This image, shot by a photographer unknown to me, allegedly shows a wryneck ( Jynx torquilla ) pecking away at a tree branch. The head looks like a spindle, doesn’t it? -via TYWKIWDBI
Originally posted here:
Woodpecker Shot at a Slow Shutter Speed
First time accepted submitter CanadianRealist writes “Electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen is very inefficient without the use of a catalyst. Unfortunately catalysts are currently made of crystals containing rare, expensive toxic metals such as ruthenium and iridium. Two chemists from the University of Calgary have invented a process to make a catalyst using relatively non-toxic metal compounds such as iron oxide, for 1/1000 the cost of currently used catalysts. It is suggested this would make it more feasible to use electrolysis of water to create hydrogen as a method of storing energy from variable green power sources such as wind and solar.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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New Catalyst Allows Cheaper Hydrogen Production
Egypt’s Naval forces claim they have captured three scuba divers who were trying to cut an undersea Internet cable in the Mediterranean. Col. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said in a statement that the divers were caught while “cutting the undersea cable” of Telecom Egypt. Internet services have been disrupted since March 22 in Egypt. From the article: “The statement was accompanied by a photo showing three young men, apparently Egyptian, staring up at the camera in what looks like an inflatable launch. It did not have further details on who they were or why they would have wanted to cut a cable.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Egyptian Forces Capture 3 Divers Trying To Cut Undersea Internet Cable
The new E6 Series Super Komachi has a sleek design and a top speed of nearly 200 mph. Operators hope it will help the quake-ravaged north. [Read more]
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200-mph red bullet trains thrill rail-mad Japan
Back in 2007, Lindy Scallan went to Hawaii for a vacation and took her camera along. After putting the camera in its underwater housing, she went scuba diving but unfortunately lost her camera. Thinking it was gone forever, the camera was incredibly found thousands of mile away in Taiwan six years later. The pictures she took from that 2007 vacation are still on the camera. More »
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This Lost Underwater Camera Was Incredibly Reunited with Its Owner After Six Years
The coming of the Hyperkin RetroN 3 marked the end of doing a rain dance while blowing into your childhood SNES. And now Hyperkin is so excited about expanding compatibility that they’re skipping ahead and calling their next console RetroN 5. More »
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Play All Your Old Games On The RetroN 5
People don’t wear watches anymore. You’ll look ridiculous. Why wouldn’t you just use your smartphone instead? These are just some of the negative sentiments skeptics are spewing about smart watches, which are still very much in their nascent stage. Guess what? They’re wrong. More »
Excerpt from:
Why You’ll End Up Wearing a Smart Watch
Nerval’s Lobster writes “IBM announced this week that it has developed a way to manufacture both logic and memory that relies on a small drop of ‘ionic liquid’ to flip oxides back and forth between an insulating and conductive state without the need to constantly draw power. In theory, that means both memory and logic built using those techniques could dramatically save power. IBM described the advance in the journal Science, and also published a summary of its results to its Website. The central idea is to eliminate as much power as possible as it moves through a semiconductor. IBM’s solution is to use a bit of ‘ionic liquid’ to flip the state. IBM researchers applied a positively charged ionic liquid electrolyte to an insulating oxide material — vanadium dioxide — and successfully converted the material to a metallic state. The material held its metallic state until a negatively charged ionic liquid electrolyte was applied in order to convert it back to its original, insulating state. A loose analogy would be to compare IBM’s technology to the sort of electronic ink used in the black-and-white versions of the Kindle and other e-readers. There, an electrical charge can be applied to the tiny microcapsules that contain the ‘ink,’ hiding or displaying them to render a page of text. Like IBM’s solution, the e-ink doesn’t require a constant charge; power only needs to be applied to re-render or ‘flip’ the page. In any event, IBM’s technique could conceivably be applied to both mobile devices as well as power-hungry data centers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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IBM Dipping Chips In ‘Ionic Liquid’ To Save Power
First time accepted submitter Olivier Bonaventure writes “The TCP protocol is closely coupled with the underlying IP protocol. Once a TCP connection has been established through one IP address, the other packets of the connection must be sent from this address. This makes mobility and load balancing difficult. Multipath TCP is a new extension that solves these old problems by decoupling TCP from the underlying IP. A Multipath TCP connection can send packets over several interfaces/addresses simultaneously while remaining backward compatible with existing TCP applications. Multipath TCP has several use cases, including smartphones that can use both WiFi and 3G, or servers that can pool multiple high-speed interfaces. Christoph Paasch, Gregory Detal and their colleagues who develop the implementation of Multipath TCP in the Linux kernel have achieved 50 Gbps for a single TCP connection [note: link has source code and technical details] by pooling together six 10 Gbps interfaces.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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A 50 Gbps Connection With Multipath TCP
itwbennett writes “Do you know what data the 1300+ tracking companies have on you? Privacy blogger Dan Tynan didn’t until he had had enough of being stalked by grandpa-friendly Jitterbug phone ads. Tracking company BlueKai and its partners had compiled 471 separate pieces of data on him. Some surprisingly accurate, some not (hence the Jitterbug ad). But what’s worse is that opting out of tracking is surprisingly hard. On the Network Advertising Initiative Opt Out Page you can ask the 98 member companies listed there to stop tracking you and on Evidon’s Global Opt Out page you can give some 200 more the boot — but that’s only about 300 companies out of 1300. And even if they all comply with your opt-out request, it doesn’t mean that they’ll stop collecting data on you, only that they’ll stop serving you targeted ads.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Tracking the Web Trackers