When most people hear the word “drone, ” they probably picture a cockpit-free plane zipping over the Iraqi desert. But there’s more to it than that. The Army is in the process of adopting a whole new generation of unmanned vehicles that will assist soldiers on the battlefield—and they’re by far the scariest remote-controlled cars you’ll ever see. Read more…
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These Next Generation Drones Carry Gear and Machine Guns into Battle
Twitter now allows anyone you follow to send you direct messages, if you enable the feature in your settings. The feature can be useful for people who get followers begging them to follow back in order to DM something private, but it could also lead to a ton of spam—that’s why it’s off by default. Read more…
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Twitter Now Lets Any User Send You Direct Messages (If You Enable It)
Everybody hates wires, but if you want crazy speed, they’re the way to go. But maybe not anymore. A team of German scientists have developed record-setting Wi-Fi that cooks right along at 100 Gigabits per second . You know, like Google Fiber but times 100. Read more…
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The World’s Fastest Wi-Fi Makes Google Fiber Look Like Dial-Up
“Todd, ” the digitally rendered man pictured at far left, is a physiologically average American male, his paunchy proportions based on averages from CDC anthropometric data . Beside him stand average men from Japan, the Netherlands and France. How do you stack up? Read more…
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The bodies of average men from around the world
An anonymous reader writes “People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves temporarily unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday, after a routine test of backup systems by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure. Xerox announced late in the evening that access has been restored for users in the 17 states affected by the outage, hours after the first problems were reported. ‘Restarting the EBT system required time to ensure service was back at full functionality, ‘ spokeswoman Jennifer Wasmer said in an email. An emergency voucher process was available in some of the areas while the problems were occurring, she said. U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Courtney Rowe underscored that the outage was not related to the government shutdown.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Xerox "Routine Backup Test" Leave 17 States Without Food Stamps
Usually, finding a tick up your nose wouldn’t be a cause for celebration, but Tony Goldberg discovered a new species of arachnid inside his nasal passage —and found himself a new area of study. Read more…
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Biologist discovers new tick species inside his own nose
MojoKid writes “It’s been a long time since many have seen a dreaded “blue screen of death” (BSoD), but it’s back and in the in the most unlikeliest of places. Oddly enough, some Apple iPhone 5S owners are reporting BSoD errors, though they’re a little different from the ones you may remember seeing on Windows desktops. Rather than spit out an obscure error code with a generic description, some iPhone 5S devices are suddenly turning blue before automatically restarting. The Numbers app in Apple’s iWork suite, a free program with new iPhones, seems to be the primary cause, though BSoD behavior has also been observed in other applications, according to complaints in Apple’s support forum.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Irony: iPhone 5S Users Reporting Blue Screen of Death
Taco Cowboy writes “Back in 1999, it was postulated that diamonds may rain from the sky in the atmospheres of our solar system’s gas giants. Now, research has shown that diamond rains on Saturn are more than probable. ‘”We don’t want to give people the impression that we have a Titanic-sized diamondberg floating around, ” said researcher Mona Delitsky, of California Specialty Engineering, “We’re thinking they’re more like something you can hold in your hand.” Recent data compiled by planetary scientists … has been combined with newly published pressure temperature diagrams of Jupiter and Saturn. These diagrams, known as adiabats, allow researchers to decipher at what interior level that diamond would become stable. They also allow for calculations at lower levels – regions where both temperature and pressure are so concentrated that diamond becomes a liquid. Imagine diamond rain or rivulets of pure gemstone.’ ‘At even greater depths, the scientists say the diamond will eventually melt to form liquid diamond, which may then form a stable ocean layer.’ Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Diamond Rain In Saturn
Take this with a reasonably sized grain of salt, but Sky News Entertainment reporter Joe Michalczuk says that Star Trek movie co-writer and producer Roberto Orci has discussed bringing the franchise back to TV with CBS. Read more…
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Bob Orci is reportedly talking to CBS about a new Star Trek TV series
A team of astrophysicists have made an exciting however complex discovery a mere 170 light years away. In their own words , it’s “the first evidence of a water-rich rocky planetary body” outside of our own solar system to have evidence of water. It’s the “rocky” bit that makes it Earth-like. Read more…
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Scientists Found the Remains of a Water-Covered Earth-Like Planet