Not everything in Russia is crazy people in cars, anti-gay mobs and a Nazi government with no respect to human rights. Here’s something that I wish we had: a machine that gives you a subway ticket for 30 squats in less than two minutes. Read more…
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You can buy subway tickets with squats in Moscow
Jessica Sadeq from the Smithsonian shares big news–the Institution has launched the Smithsonian X 3D Collection and 3-D explorer . They’ve gathered data on some of the most treasured items in the archives, and they’re encouraging people who work with 3D printers to help them explore new ways of using the data. Our team scanned 20 of our collection items (The Wright Flyer, a fossil whale and even an exploded star!) in 3D and have made the data available for download (and print for those with 3D printers). You can also take tours and explore the models through a custom built viewer that is embeddable and shareable. Take a look: http://3d.si.edu/ . The announcement kicks off the Smithsonian X 3D Conference, a two-day event focused on the current state of the Institution’s 3-D program and where 3D digitization of objects in its collection is headed. A webcast of the conference is available.
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Smithsonian goes 3D
As the pace of robotic integration into the modern workforce continues to increase, automatons are finding their way into an ever wider variety of industries. Already making an impact in the agricultural sector , automatons are now poised to perform the task of driving massive, house-sized mining trucks—a job once held only by highly-skilled and highly-paid human drivers. Read more…
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These Autonomous Dump Trucks Let Mines Operate Around the Clock
At the start of this week, the European Space Agency’s Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer satellite (GOCE) fell to Earth . This is what it looked like as it happened. Read more…
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This Is What a 2,000-Pound Satellite Falling to Earth Looks Like
Words cannot express how giddily excited we are by this news: you can finally get Calvin and Hobbes ebooks for the first time . Goodbye, weekend. Read more…
With over 137 million artifacts, works of art, and specimens in its collections, the Smithsonian can’t display even one percent of that at any given time. Many historically significant pieces won’t go on display in our lifetimes and other likely won’t ever see the light of day again. But their replicants will. Read more…
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The Smithsonian Is Uploading Its Lost Treasures to the Internet
Jah-Wren Ryel writes “Every smartphone or other device with mobile communications capability (e.g. 3G or LTE) actually runs not one, but two operating systems. Aside from the operating system that we as end-users see (Android, iOS, PalmOS), it also runs a small operating system that manages everything related to radio. So, we have a complete operating system, running on an ARM processor, without any exploit mitigation (or only very little of it), which automatically trusts every instruction, piece of code, or data it receives from the base station you’re connected to. What could possibly go wrong?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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The Second Operating System Hiding In Every Mobile Phone
Sites like this can be searched for glass beads that reveal the past. rickmach Meteorite impacts can be very destructive. A meteorite that fell in Mexico around 66 million years ago created a 180 km crater and caused the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs while spewing debris and molten rock into the air. Now, in what is a fascinating tale of serendipity, researchers have found that these events don’t entirely destroy all traces of life at the site of impact. Molten rocks can capture and preserve organic matter as they cool down to form glass beads. When a meteor enters Earth’s atmosphere, the friction causes it to heat up, scorching everything in its path. Most of the time that’s where the story ends, as the meteor burns up in the sky as a “shooting star.” But sometimes it’s big enough to reach all the way to the surface and transfer its remaining energy to the ground. This energy is dissipated as mild earthquakes and sound shockwaves—but mostly as heat. The heat energy can be so great that it melts rocks on the surface and hurls them up in the atmosphere. Anything that comes in contact with this molten rock would presumably get burnt, leaving nothing but rocky material that cools down in the atmosphere, forming glass beads and tektites (gravel-sized natural glass). This is what City University of New York researcher Kieren Howard assumed, but he was able to show that his assumptions were wrong. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Meteorite impacts capture time capsules of the ecosystems they destroy
[Image via Podcars ] Milton Keynes sounds like the name of someone your cousin married for his money, but in fact it’s a large town in Buckinghamshire, 50 miles northwest of London. With a population of over 200, 000, it can be considered urban, and the area is about to become more well-known, perhaps even famous. Because in 2015 it will start deploying driverless taxis, also called PRTs, for Personal Rapid Transit. In actuality the electricity-operated PRTs are less like taxis and more like surface-going, two-person subway cars that travel directly from point A to point B, without making undesired stops. Routes, it seems, will be fixed, with the town’s central train station serving as a hub, and areas of service expected to include the local shopping mall and particular office buildings. PRTs are not without precedent in the UK; London Heathrow has been running them since 2011 to ferry passengers between terminals, and the things recharge themselves. Check out how they operate, and don’t be put off by this video’s silly beginning, as the entire thing is pretty informative: (more…)
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UK to Get Driverless Taxis. Heathrow Already Has Them. Man, NYC/JFK Sucks
An anonymous reader writes “FireEye researchers have linked eleven distinct APT cyber espionage campaigns previously believed to be unrelated (PDF), leading them to believe that there is a shared operation that supplies and maintains malware tools and weapons used in them. The eleven campaigns they tied together were detected between July 2011 and September 2013, but it’s possible and very likely that some of them were active even before then. Despite using varying techniques, tactics, and procedures, the campaigns all leveraged a common development infrastructure, and shared — in various combinations — the same malware tools, the same elements of code, binaries with the same timestamps, and signed binaries with the same digital certificates.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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The Operations of a Cyber Arms Dealer