Friday was a big day at the drone testing facility in Boulder City, Nevada. It was the day that the first drone authorized to fly without FAA approval would take to the air. The bright orange unmanned aircraft, Magpie, did just that—and then it crashed to the ground in an embarrassing cloud of dust two seconds later. Read more…
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First Drone Launches at FAA Test Site in Nevada, Crashes Immediately
Depending on the context, volcanic eruptions are either terrifying or transfixing—sometimes both, but rarely neither. The opportunity to safely view the otherworldly spectacle of lava rarely fails to ignite a child-like, giddy wonder. The damage currently being done by a lava flows in the Cape Verde Islands , on the other hand, is heart-breaking. We study these things because they are both lovely and terrible. We want to see a lava flow spill across a snowfield out of curiosity, and we want to better understand the hazards surrounding snow-capped volcanoes out of caution. Benjamin Edwards of Dickinson College and Alexander Belousov and Marina Belousova of Russia’s Institute of Volcanology and Seismology got the opportunity to witness one of these events last year in Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. For nine months, Tolbachik spewed basaltic lava flows that ultimately covered 40 square kilometers, reaching as far as 17 kilometers from their source. The lava flows came in two flavors , known to geologists by Hawaiian names. (While frozen Kamchatka doesn’t exactly evoke coconuts and grass skirts, these lavas are similar to those of the Hawaiian volcanoes.) First there’s ‘a’a (pronounced as a staccato “AH-ah”), which ends up a chunky, blocky crumble of basalt. The other is pahoehoe (roughly “puh-HOY-hoy”, which is how volcanologists answer the phone), which flows more like thick batter and can solidify into a surface resembling a pile of ropes. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Watching lava fight with snow in Kamchatka
With Yosemite, you can create your own voice commands on your Mac using Automator. Blogger Jacob Salmela points out that if you like to live on the edge, you can make a voice activated self-destruct sequence. Read more…
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Give Your Mac a Voice-Activated Self Destruct Sequence
At this point in time, you’ve already hung your tinsel and decorated your tree with blinking lights. Maybe there’s even a glowing Santa statue on your lawn. But did you ever step back and think about where all of these holiday decorations come from? A factory in China is the easy answer. An entire town of factories specializing in Christmas cheer is the correct answer . Read more…
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A Single Chinese Town Makes Most of the World’s Christmas Decorations
OAKLAND, Calif.—A federal judge spent over four hours on Friday questioning lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and from the Department of Justice in an ongoing digital surveillance-related lawsuit that has dragged on for more than six years. During the hearing, US District Judge Jeffrey White heard arguments from both sides in his attempt to wrestle with the plaintiffs’ July 2014 motion for partial summary judgment . He went back and forth between the two sides, hearing answers to his list of 12 questions that were published earlier this week in a court filing. That July 2014 motion asks the court to find that the government is “violating the Fourth Amendment by their ongoing seizures and searches of plaintiffs’ Internet communications.” The motion specifically doesn’t deal with allegations of past government wrongdoing, nor other issues in the broader case. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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EFF: Feds can’t get around Fourth Amendment via automated data capture
I n case anybody still believed we were doing ok on cybersecurity, Staples just announced that malware deployed at 115 of its stores nationwide gave hackers access to some 1.16 million customers’ payment cards. Check here to see if your store was hit. Read more…
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1.16 Million Payment Cards Breached in Staples Hack
Instagram has made good on its promise to start purging inactive, fake and spam accounts this December, and it’s doing such a great job that users are calling it “Instagram Rapture” or “Instapurge.” Celebrities ended up losing a big chunk of their followers, like Justin Bieber whose Belieber count went down by 3.5 million, according to the list created by software developer Zach Allia. Ariana Grande’s numbers are also down by 1.5 million, while Kim Kardashian lost 1.3 million fake minions. Someone named chiragchirag78 even went from boasting 4 million fans to have only eight left — poor user was so devastated, he ended up deleting his account. But it’s still Instagram itself that’s suffered the worst blow, shedding almost 19 million followers in the process. Since Instagram’s efforts are sitewide, even ordinary people’s follower counts are affected. And while many praised the Facebook-owned service for cracking down on spambots (thereby exposing those who’ve purchased fake followers), there’s an army of slighted users, as well. Some are continuing to post a barrage of insults and profanities on Instagram’s official account, while others are campaigning for people to unfollow it. What these angry users might not know, though, is that the service deactivated those fake accounts and spambots long ago, an Instagram spokesperson told Business Insider . The service is merely removing them for good. Filed under: Misc Comments Via: The Verge Source: Business Insider , The New York Times
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Instagram purges spam fake accounts, costing celebs millions of followers
It’s rare to see the future unfold in front of our eyes this dramatically but here it is: the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab has helped a man who lost both his arms in a “freak electrical accident” connect to dual robotic arms by connecting to and reading from his nervous system. The results aren’t quite staggering as he still has limited control over the… Read More
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Watch This Double Amputee Control Two Robotic Arms At Once
Check out the gorgeous images that photographer Steve Scalone took of my latest object of desire, a 99-cheese pizza created by pizza world champion Johnny di Francesco, of Melbourne’s famed 400 Gradi. A pizza that The Guardian says tastes fantastic: Read more…
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A pizza world champion made this 99-cheese pizza and it tastes fantastic
It’s time again for Hankook Tire’s biennial design school team-up, where they task ID students with developing futuristic tire concepts. Last time ’round they paired up with Cincinnati’s DAAP , and this year they’re at Germany’s University of Design, Engineering and Business in Pforzheim. And once again, not only did the students did not disappoint, but pulled off some real socks-knockers! The central trend is to stop looking at the tire as a rubber cladding for a wheel, and to think of it instead as something that works together with an actively transforming wheel to create some ker-azy functionality. Now maybe I’m biased because I know ID students were involved, but the following video showing the three winning concepts in action is more exciting than any action movie trailer you’ll see: (more…)
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Pforzheim Design Students and Hankook Tire Team Up for Futuristic Wheel Concepts