New submitter RobertJ1729 writes The Rhode Island Comic Con (RICC) is in the middle of a complete meltdown as hundreds are turned away at the door or denied reentry due to the event organizers selling far more tickets than the venue can accomodate. The Providence Journal reports that “According to Providence Fire Chief David Soscia, too many people were being let in at a time and the organizers were not correctly counting them. That led to over-congested areas in the building which has a maximum capacity of 17, 000 people.” Meanwhile the Rhode Island Comic Con Facebook page is being flooded with comments from angry attendees describing chaos both inside and out of the convention center. RICC initially posted, “Hello RICC fans! WE ARE NOT OVERSOLD!, ” and promised to honor tomorrow tickets sold for today. That post generated several hundred angry comments before eventually being deleted (though it survives in part on RICC’s twitter feed). Commenters are alleging that RICC is deleting negative Facebook comments. Users are tweeting at #ricomicconfail2014 to vent their frustration. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The appeal of a contactless payment card is obvious: you just wave your credit or debit card over a terminal and you’ve paid. But it also removes the PIN from the equation, meaning it’s easy for someone to steal and use your card. To combat this, but to also keep contactless payments a breeze, MasterCard has just announced the first credit card with a built-in fingerprint sensor for biometric security. Read more… 
Trees are vital for human life: they use up CO2 and pump out oxygen, as well as providing food, fuel and, err, climbing frames, too. But how big would a single tree need to be in order to sustain the human race? Read more… 
Lenovo introduced its Helix detachable last year, with a 11.6-inch, 1080p screen, a beefy Intel Core i5 chip inside and a battery-boosting keyboard dock. Pretty much a Surface Pro. This year it’s back with a new, slimmer body and it’s one of the first gadgets out there to rep Intel’s newest “Core M” brains . Read more… 
MikeChino writes A new paper by a group of researchers from Montana State University confirms that life can survive under antarctic ice. Researchers led by John Priscu drilled down into the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and pulled up organisms called Archaea. These organisms survive by converting methane into energy, enabling them to survive where there is no wind or sunlight, buried deep under the ice. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
