit record is suspiciously large.

 More circumstantially, Wright’s blog, his public records, and his verified writings on mail lists and Twitter sketch a man who matches with Satoshi Nakamoto’s known characteristics well enough to place him leagues above other candidates. He’s a former subscriber to the 1990s "cypherpunks" mailing list devoted to anti-authoritarianism and encryption, an advocate of gold as a financial tool, an accomplished C++ coder, a security professional plausibly capable of writing a tough-to-hack protocol like bitcoin, a libertarian who battled with tax authorities, and a fan of Japanese culture.

 He is also—parallels to Nakamoto aside—a strange and remarkable person: an almost obsessive autodidact and double-PhD who once boasted of obtaining new graduate degrees at a rate of about one a year. He’s a climate-change denier, a serial entrepreneur who started companies ranging from security consultancies to a bitcoin bank, and an eccentric who wrote on his blog that he once accepted a challenge to create a pencil from scratch and spent years on the problem, going so far as to make his own bricks to build his own kiln in which to mix the pencil’s graphite.

 Wright’s blogging and leaked emails describe a man so committed to an unproven cryptocurrency idea that he mortgaged three properties and invested more than $1 million in computers, power, and connectivity—even going so far as to lay fiberoptic cables to his remote rural home in eastern Australia to mine the first bitcoins. His company, Tulip Trading, built two supercomputers that have officially ranked among the top 500 in the world, both seemingly related to his cryptocurrency projects. (Wright seems to enjoy tulip references, a likely taunt at those who have compared bitcoin to the Netherlands’ 17th century "tulip bubble.") The first of those supercomputers he named Sukuriputo Okane—Japanese for "script money." Another, named Co1n, holds the title of the world’s most powerful privately owned supercomputer. As Wright told the Bitcoin Investor’s conference, he’s applying that second machine towards the mysterious task of "modeling Bitcoin’s scalability," and meanwhile building an even more powerful supercomputing cluster in Iceland because of its cheap geothermal power.

 Bitcoin watchers have long wondered why the giant cache of coins they attribute to Satoshi Nakamoto never moved on the bitcoin’s publicly visible blockchain. Wright’s "Tulip" trust fund of 1.1 million bitcoins may hold the key to that mystery. The trust fund PDF signed by Wright’s late friend David Kleiman keeps those coins locked in place until 2020, yet gives Wright the freedom to borrow them for applications including "research into peer-to-peer systems" and "commercial activities that enhance the value and position of bitcoin."

 Despite those exceptions to the trust’s rules, the million-coin hoard has yet to budge, even after Kleiman’s death in 2013. That may be because Wright could be keeping the coins in place as an investment. He could be leveraging the trust in less visible ways, like legally transferring ownership of money to fund his companies while still leaving it at the same bitcoin address. Or he might still be waiting for January 1st, 2020, a countdown to a date that could take the lid off the biggest cryptocurrency fortune in history.

 Coming Clean

 In spite of all the clues as to Wright’s possible secret life—some that he apparently placed himself—Wright has demonstrated such a talent for obfuscation and a love of privacy that he’s never even raised the suspicions of most Nakamoto-worshipping bitcoiners. "If we don't want to go out there and say ‘I’m a billionaire,’ or ‘I’m running XYZ,’ or ‘this is my life,’ I shouldn't have to tell people that," Wright told the Las Vegas crowd in October when an audience member asked his thoughts about what bitcoin means for property rights. "We should be able to choose how we live."

 In the leaked emails, Wright seems to bristle at the few times anyone has attempted to out bitcoin’s creator. "I am not from the bloody USA! Nor am I called Dorien [sic]," reads a message from Wright to a colleague dated March 6, 2014. That’s the same day as Newsweek’s largely discredited story claimed the inventor of bitcoin to be the American Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto.

 If Wright is bitcoin's creator, the revelation of his work carries more importance than merely sating the curiosity of a few million geeks.

 Wright seemed to take personal offense at the Newsweek story. "I do not want to be your posterboy. I am not found and I do not want to be," he writes in another message the same day. The email, addressed to a colleague and titled "please leak," may have been an early draft of the Nakamoto’s posted denial of Newsweek’s story. That public denial, a rare message from Nakamoto posted from his account on the P2P Foundation forum, simply read “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.” But Wright’s private response was far angrier. "Stop looking... Do you know what privacy means? A gift freely given is just that and no more!"

 At times, however, Wright has seemed practically envious of Nakamoto. "People love my secret identity and hate me," he complained to Kleiman in a leaked email from 2011. "I have hundreds of papers. Satoshi has one. Nothing, just one bloody paper and I [can’t] associate myself with ME!"

 If Wright is bitcoin’s creator, the revelation of his work carries more importance than merely sating the curiosity of a few million geeks. The bitcoin economy would need to consider that if his million-bitcoin trust unlocks in 2020, Wright and those to whom he may have assigned hundreds of thousands of bitcoins would be free to sell them on the open market, potentially tanking the cryptocurrency’s price; debates within the bitcoin community like the current fracas over bitcoin’s "block size” may look to long-lost Nakamoto for guidance; the world would have to grapple with the full scope of Wright's vision when he unleashes the result of his companies' post-bitcoin research. The other suspected Satoshis may finally get a reprieve from nosey reporters like us. And the intellectual history of cryptocurrencies would be forever rewritten.

 Wright himself, despite his hostile response to Satoshi-seekers, has lately seemed to be dropping clues of a double life. In the last two years he’s started to write more frequently about bitcoin on his blog; he’s even peppered Twitter with hints (Though he also deleted many of those earlier this month and made his tweets private.)

 "'Identity' is not your name. Where people go wrong is that they do not see it to be the set of shared experiences with other individuals," he wrote in one tweet in October.

 When a UCLA professor nominated Satoshi Nakamoto for a Nobel Prize earlier this month—and he was declared ineligible due to the mystery of his identity—Wright lashed out. "If Satoshi-chan was made for an ACM turing price [sic] or an Alfred Nobel in Economics he would let you bloody know that," he wrote on twitter, using the Japanese "chan" suffix that indicates familiarity or a nickname.

 "I never desired to be a leader but the choice is not mine," reads a third recent tweet from Wright. "We are a product of the things we create. They change us."

 In one cryptic and meandering blog post in September in which Wright takes stock of his long career, he even seems to concede that no one can build and wield the wealth that Satoshi Nakamoto has amassed and remain hidden indefinitely. "There is a certain power and mystery in secrets," Wright mused.

 "Am slowly coming to the realisation and acceptance," he added, "No secret remains forever."

 Update 12/14/2015 2:40pm: New clues following the publication of this story have shown inconsistencies in Wright's academic and supercomputing claims that may point to the second, strange possibility we noted: an elaborate, long-planned hoax.

 You may also like: ||||| The identity of "Satoshi Nakamoto", the pseudonym of the mysterious individual or group that created the concept of Bitcoin in late 2009, has been the subject of frenzied investigation by the currency's enthusiasts and the tech press for years. It turns out that the shadowy figure behind the digital alternative currency may be from Australia, and living in Sydney.

 UPDATE: The house belonging to Craig Wright in North Ryde has been raided by police, The Guardian reports.

 Bitcoin image via Shutterstock

 A month-long Gizmodo investigation into Dr Craig Wright and the late Dave Kleiman, an American computer forensics expert who died in 2013, has revealed that they were almost certainly involved in the creation of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency protocol. Wright, from North Ryde in Sydney, is a cryptocurrency enthusiast and serial entrepreneur.

 Wired has gathered enough evidence to suggest that Wright is the cryptocurrency's creator that it's confident in naming him publicly; it's not certain of its discovery, but it's more than confident — pointing to blog posts made by Wright before the public unveiling of the Bitcoin protocol, as well as his apparent ownership of a 1.1 million bitcoin blockchain worth $605,000,000.

 In the last weeks, WIRED has obtained the strongest evidence yet of Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity. The signs point to Craig Steven Wright, a man who never even made it onto any Nakamoto hunters’ public list of candidates, yet fits the cryptocurrency creator’s profile in nearly every detail. And despite a massive trove of evidence, we still can’t say with absolute certainty that the mystery is solved. But two possibilities outweigh all others: Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer...

