Archive for December, 2013
Dangerous Air Pollution in Shanghai, Schoolchildren Ordered Indoors
December 6th, 2013Via: Guardian: Shanghai authorities ordered schoolchildren indoors and halted all construction on Friday as China’s financial hub suffered one its worst bouts of air pollution, bringing visibility down to a few dozen meters and obscuring the city’s spectacular skyline. The financial district was shrouded in a yellow haze and noticeably fewer people walked the city’s […]
Determination Can be Induced by Electrical Brain Stimulation
December 6th, 2013Via: Guardian: Doctors in the US have induced feelings of intense determination in two men by stimulating a part of their brains with gentle electric currents. The men were having a routine procedure to locate regions in their brains that caused epileptic seizures when they felt their heart rates rise, a sense of foreboding, and […]
Moon Express Unveils Commercial Lunar Lander Design
December 6th, 2013Via: NBC: A commercial space company has revealed the design of the lunar lander that it aims to send to the moon in 2015. California-based Moon Express unveiled the blueprint and first images of its MX-1 lunar lander on Thursday in Las Vegas, during the last day of the Autodesk University computer-aided design conference. In […]
Navy Launches a Drone from a Submerged Submarine
December 6th, 2013Via: Defense One: The Naval Research Lab just launched a drone from a submerged submarine – giving a huge edge to the future of special operations. It took six years to develop and launch an all-electric, fuel cell-powered, folding-wing drone aircraft from a submerged submarine. The eXperimental Fuel Cell Unmanned Aerial System, or XFC UAS, […]
What the Fluck
December 6th, 2013The piece below is about how journalists confronted the money power last century, but how they’re failing to do so today. The theory is that we need journalists to let us know that we’re being bent over a barrel, because we’re somehow confused about what’s happening to us. More muckraking journalists will save the day! […]
Newborn-to-Toddler Apptivity™ Seat
December 5th, 2013Television and other entertainment media should be avoided for infants and children under age 2. A child’s brain develops rapidly during these first years, and young children learn best by interacting with people, not screens. —American Academy of Pediatrics In other news: Screen Time Resulting in Children Turning Up to Doctors with Motor Delays, Decreased […]
Nissan Begins Autonomous Vehicle Trials on Japanese Roads
December 5th, 2013Via: Autoblog: Earlier this week, the Japanese automaker tested a self-driving Nissan Leaf electric vehicle on public roads for the first time and proclaimed the exercise a success in driverless motoring. Nissan equipped the vehicle with its so-called Autonomous Drive feature and took the car out onto Sagami Expressway in Kanagawa prefecture. The car, the […]
Someone’s Been Siphoning Data Through a Huge Security Hole in the Internet
December 5th, 2013Via: Wired: In 2008, two security researchers at the DefCon hacker conference demonstrated a massive security vulnerability in the worldwide internet traffic-routing system — a vulnerability so severe that it could allow intelligence agencies, corporate spies or criminals to intercept massive amounts of data, or even tamper with it on the fly. The traffic hijack, […]
Confirmed: NSA Tracking Cellphone Locations Worldwide
December 4th, 2013In summary, my thesis was that the NSA operation that Tice was involved with was related to tracking individual Americans, on the ground, in real time, using the mobile phone networks…I’m pretty sure that it knows more about all of us than we can imagine. —Cryptogon, 2007 I refuse to accept that this only targets […]
Google Working on Some Sort of Robotics Project
December 4th, 2013Via: New York Times: In an out-of-the-way Google office, two life-size humanoid robots hang suspended in a corner. If Amazon can imagine delivering books by drones, is it too much to think that Google might be planning to one day have one of the robots hop off an automated Google Car and race to your […]
