The Deadliest place on Earth
“It’s 50oC and has a humidity of 100%, less than a hundred people have been inside and it’s so deadly that even with respirators and suits of ice you can only survive for 20 minutes before your body starts to fail. It’s the nearest thing to visiting another planet – it’s going deep inside our own.
For ‘How Earth made us’ I have been lucky enough to film everywhere from tiny Pacific islands to the centre of the Sahara desert, yet nowhere could prepare me for filming in The Giant Crystal Cave – Cueva de los Cristales of Mexico.”
Read the full story at The Iron Ammonite
Man Jailed for Bulge in His Pocket
“Can you be an apparent law-abiding citizen, walking along a city street, and be arrested, essentially, for having a bulge in your pants? Yes, over in Richland, anyway.
That was the outcome of what happened to Dustin Warren Harrington around 11 p.m. Aug.13, 2005. Police Officer Scott Reiber thought Harrington looked suspicious walking through a neighborhood at night. He flipped a U-ey, and asked Harrington if they could talk.
As Reiber later explained somewhat confusingly in court, he “contact[ed]” Harrington because “[t]hat area, late at night, a gentleman walking – social contact. See what he was up to, just to talk.” Reiber asked Harrington where he was coming from. His sister’s house, said Harrington, but he didn’t know exactly where the house was. That made Reiber suspicious, and Harrington seemed nervous, according to court records. Reiber then noticed bulges in Harrington’s pockets. Reiber also thought it was suspicious that Harrington kept moving his hands in and out of them.
As a state trooper pulled up to assist, the Richland cop asked if he could pat down Harrington for officer safety, explaning he was not under arrest. Harrington agreed. Reiber then “felt a hard, cylindrical object in Harrington’s front right pocket,” according to the record. What’s this? asked the cop. “My glass,” said Harrington. “My meth pipe.” Immediately arrested, Harrington was also carrying a baggy of meth, found during the pat down.
Harrington was later convicted of unlawful possession of a controlled substance, and appealed, claiming the evidence was seized illegally. The cop, with the trooper backing him up, he said, effectively gestapo-ed him into turning over his incriminating goods. Today, the state Supreme Court unanimously agreed. “We conclude,” says Justice Richard Sanders, who authored today’s opinion, “the officers’ [cop and trooper] actions, when viewed cumulatively, impermissibly disturbed Harrington’s private affairs without authority of law and therefore constituted an unlawful seizure.” ”
Read more at Seattle Weekly
New Xbox game teaches you how to talk to girls
“Available now on Xbox Live Marketplace for 80 MS Points ( US$1), a new game that promisses to teach you how to chat with the ladies: Don’t Be Nervous Talking 2 Girls. It’s developed by Silver Dollar Games, a company that focus on making visual novels and similar games.
With the tagline “Are you nervous talking to girls? All you need is practice”, the game plays like a visual novel where you need to keep up a pleasant conversation with a female. Should you creep out the woman, she responds with threats, like calling the police on you. Maybe there’s a sequel in which you need to talk your way out of jail.
I don’t think anyone will want to play this in that huge television in the living room.”
Read more at Vgchartz
Police Force “Consulted Warlock Over Horse Plaiting”
“A police force has consulted a “warlock” in an attempt to unravel a spate of mysterious incidents of horses having their manes plaited.
Owners in west Dorset and the surrounding counties had believed that thieves plaited the manes of the beasts to identify which ones to steal when they returned at night.
But police officers investigating the incidents said there had been no thefts, and instead their enquiries led to the world of pagan ritual.”
Telegraph (thanks, Ferkle)
Americans consume 3,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information per year, not counting work
“The average American sucks down 34 gigabytes of data per day, half of that from video games, says the latest update of a study by two researchers at the University of California in San Diego. That’s enough to fill 7 DVD discs. Every day.
After video games (55%), the next highest data volume is TV (35%) and movies (10%). Computer data makes up one quarter of one percent, because most of it is text, which hardly takes up any data at all.
All told, Americans consumed 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008, and that despite the use of advanced compression algorithms to shrink down our media.
Surprisingly, the rate of data growth has been slow, much slower than the frequent doubling of computer chip components measured by Moore’s Law. Yet over the past 28 years, this growth has multiplied itself into a four-fold increase in bytes and a 140 percent increase in the number of words absorbed by Americans since 1980.
The study, available as a 37-page PDF download, breaks down digital data consumption — not counting that done at work — into several categories.”
Read more at Venture Beat
Cold War Vintage Ads
The Red Menace: fascinating vintage ads from the times of Communism and the Cold War.