 Possibly the strongest evidence is a leaked email about an alleged tax dispute that Wright had with the Australian government, where the self-described "security nerd, economist and researcher" supposedly suggests using Satoshi Nakamoto's identity to reach out to then-New South Wales senator Arthur Sinodinos: "Would our Japanese friend have weight coming out of retirement?"

 Wright lists DeMorgan Ltd in his Twitter profile, a company "focused on alternative currency" with "several Bitcoin based research projects". The Australian Securities and Investment Commission proposed to deregister DeMorgan in June 2014 after its initial registration in January to an address in North Ryde in Sydney's northwest. The company's ABN, registered to an address in Wauchope near Port Macquarie and previously trading as "Vin De La Terre", was cancelled in late October this year.

 Wright is also the founder and CEO of Cloudcroft, an Australian supercomputing firm whose Tulip Trading C01N is currently ranked at #17 in the supercomputing world's Top 500 list. Here's a video where Dr Wright introduces Cloudcroft and C01N, a high-performance computing cluster designed for finance and apparently built in North Ryde in partnership with SGI, with 115,200 CPU cores and 146TB of main memory. Gizmodo has contacted SGI to confirm this information. Gizmodo Australia has also reached out to Dr Wright for comment.

 Questions, comments, tips? You can find me on Twitter at @csimps0n. ||||| Even as his face towered 10 feet above the crowd at the Bitcoin Investor’s Conference in Las Vegas, Craig Steven Wright was, to most of the audience of crypto and finance geeks, a nobody.

 The 44-year-old Australian, Skyping into the D Hotel ballroom’s screen, wore the bitcoin enthusiast’s equivalent of camouflage: a black blazer and a tieless, rumpled shirt, his brown hair neatly parted. His name hadn’t made the conference’s list of "featured speakers." Even the panel’s moderator, a bitcoin blogger named Michele Seven, seemed concerned the audience wouldn’t know why he was there. Wright had hardly begun to introduce himself as a "former academic who does research that no one ever hears about," when she interrupted him.

 "Hold on a second, who are you?" Seven cut in, laughing. "Are you a computer scientist?"

 "I’m a bit of everything," Wright responded. "I have a master's in law…a master’s in statistics, a couple doctorates..."

 "How did you first learn about bitcoin?" Seven interrupted again, as if still trying to clarify Wright’s significance.

 Wright paused for three full seconds. "Um. I’ve been involved with all this for a long time," he stuttered. "I—try and stay—I keep my head down. Um..." He seemed to suppress a smile. The panel’s moderator moved on. And for what must have been the thousandth time in his last seven years of obscurity, Wright did not say the words WIRED’s study of Wright over the past weeks suggests he may be dying to say out loud.

 "I am Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of bitcoin."

 Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he's a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.

 Since that pseudonymous figure first released bitcoin’s code on January 9th, 2009, Nakamoto’s ingenious digital currency has grown from a nerd novelty to a kind of economic miracle. As it’s been adopted for everything from international money transfers to online narcotrafficking, the total value of all bitcoins has grown to nearly $5 billion. Nakamoto himself, whoever he is, appears to control a stash of bitcoins easily worth a nine-figure fortune (it rose to more than a billion at the cryptocurrency’s peak exchange rate in 2014). But the true identity of bitcoin’s creator remains a cipher. Media outlets from the New Yorker to Fast Company to Newsweek have launched investigations into unmasking Nakamoto that were either inconclusive or, in Newsweek’s case, pointed to a man who subsequently denied having anything to do with cryptography, not to mention cryptocurrency. Altogether, the world’s Satoshi-seekers have hardly put a dent in one of the most stubborn mysteries of the 21st century, one whose answer could resonate beyond a small sphere of crypto geeks and have real economic effects.

 In the last weeks, WIRED has obtained the strongest evidence yet of Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity. The signs point to Craig Steven Wright, a man who never even made it onto any Nakamoto hunters’ public list of candidates, yet fits the cryptocurrency creator’s profile in nearly every detail. And despite a massive trove of evidence, we still can’t say with absolute certainty that the mystery is solved. But two possibilities outweigh all others: Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.

 The Evidence

 The first evidence pointing to Wright appeared in mid-November, when an anonymous source close to Wright began leaking documents to Gwern Branwen, a pseudonymous, independent security researcher and dark web analyst. Branwen provided those documents to WIRED, and they immediately led to several direct, publicly visible connections between Nakamoto and Wright:

 An August 2008 post on Wright’s blog, months before the November 2008 introduction of the bitcoin whitepaper on a cryptography mailing list. It mentions his intention to release a "cryptocurrency paper," and references "triple entry accounting," the title of a 2005 paper by financial cryptographer Ian Grigg that outlines several bitcoin-like ideas.

 A post on the same blog from November, 2008. It includes a request that readers who want to get in touch encrypt their messages to him using a PGP public key apparently linked to Satoshi Nakamoto. A PGP key is a unique string of characters that allows a user of that encryption software to receive encrypted messages. This one, when checked against the database of the MIT server where it was stored, is associated with the email address satoshin@vistomail.com, an email address very similar to the satoshi@vistomail.com address Nakamoto used to send the whitepaper introducing bitcoin to a cryptography mailing list.

 An archived copy of a now-deleted blog post from Wright dated January 10, 2009, which reads: "The Beta of Bitcoin is live tomorrow. This is decentralized... We try until it works." (The post was dated January 10, 2009, a day after Bitcoin’s official launch on January 9th of that year. But if Wright, living in Eastern Australia, posted it after midnight his time on the night of the 9th, that would have still been before bitcoin’s launch at 3pm EST on the 9th.) That post was later replaced with the rather cryptic text "Bitcoin - AKA bloody nosey you be…It does always surprise me how at times the best place to hide [is] right in the open." Sometime after October of this year, it was deleted entirely.

 WIRED

 In addition to those three blog posts, we received a cache of leaked emails, transcripts, and accounting forms that corroborate the link. There’s a leaked message from Wright to his lawyer date June 2008 in which Wright imagines "a P2P distributed ledger"—an apparent reference to bitcoin’s public record of transactions known as the blockchain, long before it was publicly released. The email goes on to reference a paper called "Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party" that Wright expects to release in 2009.

 'I did my best to try and hide the fact that I've been running bitcoin since 2009. By the end of this I think half the world is going to bloody know.' Craig Steven Wright

 Another leaked email from Wright to computer forensics analyst David Kleiman, a close friend and confidant, just before bitcoin’s January 2009 launch discusses a paper they’d been working on together. Wright talks about taking a buyout from his job and investing in hundreds of computer processors to "get [his] idea going." There’s also a PDF authored by Kleiman, who died in April of 2013, in which he agrees to take control of a trust fund, codenamed the "Tulip Trust," containing 1.1 million bitcoins. The PDF is signed with Kleiman’s PGP signature, a cryptographic technique that ensures it couldn’t have been altered post-signature.

 That million-coin trove—The Tulip Trust—is the same size as a mysterious bitcoin fortune that’s long been visible on bitcoin’s blockchain and widely attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. No one but Nakamoto is known to have assembled such a massive hoard of the cryptocurrency, and only Nakamoto could have generated so many bitcoins so early in its evolution, when a bitcoin could be “mined” with relatively small amounts of processing power. Only one such bitcoin megapile exists, and the closely-watched coins haven’t moved in bitcoin’s entire history.

 Another clue as to Wright’s bitcoin fortune wasn’t leaked to WIRED but instead remains hosted on the website of the corporate advisory firm McGrathNicol: a liquidation report on one of several companies Wright founded known as Hotwire, an attempt to create a bitcoin-based bank. It shows that the startup was backed in June 2013 by $23 million in bitcoins owned by Wright. That sum would be worth more than $60 million today. At the time of the company’s incorporation, Wright’s investment in that one firm alone represented more than 1.5 percent of all existing bitcoins, a strangely large stash for an unknown player in the bitcoin world.

 The giveaways go on: There’s a leaked email from Wright to an associate in January 2014 about a tax dispute with the Australian government. In it, he seems to consider using Nakamoto’s name to wield influence with New South Wales Senator Arthur Sinodinos "Would our Japanese friend have weight coming out of retirement?" Wright asks. It includes a draft email to the senator signed "Satoshi Nakamoto." And a leaked transcript of Wright’s meeting with attorneys and tax officials in February 2014 quotes him in a moment of exasperation: "I did my best to try and hide the fact that I've been running bitcoin since 2009," Wright says. "By the end of this I think half the world is going to bloody know."

 Making Contact

 On December 1st, WIRED sent an encrypted email to Wright suggesting that we knew his secret and asking for a meeting. A few hours later, we received a wary response from the address Tessier-Ashpool@AnonymousSpeech.com, a cyberpunk reference to a rich and powerful corporate dynasty in William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. Wright had referenced the same fictional family in the bio of his private twitter profile. The email’s IP showed that it came from an IP address in Panama controlled by Vistomail, the same service that Satoshi Nakamoto had used to send his emails introducing bitcoin and to run Bitcoin.org. “This is a throw away account. There are ways even with [the anonymity software] Tor, but the people in Panama are exteremly [sic] good and do not violate people's desired privacy,” the email read. “You are digging, the question is how deep are you?” The message ended, “Regards, the Director of Tessier-Ashpool”

 After WIRED sent an encrypted email to Wright suggesting that we knew his secret, we received a perplexing message: 'You seem to know a few things. More than you should.'

 A few hours later, we received another, even more perplexing message from the same account. “The nature of this moniker is selected for a purpose. I now have resources. This makes me a we now. I am still within that early phase of learning just what my capabilities happen to be. So, even now with resources I remain vulnerable,” it read. “You seem to know a few things. More than you should.”

 When we responded by describing the three blog posts that showed Wright’s clear connection to bitcoin’s creation and asking again for a meeting, he gave a revealing answer. “Although we all desire some level of credit, I have moved past many of these things,” read his response from the same Tessier-Ashpool account. “Too many already know secrets, the world does not need to know. There are other means to lead change than to be a dictator.”

 After our second followup message asking for a chance to talk, Wright responded that he would consider our request. Then he stopped responding altogether.

 Dropping Breadcrumbs?

 Despite that overwhelming collection of clues, none of it fully proves that Wright is Nakamoto. All of it could be an elaborate hoax—perhaps orchestrated by Wright himself. The unverified leaked documents could be faked in whole or in part. And most inexplicably of all, comparisons of different archived versions of the three smoking gun posts from Wright’s blog show that he did edit all three—to insert evidence of his bitcoin history. The PGP key associated with Nakamoto’s email address and references to an upcoming "cryptocurrency paper" and "triple entry accounting" were added sometime after 2013. Even the post noting bitcoin’s beta launch is questionable. While it was ostensibly posted in January 2009, it later seems to have been deleted and then undeleted—or possibly even written for the first time—sometime between October 2013 and June of 2014.

 Wright’s blog, his public records, and his verified writings on mail lists and Twitter sketch a man who matches with Satoshi Nakamoto's known characteristics well enough to place him leagues above other candidates.

 Why those breadcrumbs were dropped remains a mystery. Is Wright trying to falsely steal Nakamoto’s glory (or money)? Is he quietly revealing himself as bitcoin’s creator?

 But this much is clear: If Wright is seeking to fake his Nakamoto connection, his hoax would be practically as ambitious as bitcoin itself. Some of the clues added to his blog were made more than 20 months ago—a very patient deception if it were one. His references to Grigg’s "triple entry accounting" paper would represent an uncannily inventive lie, representing a new and obscure possible inspiration for bitcoin. And there’s little doubt Wright is a certified bitcoin mogul. Even the $60 million portion of his cryptocurrency stash that’s verifiable in McGrathNicol’s public audit record is suspiciously large.

 More circumstantially, Wright’s blog, his public records, and his verified writings on mail lists and Twitter sketch a man who matches with Satoshi Nakamoto’s known characteristics well enough to place him leagues above other candidates. He’s a former subscriber to the 1990s "cypherpunks" mailing list devoted to anti-authoritarianism and encryption, an advocate of gold as a financial tool, an accomplished C++ coder, a security professional plausibly capable of writing a tough-to-hack protocol like bitcoin, a libertarian who battled with tax authorities, and a fan of Japanese culture.

 He is also—parallels to Nakamoto aside—a strange and remarkable person: an almost obsessive autodidact and double-PhD who once boasted of obtaining new graduate degrees at a rate of about one a year. He’s a climate-change denier, a serial entrepreneur who started companies ranging from security consultancies to a bitcoin bank, and an eccentric who wrote on his blog that he once accepted a challenge to create a pencil from scratch and spent years on the problem, going so far as to make his own bricks to build his own kiln in which to mix the pencil’s graphite.

 Wright’s blogging and leaked emails describe a man so committed to an unproven cryptocurrency idea that he mortgaged three properties and invested more than $1 million in computers, power, and connectivity—even going so far as to lay fiberoptic cables to his remote rural home in eastern Australia to mine the first bitcoins. His company, Tulip Trading, built two supercomputers that have officially ranked among the top 500 in the world, both seemingly related to his cryptocurrency projects. (Wright seems to enjoy tulip references, a likely taunt at those who have compared bitcoin to the Netherlands’ 17th century "tulip bubble.") The first of those supercomputers he named Sukuriputo Okane—Japanese for "script money." Another, named Co1n, holds the title of the world’s most powerful privately owned supercomputer. As Wright told the Bitcoin Investor’s conference, he’s applying that second machine towards the mysterious task of "modeling Bitcoin’s scalability," and meanwhile building an even more powerful supercomputing cluster in Iceland because of its cheap geothermal power.

 Bitcoin watchers have long wondered why the giant cache of coins they attribute to Satoshi Nakamoto never moved on the bitcoin’s publicly visible blockchain. Wright’s "Tulip" trust fund of 1.1 million bitcoins may hold the key to that mystery. The trust fund PDF signed by Wright’s late friend David Kleiman keeps those coins locked in place until 2020, yet gives Wright the freedom to borrow them for applications including "research into peer-to-peer systems" and "commercial activities that enhance the value and position of bitcoin."

 Despite those exceptions to the trust’s rules, the million-coin hoard has yet to budge, even after Kleiman’s death in 2013. That may be because Wright could be keeping the coins in place as an investment. He could be leveraging the trust in less visible ways, like legally transferring ownership of money to fund his companies while still leaving it at the same bitcoin address. Or he might still be waiting for January 1st, 2020, a countdown to a date that could take the lid off the biggest cryptocurrency fortune in history.

 Coming Clean

 In spite of all the clues as to Wright’s possible secret life—some that he apparently placed himself—Wright has demonstrated such a talent for obfuscation and a love of privacy that he’s never even raised the suspicions of most Nakamoto-worshipping bitcoiners. "If we don't want to go out there and say ‘I’m a billionaire,’ or ‘I’m running XYZ,’ or ‘this is my life,’ I shouldn't have to tell people that," Wright told the Las Vegas crowd in October when an audience member asked his thoughts about what bitcoin means for property rights. "We should be able to choose how we live."

 In the leaked emails, Wright seems to bristle at the few times anyone has attempted to out bitcoin’s creator. "I am not from the bloody USA! Nor am I called Dorien [sic]," reads a message from Wright to a colleague dated March 6, 2014. That’s the same day as Newsweek’s largely discredited story claimed the inventor of bitcoin to be the American Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto.

 If Wright is bitcoin's creator, the revelation of his work carries more importance than merely sating the curiosity of a few million geeks.

 Wright seemed to take personal offense at the Newsweek story. "I do not want to be your posterboy. I am not found and I do not want to be," he writes in another message the same day. The email, addressed to a colleague and titled "please leak," may have been an early draft of the Nakamoto’s posted denial of Newsweek’s story. That public denial, a rare message from Nakamoto posted from his account on the P2P Foundation forum, simply read “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.” But Wright’s private response was far angrier. "Stop looking... Do you know what privacy means? A gift freely given is just that and no more!"

 At times, however, Wright has seemed practically envious of Nakamoto. "People love my secret identity and hate me," he complained to Kleiman in a leaked email from 2011. "I have hundreds of papers. Satoshi has one. Nothing, just one bloody paper and I [can’t] associate myself with ME!"