Check it out at Denge (thanks, GadgetFreakk)
A social network that ballooned
“An MIT team’s savvy use of social media to locate weather balloons as part of a $40,000 DARPA contest may shed light on how to mobilize resources during emergencies.
On Tuesday, Dec. 1, members of the MIT Media Lab’s Human Dynamics Laboratory received an e-mail with a $40,000 proposition. The U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was holding a competition that weekend: on Saturday morning, 10 large red weather balloons would be raised at undisclosed locations across the United States; the first team to use social media — like online social networks and communication systems — to determine the correct latitude and longitude of all 10 would receive $40,000.
On Wednesday, members of the lab began discussing possible approaches to the problem. By Thursday, they had built a demonstration version of the website they would use to aggregate data, and on Thursday evening the site went live. Within two days, 5,000 people had formally joined the team’s network, out of hundreds of thousands who had visited the site. On Saturday morning the balloons went up, and by the end of the day the MIT team — which consisted of postdocs Riley Crane and Manuel Cebrian and grad students Galen Pickard, Anmol Madan, and Wei Pan — had won the competition.
The crux of the MIT team’s approach was the incentive structure it designed — a way of splitting up the prize money among people who helped find a balloon. Whoever provided the balloon’s correct coordinates got $2,000; but whoever invited that person to join the network got $1,000; whoever invited that person got $500; and so on. No matter how long the chain got, the total payment would never quite reach $4,000; whatever was left over went to charity.”
Read more at MIT News
War games
“Consumer products and video-gaming technology are boosting the performance and reducing the price of military equipment.
VIDEO games have become increasingly realistic, especially those involving armed combat. America’s armed forces have even used video games as recruitment and training tools. But the desire to play games is not the reason why the United States Air Force recently issued a procurement request for 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) video-game consoles. It intends to link them up to build a supercomputer that will run Linux, a free, open-source operating system. It will be used for research, including the development of high-definition imaging systems for radar, and will cost around one-tenth as much as a conventional supercomputer. The air force has already built a smaller computer from a cluster of 336 PS3s.
This is merely the latest example of an unusual trend. There is a long tradition of technology developed for military use filtering through to consumer markets: satellite-navigation systems designed to guide missiles can also help hikers find their way, and head-up displays have moved from jet fighters to family cars. But technology is increasingly moving in the other direction, too, as consumer products are appropriated for military use.
Traditionally the military has preferred to develop and control its own technology, not just for tactical advantage but also to ensure that equipment was tough and reliable enough for those whose lives would depend on it. That began to change after the cold war as defence budgets became constrained and the development of sophisticated industrial and consumer products accelerated. As some of these technologies have become commoditised products which are available to everyone—friend and foe alike—there seems less reason not to buy them and use the savings for more critical equipment that needs to be built-to-order. And consumer products can often be tweaked to make them more rugged or secure when necessary.”
Read more at Economist
Scientist discovers new way to repair damaged nerves
“Experiments studying the growth of baby brains could lead to novel therapies for brain or spinal cord injuries.
Until about the age of two, the neurons in the human brain are still growing, stretching out long arms known as axons to form connections and build networks and circuits. After that, experience and learning shape those connections largely through pruning, said Dr. Smith, now 32 and running her own lab at Carleton University. Superfluous connections are trimmed; those used more frequently are strengthened in a variety of ways that don’t involve the growth of axons.
This suggests that a mechanism must kick in during the toddler years to prevent neurons from growing and forming new connections, said Dr. Smith, who moved back to Canada in 2008 after doing post-doctoral work at Harvard University. “There are signals from the brain saying, ‘Okay, the connections are formed, there is no need for you to grow.’ ” Dr. Smith suspects this could be what prevents injured neurons in the brains and spinal cords of adults from repairing themselves.
Now, she and colleagues at Harvard have a found a molecule that appears to put the brakes on neuron growth in adult mice. It is called SOCS3. When the scientists blocked it in adult mice with crushed optic nerves, the damaged neurons began to sprout. Some of the new growth reached as far as the brain. The next step is to see if this is enough to restore the vision of the blind mice, said Dr. Smith, who reported her findings Thursday in the journal Neuron.”
Crematorium To Use Burning Bodies To Generate Electricity
“A crematorium is planning to use energy from burning bodies to run its own electricity and heating.
Hastings Borough Council in East Sussex says it would be the first in Europe to invest in technology which converts excess heat from cremations into reusable energy.
It hopes new generators, being installed next summer as part of an £800,000 refit, will save money in the long run by cutting energy bills.
Hastings Borough Council amenities manager Peter Mead said the recycled power would not come directly from the bodies but from the machines used to cremate them and filter the fumes.”
Read more at Telegraph (thanks, KirstyJ)