 If Wright is bitcoin’s creator, the revelation of his work carries more importance than merely sating the curiosity of a few million geeks. The bitcoin economy would need to consider that if his million-bitcoin trust unlocks in 2020, Wright and those to whom he may have assigned hundreds of thousands of bitcoins would be free to sell them on the open market, potentially tanking the cryptocurrency’s price; debates within the bitcoin community like the current fracas over bitcoin’s "block size” may look to long-lost Nakamoto for guidance; the world would have to grapple with the full scope of Wright's vision when he unleashes the result of his companies' post-bitcoin research. The other suspected Satoshis may finally get a reprieve from nosey reporters like us. And the intellectual history of cryptocurrencies would be forever rewritten.

 Wright himself, despite his hostile response to Satoshi-seekers, has lately seemed to be dropping clues of a double life. In the last two years he’s started to write more frequently about bitcoin on his blog; he’s even peppered Twitter with hints (Though he also deleted many of those earlier this month and made his tweets private.)

 "'Identity' is not your name. Where people go wrong is that they do not see it to be the set of shared experiences with other individuals," he wrote in one tweet in October.

 When a UCLA professor nominated Satoshi Nakamoto for a Nobel Prize earlier this month—and he was declared ineligible due to the mystery of his identity—Wright lashed out. "If Satoshi-chan was made for an ACM turing price [sic] or an Alfred Nobel in Economics he would let you bloody know that," he wrote on twitter, using the Japanese "chan" suffix that indicates familiarity or a nickname.

 "I never desired to be a leader but the choice is not mine," reads a third recent tweet from Wright. "We are a product of the things we create. They change us."

 In one cryptic and meandering blog post in September in which Wright takes stock of his long career, he even seems to concede that no one can build and wield the wealth that Satoshi Nakamoto has amassed and remain hidden indefinitely. "There is a certain power and mystery in secrets," Wright mused.

 "Am slowly coming to the realisation and acceptance," he added, "No secret remains forever."

 Update 12/14/2015 2:40pm: New clues following the publication of this story have shown inconsistencies in Wright's academic and supercomputing claims that may point to the second, strange possibility we noted: an elaborate, long-planned hoax.

 You may also like: ||||| SYDNEY, Australia — The Australian authorities on Wednesday raided the home of a computer expert and entrepreneur in suburban Sydney, just hours after two news outlets identified the man as a likely creator of the digital currency Bitcoin.

 The Australian Federal Police said the raid on the residence of the man, Craig Steven Wright, was for a tax investigation, and a spokesman said it had no connection to the Bitcoin reports. The Australian Taxation Office, which asked the police to carry out the raid, declined to comment on “any individual’s or entity’s tax affairs.”

 The raid, in the leafy suburb of Gordon on Sydney’s upper north shore, came hours after reports in Wired magazine and Gizmodo drew strong links between Mr. Wright and Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of the virtual currency that has grown to billions of dollars in total value.

 The identity of Mr. Nakamoto has been a mystery since the currency’s computer code was released in 2009, with several false leads having been aired and debunked. The growing value of Bitcoin, which is managed by computers that run its peer-to-peer software, has driven the search for its creator or creators.

 Wired, which was first to identify Mr. Wright as a possible inventor of the currency, cited old blog posts as well as leaked documents and emails. The magazine acknowledged that the trail of clues could be a hoax, but it added: “If Wright is seeking to fake his Nakamoto connection, his hoax would be practically as ambitious as Bitcoin itself.”

 The Gizmodo report said that Mr. Wright and Dave Kleiman, an American who died in 2013, “were involved in the development of the digital currency.”

 Both outlets cited what was described as a transcript of a 2014 meeting among Mr. Wright, lawyers and tax officials, in which he is quoted as saying, “I did my best to try and hide the fact that I’ve been running Bitcoin since 2009.”

 “By the end of this, I think half the world is going to bloody know,” he added, according to the transcript.

 Efforts to reach Mr. Wright on Wednesday were unsuccessful.

 A Newsweek investigation in 2014 incorrectly identified the Bitcoin creator as Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a physicist living with his mother in Southern California. He denied the report, saying he had only learned of Bitcoin weeks earlier after a reporter contacted his son. |||||
What is a shorter version of the above article?

– Wired says it has uncovered "the strongest evidence yet of Satoshi Nakamoto's true identity." Nakamoto, the alias for the creator of Bitcoin, has never been unmasked publicly, but Wired's Andy Greenberg and Gwern Branwen name Australian Craig Wright, 44, as the most likely candidate. "Either Wright invented Bitcoin, or he's a brilliant hoaxer," they write. Australian police seem to be believers: They raided Wright's home in Sydney on Wednesday, reports the New York Times. Wired notes that Wright—founder of supercomputing firm Cloudcroft, per Gizmodo—blogged about releasing a "cryptocurrency paper" a few months before the Bitcoin white paper was revealed in November 2008, though that post was edited in 2013. He also used an encryption key linked to satoshin@vistomail.com. Nakamoto used satoshi@vistomail.com to introduce the white paper. Wright, who owns at least $60 million in Bitcoin, also has access to 1.1 million Bitcoins worth $605 million—the same amount attributed to Nakamoto. "I am not from the bloody USA! Nor am I called Dorien [sic]," Wright wrote in a leaked email sent the same day Newsweek claimed American Dorian Nakamoto as Bitcoin's inventor. Leaked transcripts from meetings with Wright's attorneys in February 2014 also quote him as saying: "I did my best to try and hide the fact that I've been running Bitcoin since 2009 … By the end of this I think half the world is going to bloody know." Then, in an odd interview at the Bitcoin Investor Conference, a moderator asked Wright how he first learned about Bitcoin. "Um, I've been involved with all this for a long time," he said after a long pause. "I—try and stay—I keep my head down." After sending an encrypted email to Wright suggesting he was Nakamoto, Wired received this response: "You seem to know a few things. More than you should." With a verified identity, Nakamoto could be nominated for a 2016 Nobel Prize, per CoinReport. (Click for more from Wired.)


– "Lucky" Whitehead's first name hasn't proved prescient lately, though he doesn't bear any fault in the most recent matter. Whitehead (whose real first name is Rodney, per NBC News), who used to be a wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, was cut from the team Monday during training camp after a case of mistaken identity in a Virginia shoplifting incident—and Prince William County cops there now admit they've discovered he had nothing to do with the crime. A man busted at the scene for stealing items at a Wawa convenience store on June 22 was questioned by police and verbally provided his name, date of birth, and Social Security number, as he didn't have ID on him—all of which matched Whitehead's. The suspect was released, but when he blew off a court hearing for the case, an arrest warrant was issued, with Lucky Whitehead's name on it. After the news came out, Whitehead was released from his employer, with a team exec alluding to past incidents: "We just decided it was time to go in a different direction." At a Tuesday presser, Cowboys coach Jason Garrett was asked about the mix-up and release—Prince County Police now say they "regret the impact" of their error, though they add they acted in "good faith" based on their information—but Garrett simply repeated 10 times, in different variations, per ESPN: "We made a decision we felt was in the best interest of the Dallas Cowboys." Meanwhile, Whitehead tells the Dallas Morning News he was "blindsided." "Let's not sugarcoat anything. I was pretty much … called a liar," he adds, though he notes his teammates believed him. "He deserved better from law enforcement. We all do," Whitehead's agent tells NBC, demurring when asked if they would try to get his job back.

Expand this summary.

OXNARD, California -- Dallas Cowboys coach Jason Garrett's news conference was dominated by talk of recently cut wide receiver Lucky Whitehead and only Whitehead.

 The coach spoke for a little more than three minutes.

 Here is the transcript of the back-and-forth between the media and Garrett.

 On whether he regrets Whitehead's being cut and whether he will address the team about the move:

 Garrett: Yesterday we made a decision that was deemed to be in the best interest of the Dallas Cowboys. We're standing by that decision. We're going to move on.

 On whether the decision to cut Whitehead was based on the idea of the arrest:

 Garrett: Yesterday we made a decision we felt was the best interest of the Dallas Cowboys. We're going to stand by that decision. We're going to move on.

 On whether it is fair to Whitehead to say the same thing over and over:

 Garrett: It's the truth. We made a decision we felt was in the best interest of the Dallas Cowboys.

 On whether there are some people working for the Dallas Cowboys who are just too stupid to work for this team:

 Garrett: I'll stand by the statement that I made. We made a decision yesterday that we felt was in the best interest of the Dallas Cowboys. We're going to stand by that decision. We're going to move forward.

 On sending the wrong message by rushing to judgment:

 Garrett: Yesterday we made a decision that we felt that was in the best interest of the Dallas Cowboys. We're going to stand by that decision. We're going to move forward.

 On why the decision wasn't made before camp:

 Garrett: Again, guys, I'm not going to continue to address this. We made a decision that we felt was in the best interest of the Dallas Cowboys. We're going to stand by that decision and we're going to move on.

 On whether he knows something the media doesn't:

 Garrett: We know lot a lot of things about our players that you guys don't know.

 On why, if team officials knew more, Whitehead was on the team in the first place:

 Garrett: Guys, we made a decision yesterday that we felt was in the best interest of our team. And in evaluating the particular situation and the context of that situation, we felt like we made a decision in regards to Lucky that was right for our team. And we stand by that decision.

 On whether Garrett was happy it turned out Whitehead was not involved:

 Garrett: I think the best thing for Lucky is to have a clean slate. And he'll have a new opportunity somewhere else. That's good for him. And again, it's in the best interest of our football team.

 On whether Whitehead said he did not do it:

 Garrett: We had a number of conversations regarding this. And again, we made a decision that we think is in the best interest of the Dallas Cowboys.

 On why others with issues are still on the roster:

 Garrett: Guys, this will be the last time I'll say it. I appreciate your interest in it. We made a decision yesterday in regards to Lucky Whitehead that we think is in the best interest of the Dallas Cowboys. We're standing that by that decision. We're going to move forward. If you have any other football questions, I’m happy to answer them.

 He was met with silence. ||||| He didn't do it — and now police are saying it, too.

 Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Lucky Whitehead was wrongly implicated in a shoplifting arrest in Virginia last month, Prince William County police confirmed Tuesday — an incident that apparently led the team to drop him just hours after a training camp practice Monday.

 In a statement about the mix-up, police said they acted in "good faith" when they initially investigated the case involving Whitehead, whose actual first name is Rodney. But they pledged to work with the Prince William County Commonwealth's Attorneys Office to officially clear the young NFL player.

 Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Lucky Whitehead runs onto the field for practice at the NFL team's football training camp in Oxnard, California, on July 24, 2017. Michael Owen Baker / AP

 The bizarre episode kicked off when someone stole items at a Wawa convenience store on June 22, and the clerk pointed out the suspect at the scene, police said. That man did not have identification on him, but verbally provided a name, date of birth and Social Security Number that matched Whitehead's.

 Officers verified the information through the state Department of Motor Vehicles database, and compared the photo of 25-year-old Whitehead in the system with the man arrested.

 The suspect was let go and given a July 6 summons to appear in court on a misdemeanor petty larceny charge after the items were determined to be less than $200.

 Police apparently had no reason to believe the man they questioned at the time was not Whitehead, who is from Manassas in Prince William County. Police Sgt. Jonathan Perok told NBC News that "we have no idea" how the man had obtained that data.

 "At this point, the police department is also confident in confirming that Mr. Whitehead's identity was falsely provided to police during the investigation," police said in a statement. "The police department is currently seeking the identity of the man involved in the incident."

 The police department added that it "regrets the impact" that the incorrect information had on Whitehead.

 “ It cost my player his job. He deserved better from law enforcement.”

 The football player's agent, David Rich, said police dropped the ball during its investigation and is "disappointed" by the error.

 "It cost my player his job," Rich said in an email. "He deserved better from law enforcement. We all do."

 Whitehead was eventually alerted to his involvement in the case when the man who claimed to be him was absent during a court hearing and a warrant was put out for Whitehead's arrest.

 Whitehead maintained his innocence when the news broke and said he wasn't even in Virginia when the incident occurred.

 "I don't know who got arrested in Virginia. But it wasn't me. I NEVER once had an altercation with the cops. And come to find out, this happened, they say, at 1:34 a.m. at a Wawa in Woodbridge, Virginia [on a day] that I was in Dallas until 11:20 a.m.," he told CowboysHQ.com.

 Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones said in a statement Monday that Whitehead was cut after he was given "a lot of different chances along the way going back to last year. I think we just decided it was time to go in a different direction."

 Whitehead, who joined the team in 2015 with a three-year, $1.58 million contract, also made headlines recently for saying on social media that his dog was stolen and taken for ransom. The dog was later recovered.

 A Cowboys spokesman did not return an email seeking comment following the announcement of Whitehead's innocence.

 Whitehead told the Dallas Morning News on Tuesday that he doesn't know who could have obtained his personal information and feels hurt that his team didn't give him the chance to clear his name.

 "Let's not sugarcoat anything," Whitehead said. "I was pretty much being called a liar."

 When asked whether Whitehead would seek his job back or why the team has kept other players who have courted controversy, including star running back Ezekiel Elliott, his agent declined to comment.

 "I've got thoughts but probably best I don't share them," Rich said. |||||


Write an article based on this summary:

– Cool—and/or creepy—news out of Japan, where researchers at the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University have created a human ear ... on the back of a rat. The researchers used stem cells that grew into ear cartilage, shaping the cells into an ear by putting them in "biological tubing," Discovery News reports. More specifically, they used "induced pluripotent stem cells," which the National Institutes of Health explains are "adult cells that have been genetically reprogrammed to an embryonic stem cell-like state." The ear-shaped cartilage was implanted under a rat's skin, where it was allowed to grow for two months; the tubing dissolved and a 2-inch-long ear was left behind. The researchers believe this technology could be used to treat people who are born with no ears or with smaller-than-normal ears, Japan Today reports. It could also be used to repair ears disfigured in accidents, Discovery adds. In the case of a child born with a missing or misshapen ear, the researchers note that the ear they created is "living," and thus would develop and grow along with the child. A clinical trial involving humans is expected to start in five years. In 2013, researchers in Boston used sheep cells, bovine collagen, and an ear-shaped titanium wire frame to grow an ear on the back of another rat, Discovery notes. (These creatures can grow the heads and brains of other species.)

TOKYO —

 The University of Tokyo and Kyoto University said Friday they have succeeded in creating human ear cartilage from iPS cells.

 The University of Tokyo released photos of a rat with cartilage in the shape of a human ear implanted on its back. The researchers hope they can use the new technology in treating patients born without ears or with small ears, with a clinical study involving humans expected to start in five years.

 The researchers at the two state-run universities cultured human induced pluripotent stem cells into cartilage cells, which were then made into numerous tiny balls.

 They filled a plastic tube with the diameter of about 3 millimeters with the balls. Using three such tubes, the researchers shaped a human ear and implanted it onto the back of a rat.

 In about two months, the tubes dissolved, leaving behind on the animal’s back what looks like a 5-centimeter human ear.

 Induced pluripotent stem cells could grow into various human tissues and they are considered promising in the field of regenerative medicine.

 © KYODO ||||| One in 10 American adults will have some level of chronic kidney disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Currently around 600,000 patients in the U.S. have chronic kidney failure. Most rely on dialysis while a fraction of them actually get transplants. Scientists from the University of California, San Francisco are on a mission to create a sophisticated artificial kidney device made with human kidney cells, silicon nanofilters and powered by blood pressure. The project, led by UCSF nephrologist William Fissell and bioengineering professor Shuvo Roy, aims to begin testing the kidney device in 2017.

 Little by little, bioengineered intestines are being grown in the lab to diagnose digestive disorders and to help patients born without a piece of intestine. In 2011, Cornell biological and environmental engineering assistant professor John March began collaborating with Pittsburgh-based pediatric surgeon David Hackam on a small artificial intestine using collagen and stem cells. Then last year in Switzerland, EPFL professor Martin Gijs led a project in the Laboratory of Microsystems to create a miniature intestinal wall from cultured epithelial cells and electronics called NutriChip to identify foods that cause inflammation. Scientists at Harvard’s Wyss Institute also made a “gut-on-a chip” to mimic the real thing using intestinal cells in a tiny silicon polymer device.

 When a ruptured or degenerating disc causes chronic back pain, treatment is limited. At worst, patients undergo surgery to fuse vertebrae together and then have limited flexibility. Over the past several years artificial discs have emerged as an alternative, but they can wear out as they work. In 2011, a research team from Cornell University bioengineered implants using gel and collagen seeded with rat cells that were then successfully placed into rat spines. This summer Duke bioengineers took things further, coming up with a gel mixture they think can help regenerate tissue when injected into the space between discs.

 In April, after an international team of surgeons spent nine hours operating on her at Children's Hospital of Illinois in Peoria, 32-month old Hannah Warren became the youngest patient to ever receive a bioengineered organ. Scientists had made a windpipe for her using her own bone marrow cells. Born without a trachea, she needed help breathing, eating, drinking and talking. Harvard Bioscience created the custom scaffold and bioreactor for the experimental procedure. Sadly Hannah died on July 7 due to complications from a more recent surgery on her esophagus. Despite the high risks, bioengineers say they will continue to move ahead.

 Bioengineers are working on it, but the liver is one of the largest, most challenging organs to recreate. In 2010 bioengineers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center grew miniature livers in the lab using decellularized animal livers for the structure and human cells. This month, a team from the Yokohama City University Graduate School of Medicine published results of a study where they reprogrammed human adult skin cells, added other cell types, and got them to grow into early-stage liver “buds.” Currently the scientists can produce about 100 of them, but the study’s lead author Takanori Takebe told the Wall Street Journal that even a partial liver would require tens of thousands.

 Artificial heart devices have been surgically implanted since the 1980s, but no device has been able to replace the human heart as effectively as a healthy biological one. After all, a human heart pumps 35 million times in a single year. Recently scientists have made advances in adding more biological material to artificial heart devices. In May the French company Carmat prepared to test an artificial device containing cow heart tissue. At Massachusetts General Hospital, surgeon Harald C. Ott and his team are working on a bioartificial heart scaffold while MIT researchers recently printed functional heart tissue from rodent cells.

 Being able to make blood vessels in the lab from a patient’s own cells could mean better treatments for cardiovascular disease, kidney disease and diabetes. In 2011, the head of California-based Cytograft Tissue Engineering reported progress in a study where three end-stage kidney disease patients were implanted with blood vessels bioengineered in the lab. After eight months the grafts continued to work well, easing access to dialysis. Then this month a team at Massachusetts General Hospital found a way to encourage stem-like cells to develop into vascular precursor cells, a key step on the way to becoming blood vessel cells. They generated long-lasting blood vessels in living mice.

 Surgeon Anthony Atala directs the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine and is known for growing new human cells, tissues and organs -- particularly ones that advance urology. Atala and his team’s bioengineered bladders succeeded in clinical trials. The bladders were constructed from patients’ cells that were grown over two months on a biodegradable scaffold and then implanted. Patients included children with spina bifida who risked kidney failure. It’s been several years since then and the results are positive. “These constructs appear to be doing well as patients get older and grow,” Atala told the NIH Record.

 Reproducing 3-D biological structures, particularly the complex human ear, presents significant challenges for bioengineers. A team at Princeton University led by mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor Michael McAlpine used 3-D printing technology to make a functional ear from calf cells and electronic materials. The ear that debuted in May 2013 is no mere replacement -- it can pick up radio frequencies well beyond the range that human ears normally detect.

 Producing small amounts of artificial skin to graft on patients and use for toxicity testing has been possible for years. Human skin cells are cultivated in the lab and then embedded in a collagen scaffold. In 2011, the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology introduced a system that can rapidly manufacture two-layer artificial skin models. Their Tissue Factory has the capacity to make 5,000 skin sheets in a month.

 When physicians run out of treatment options they look to a nascent field known as bioengineering. Specialized scientists apply engineering principles to biological systems, opening up the possibility of creating new human tissue, organs, blood and even corneas such as the one shown here. Waiting lists for organ transplants continue to be lengthy so the race to save lives with bioengineered body parts is on. Here’s a look at some of the most notable achievements in recent years.

 For the first time, scientists have used stem cells to grow an adult-size human ear on the back of a rat.

 The scientists, who come from the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University, say the ear could be grown to repair faces disfigured in battle or accidents and also help people born without ears or with ear deformities.

 10 Amazing Parts Created Outside The Body

 In the United States alone, a range of about 1 to 5 children out of 10,000 are born with misshapen or missing ears.

 To grow the ear, the team induced pluripotent stem cells to grow into ear cartilage. Those cells were then placed into a kind of biological tubing shaped roughly as an ear.

 The ear form was then implanted under the skin of a live rat and the cells were left to grow for about two months. Around that time, the tubes dissolved, leaving behind the human ear about 2 inches long.

 8 Animals That Can Regrow Their Body Parts

 It’s not the first time researchers have grown an ear on the back of a rat.

 Back in 2013, a team from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston used bovine collagen and cells from sheep to grow an ear on a titanium wire frame shaped like the body part.

 So-called tissue engineering is being explored to grow other kinds of body parts, too, including noses and windpipes.

 Human-Animal Hybrids Growing For Organ Transplants

 The Japanese researchers say because their ear is a living part, it would develop as a child grew.

 They hope to start clinical trials in about five years.

 via The Daily Mail |||||


Here is a news article: FRANKLIN, TN (WKRN) — A Middle Tennessee family is raising awareness about a rare genetic disorder called LCHAD.

 It’s so rare that it only affects one in 100,000 children and one of them is a little boy from Franklin.

 Just by looking at 2-year-old Owen Torti, you would never know he has special medical needs.

 Owen has LCHAD, which means his body can not break down certain fats for energy.

 “It can get pretty serious pretty fast, and what that means is he has to eat around the clock. He can’t go that far without eating a full meal,” Kayla Torti, Owen’s mother, told News 2.

 If he goes without, his body begins breaking down muscle.

 Kayla Torti and husband Tyler Torti said he must eat every hour and is fed through a stomach tube.

 Owen was diagnosed with the disorder when he was just a week old.

 When his parents looked for more information online, there wasn’t much available.

 “When you find out your child has something you’ve never heard of before, you don’t know how to treat it, you also don’t know what it means long term… It can feel really lonely for parents initially,” Tyler Torti said.

 The Torti family isn’t alone. People they don’t even know are rallying around them.

 Two teams wearing shirts that said “All in for Owen” ran the Ragnar Relay through Tennessee to raise awareness for Owen and his metabolic disorder.

 Runners raised $15,000 to help pay the boy’s medical bills.

 Tyler Torti said the event made them feel loved, “like other people care.”

 Kayla and Tyler Torti said they are both carriers of LCHAD and if they have more children, there is a 25 percent chance they’ll have the disorder as well.

 The Torti family isn’t sure what the future will look like, but they are certain they want to get the word out.

 “Our hope is that if somebody next year is diagnosed with LCHAD and the parents are online googling trying to figure out what this stuff is, they might find us and feel this sort of sense of peace. That hey, this family is doing it and maybe I can too,” Kayla and Tyler Torti told News 2.

 The first LCHAD diagnosis wasn’t until the 1990’s. The oldest living person with the disorder the Torti’s have contacted is now 25.

 LCHAD was added to the newborn screening just six years ago.

 Click here to find out more.

 This slideshow requires JavaScript. ||||| There is magic that happens when you do something together that could never be done a lone. Running 200ish miles from Chattanooga to Nashville, TN is not an impossible feat but it takes true teamwork. Joshua Collier and his team know what it takes to support each other, and this weekend at Ragnar Tennessee they are running for a very special cause. This is their story:

 I run Ragnar for Owen Torti. Owen is just under the age of 2 and has a rare metabolic disorder- LCHAD. LCHAD is known as an orphan disease, which means no research or funding will be directed to finding a cure or long-term solution… unless light is shone on the disorder or a celebrity/organization steps in, raises awareness and leverages their platform (similar to the ALS ice-bucket challenge).

 What started as a group of 12 individuals simply looking for team building through the Ragnar Run is slowly turning into a movement at our office. Our entire company of 500 is becoming “all in for owen.” Together we are raising awareness and directing others to www.allinforowen.com. We now have two Ragnar teams, instead of one, who will be running for Owen in the upcoming run in Chattanooga, TN (Oct. 23-24). And in addition to raising awareness we will be raising funds to help sustain and encourage Owen’s family and LCHAD families worldwide. The families, like Owen’s, are weary and need someone to hand the baton off too so they can rest, recharge, and then pick-up the baton again and run the next part of their leg.

 So, “Why we run Ragnar?”

 I…no… we…the team AllinforOwen runs Ragnar for Owen Torti.

 We run because a group of 12 individuals has been transformed into a team.

 We run because one team has turned into two Ragnar teams.

 We run to raise awareness for a family whose son has a rare metabolic disorder.

 We run to bring an orphan disease (LCHAD) into the light.

 We run to connect families around the world, who are isolated by a disorder, to see that they are not alone.

 We run to raise awareness for a family who refuses to give up.

 We run to give HOPE to a family who is giving hope to others.

 We run because the Ragnar race is not just an event but a model of how we should run with and spur each other on… on a day to day basis.

  ||||| A Georgia family is hoping to raise awareness for their 23-month-old boy after he was diagnosed with a rare metabolic disorder that means he has to eat every hour to stay healthy.

 Owen Torti was diagnosed with LCHAD (Long-chain 3-hydroxy acyl-coenzyme A dehydrogenase) when he was just a newborn, his mother, Kayla Torti, told ABC News.

 The rare genetic disorder means Owen's body is unable to break down certain fatty acids into energy. As a result, he must eat nearly constantly or else his body would start to break down key muscles in the search for energy.

 "If we had breakfast and skipped lunch [our body] would use up the energy from breakfast ... [to] break down stored fats for energy," Torti explained. "Owen’s body cannot do that. It breaks down his muscles and can cause problems with kidneys or liver or heart."

 Despite the genetic illness, Owen still looks and acts much like any other toddler, Torti said.

 "He wants to act like a normal 2-year-old and he wants to go and play and run around as long as the other 2-year-olds," Torti said. "Unfortunately, we have to have him sit down and take little breaks. ... He doesn’t know how to pace himself."

 The National Institutes of Health does not have a firm estimate for how often the disease appears in the U.S. but says in Finland it appears in about 1 of every 62,000 births. Torti said she was told by her doctors that the condition can be related to a syndrome called HELLP syndrome, which can affect a pregnant woman's red blood cells, liver enzymes and platelets.

 Since Owen needs to constantly be fed, he doesn't quite understand the purpose of a meal, Torti said.

 "From feeding Owen so frequently, he has a lot of oral aversion to eating," Torti explained to ABC News. "Solid foods is so hard for him right now."

 Torti said she is hopeful that as Owen grows, he'll be able have a fairly normal life as he learns what his limitations are.

 There’s not a lot known about how this will affect him in future and what he will and won’t be able to do, Torti said.

 "We’re hopeful that he can manage and he’ll know his body enough,” she said. ||||| Owen was born 9 weeks premature. At 7 days old Owen was diagnosed with LCHAD (Long-chain 3-hydroxy acyl-coenzyme A dehydrogenase) via the newborn screening.

 LCHAD is a rare condition that prevents the body from converting certain fats to energy.

 Because Owen’s body cannot break down fat, once his tiny storage of energy is depleted his body starts looking for other sources for energy. When it starts breaking down his muscles for energy, the slippery slope of a metabolic crisis has begun.

 Owen has been hospitalized 12 times in 20 months – primarily due to metabolic crisis. During a metabolic crisis, he experiences muscle breakdown. If not treated, breathing problems, seizures, coma and sometimes even death can occur.

 Owen is on a special medical formula called Lipistart. Owen has never been able to eat/drink much and now no longer eats or drinks anything by mouth. At 16 months Owen had a G-Tube placed to allow assistance with feeding him.

 Owen needs to enter an intensive feeding program through Baylor in Dallas, TX

 Money raised will help with: Past medical bills. Paying for formula that is not covered by insurance. The feeding program.

 This has been a journey that Kayla and Tyler did not anticipate - filled with fear, tears, anger, questions, laughter, joy and much prayer. They have found strength in each other, in the amazing love and support from those who have followed Owen’s story, and in their faith. Owen’s name means “young warrior” and he is a fighter. We believe God has big plans for this precious little boy.

 Below is more of their story through the eyes of Gammy...

 I am “Gammy” to Owen; Mom to Kayla; and the “team mom” where I work. Three months ago, a couple of guys from my office decided they would like to participate in the 200 mile Ragnar Relay. Within a few days the idea turned into a team of 12 guys wanting to do more than run for the typical reasons of getting in shape and team building – they wanted to run for a bigger purpose. They decided to run for my 23 month old grandson Owen, who has a rare metabolic disorder called LCHAD. I was overwhelmed. When I called and told Kayla, we both cried and she said it was so amazing for them to run for Owen because this is something he would not be able to do because of LCHAD.

 “All in for Owen” has truly become a team effort – my entire department and another running team from our office has joined. No words can express the depth of gratitude for all those who have given of their time and resources. Not only has the love of all those who have helped with this project brought strength to Kayla and Tyler, but our desire is that sharing their story will give hope to others who face unexpected challenges.

 On November 15, 2013 life forever changed for Kayla and Tyler Torti. After two years of infertility, they were beyond thrilled to find out they were going to a have baby! At 31 weeks, Kayla realized that something was wrong and was told to go to the hospital. She was diagnosed with HELLP Syndrome which was caused from Owen’s disorder. The doctor explained that to protect Kayla from the possibility of having a stroke or her liver rupturing, they needed to quickly do a c-section. Within a few hours, Owen entered the world at 3 lbs.14 oz. and spent the next 39 days in the NICU.

 Because of the Newborn Screening, within a few days of his birth, the doctor’s broke the news that Owen had LCHAD – an orphan disease that affects around 1 in 100,000 children. Even the medical community, other than the genetics team, knew very little about this disorder. So began a frightening, unknown journey of caring for a baby whose body could not break down long-chain fats and had to be fed every 3 hours around the clock to prevent his body from breaking down muscles for energy.

 Owen is a happy, fun little boy. To look at Owen, you would never dream he is physically fragile and that in these past 23 months has had to be hospitalized 12 times. Normal things like teething, a growth spurt, a common cold, getting too hot, getting too cold – can all cause Owen to go into a metabolic crisis. One of the primary ways that the doctor monitors his condition is through a CK (Creatine Kinase) blood test. This test provides information to know the level of muscle break down which releases protein molecules and enzymes into the bloodstream and puts a lot of pressure on the kidneys. To put this in perspective: the CK level for an athlete who has run a triathalon will be around 20,000. Owen’s numbers have gone as high as 169,000. Owen’s normal level should be 50-150. When his CK numbers are high it creates a risk to his heart, kidneys, liver and other organs. A number of children who have LCHAD have lost their sight.

 It is beyond difficult to watch Owen as he experiences a metabolic crisis. He loses muscle tone – including the ability to hold up his head. He often is too weak to even cry during these times. After each crisis, he regresses in walking because of the break down and weakness in his muscles. But through it all, he smiles.

 Owen has always struggled not only with eating, but vomiting. Because his life and health depend on him eating, at 16 months old the decision was made that Owen would benefit from a G-tube. He continues to vomit daily and the eating aversion has become so severe he is now unable to eat or drink anything by mouth so all of his nutrition comes through the feeding tube. He is fed every hour through the G-tube during the day, and at night or naptime he is on continuous feed.

 Through Baylor Health in Dallas, TX there is an inpatient feeding program that has a team of professionals (psychologist, occupational therapist, physical therapist, feeding therapist) that work with babies/children facing severe eating disorders. This program has seen amazing results. Although there is a waiting list, hopefully in January he will be accepted into the program.

 With a grateful heart.....

 LeeAnn (Gammy) |||||
A summary of this is?

– To all the new parents struggling to feed their newborn every two to three hours, imagine having to do it every hour—for years. Such is reality for the Torti family in Tennessee, whose son, Owen, now 23 months, was diagnosed with the rare metabolic disorder LCHAD (long-chain 3-hydroxyacyl-coenzyme A dehydrogenase) as an infant. Because his body doesn't break down certain foods into energy, Owen is at risk of his body breaking down his muscles for energy if he goes without food for more than an hour, reports ABC News. "He wants to act like a normal 2-year-old and he wants to go and play and run around as long as the other 2-year-olds," mom Kayla Torti says. "Unfortunately, we have to have him sit down and take little breaks. He doesn't know how to pace himself." LCHAD, which was first diagnosed in the 1990s, is so rare it only affects one in every 100,000 newborns and wasn't even on newborn screening tests until six years ago, reports WKRN Nashville. To help with medical bills, two teams recently ran the Ragnar Relay through Tennessee wearing "All in for Owen" shirts and raised $15,000. Owen was born nine weeks premature, according to the family's YouCaring page, and has been hospitalized 12 times in 20 months, typically when a metabolic breakdown causes breathing problems and seizures. If not treated, he could slip into a coma and even die. With the constant eating, his mother says he's developed an oral aversion to food and is on a special medical formula called Lipistart, administered largely through a feeding tube. The Tortis have a 25% chance of having a second child with the same disorder. (These parents are losing both their sons to a rare brain disease.)


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– A 20-year-old man streamed himself hanging his 11-month-old daughter on Facebook Live before killing himself Monday evening in a vacant hotel in Thailand, the AP reports. According to the New York Times, a four-minute video shows a crying Wuttisan Wongtalay tying a noose around his daughter's neck and dropping her over the side of the hotel in Phuket. Family members—including the baby's mother—saw the video and called police, the BBC reports. Officers arrived to find Wongtalay having hanged himself as well. Police say Wongtalay was jealous and upset with his wife, who he had accused of being with another man. The video of Wongtalay killing his daughter was on Facebook for about 20 hours before the company removed it. Facebook sent condolences to the family, calling the incident "appalling." "Our hearts go out to the family of the victim," Facebook said in a statement. The company had already promised to review its Facebook Live procedures this month after a man in Cleveland streamed himself killing an elderly man. Facebook Live has also seen live-streamed sex abuse, rape, suicide, and child abuse this year.

BANGKOK (AP) — A man in Thailand upset with his wife hanged their 11-month-old daughter on Facebook Live and then killed himself, police said Tuesday.

 Police Col. Jirasak Siemsak said officers found the bodies of 20-year-old Wuttisan Wongtalay and the baby in an abandoned hotel in Phuket province after receiving reports of the video.

 "He felt neglected by his wife because they had been fighting so he took his 11-month-old daughter to the site of the crime which is the abandoned hotel," Jirasak said. "Then we found the bodies hanging off the hotel."

 The man made the broadcast Monday evening, and the video was made inaccessible by Facebook late Tuesday afternoon.

 "The mother of the child was crying and was very sad," Jirasak said. "I am also very sad. It is a personal dispute and they were still very young."

 The incident came less than two weeks after a man in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States broadcast himself on Facebook Live shooting a man to death. A series of other offensive broadcasts, including sexual assaults, has caused Facebook to seek ways to block such videos as quickly as possible.

 Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said last week that his company has "a lot of work" to do on the problem.

 The chief investigator in the Phuket case, Lt. Jula-at Suwannin, said police have yet to question Wuttisan's 20-year-old widow because they are giving her time to grieve.

 In Thailand, the potential for problems with Facebook Live became an issue last May when local media used the platform to broadcast live video of a university lecturer who was locked in a six-hour standoff with police who were seeking him in the shooting deaths of two colleagues. After negotiations for his surrender failed, he fatally shot himself with a handgun, a moment that was shown live. ||||| Image copyright Reuters Image caption The deaths took place at a deserted hotel in Phuket

 A Thai man filmed himself killing his baby daughter on Facebook Live, before taking his own life, Thai police say.

 The 21-year-old hanged his daughter, and then himself, at a deserted hotel in Phuket on Monday, reportedly after an argument with his wife.

 Facebook sent condolences to the family for the "appalling" incident and said that the content had now been removed.

 The company pledged a review of its processes after footage of a US killing stayed online for hours this month.

 The footage of the Thai killing had also been available on video sharing website YouTube, but the company took it down after the BBC alerted it to its presence.

 Social media anger

 Relatives of the Thai man, Wuttisan Wongtalay, saw the distressing footage and alerted the police - but the authorities arrived too late to save him and his daughter.

 In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said: "This is an appalling incident and our hearts go out to the family of the victim. There is absolutely no place for content of this kind on Facebook and it has now been removed."

 Read more:

 Reuters said two videos were posted, at 16:50 (09:50 GMT) and 16:57 on Monday, and were taken down at about 17:00 on Tuesday, roughly 24 hours later. Facebook has yet to confirm the times to the BBC.

 Thailand's ministry of digital economy said it had contacted Facebook on Tuesday afternoon about removing the videos.

 Ministry spokesman Somsak Khaosuwan told Reuters: "We will not be able to press charges against Facebook, because Facebook is the service provider and they acted according to their protocol when we sent our request. They co-operated very well."

 YouTube said it had taken down the video within 15 minutes of being told of its presence by the BBC.

 Its statement read: "YouTube has clear policies that outline what's acceptable to post and we quickly remove videos that break our rules when they're flagged."

 Shortly before the BBC alerted YouTube, the video was showing 2,351 views.

 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption US 'Facebook killer' manhunt - what happened?

 Thai social media users reacted with anger to the footage, while offering condolences to the family of the girl, BBC Thai editor Nopporn Wong-Anan says.

 Devastated relatives of the child, including the mother, picked up the body of the girl and her father from hospital on Tuesday.

 Following the US killing, Facebook said it was "constantly exploring ways that new technologies can help us make sure Facebook is a safe environment".

 "We prioritise reports with serious safety implications for our community, and are working on making that review process go even faster," blogged one of its executives last week.

 Separately on Tuesday, a court in Sweden jailed three men over the gang-rape of a woman in the city of Uppsala, 80km (50 miles) north of Stockholm, earlier this year and its live-streaming on Facebook.

 One man was jailed for two years and four months, and another for one year, both for rape. The third was jailed for six months for posting the rape on Facebook and failing to report it.

 Analysis: Leo Kelion, BBC technology desk editor

 This latest atrocity comes less than a fortnight after a US man bragged on Facebook Live about his murder of a 74-year-old man in Cleveland, having also posted a video of the killing to the social network.

 The platform's chief, Mark Zuckerberg, subsequently acknowledged he had "a lot of work" to do after it emerged the murder clip had remained online for more than two hours despite Facebook having received complaints in the meantime.

 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Mark Zuckerberg commented on the Cleveland killing at a conference last week

 Prior to that, Facebook Live broadcast the death of a Chicago man who was shot in the neck and head last June, and then in July a woman streamed the death of her boyfriend after he was shot by police in Minneapolis.

 There have also been reports of sexual assaults, animal abuse and teenage suicide having been shown.

 For its part, Facebook is trying to find ways for its review team - which employs thousands of people - to react to such content more quickly.

 In addition, the firm has developed software to prevent such footage being reshared in full on its service at a later point.

 And it is also exploring the use of artificial intelligence to automatically flag videos and photos that need to be reviewed rather than waiting for other users to report them.

 What it hasn't discussed is the idea of scrapping Facebook Live altogether.

 With Twitter and YouTube, among others, offering rival live-streaming products, doing so could put it at a disadvantage.

 But as a result, there will inevitably be further outrages and criticism because Facebook Live's popularity makes it all but impossible for the firm to keep a human eye over each broadcast. ||||| In Thailand, there was broad anger over the crime, which the police said appeared to have been driven by jealousy. Mr. Wongtalay had fought with his wife the night before the killing after searching her phone and accusing her of having another relationship.

 The video showed Mr. Wongtalay fixing a noose around his daughter’s neck and then dropping her off the side of a building. After a burst of crying, he climbed over the side to retrieve her body. His subsequent suicide was not shown online.

 A second video of the police taking both of the bodies down that night remained on Facebook.

 Facebook has been under scrutiny for what role it should play in overseeing the billions of posts and videos that are uploaded on its site each day. Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, addressed the issue at a company conference this month in response to a case in which a man in Cleveland posted a video of himself shooting and killing a 74-year-old stranger.

 The deaths in Thailand highlight the global scope of the problem. As Facebook has pushed to further ensconce itself in the lives of its users, it has urged them to share their most intimate experiences on its site. That has resulted in a flood of posts and videos in different languages, cultural contexts and time zones across the world. Accidents and crimes have also occasionally shown up, and patrolling that has proved difficult.

 Last summer, an Italian wing-suit base jumper streamed his own death in an accident, while in January, three men in Sweden were arrested and accused of raping a woman and broadcasting it to a private Facebook group. In February, two journalists were fatally shot during a Facebook Live broadcast in the Dominican Republic. |||||