undefined – Page 14 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Salvador Dali’s corpse to be exhumed

A judge in Spain has ordered the exhumation of artist Salvador Dali’s body for genetic testing, so that a paternity lawsuit may be resolved. Dali died in 1989; Pilar Abel believes the painter is her father, from an affair he reportedly had with a maid in 1955. From Agencia EFE: Una juez de Madrid ha ordenado la exhumación del cadáver del pintor Salvador Dalí y la obtención de muestras de su cuerpo para la práctica de la prueba biológica de determinación de la paternidad de Pilar Abel, una gerundense que presentó una demanda para ser reconocida como hija del artista. Según indica en un auto la juez encargada del caso, “es necesaria la prueba biológica de investigación de la paternidad de Maria Pilar Abel Martínez respecto de D. Salvador Dalí Domenech”, al “no existir restos biológicos ni objetos personales sobre los cuales practicar la prueba por el Instituto Nacional de Toxicología”.

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Salvador Dali’s corpse to be exhumed

Nintendo’s SNES Classic will cost $80, comes with 21 games

Coming on September 29, the Super Nintendo Classic. It will cost $80 and include 21 built-in games, including Super Mario World, Earthbound, Final Fantasy III, Link to the Past, Secret of Mana, Donkey Kong Country, and Super Mario Kart . From Ars Technica : Unlike the NES Classic, which sold $10 controllers on top of the $60 base package, the SNES Classic comes packaged with two controllers. Even so, only five of the included titles include true simultaneous multiplayer gameplay, with a handful of others allowing for two players to alternate play. The Classic Controller and Classic Controller Pro designed for the Wii and Wii U will also work on the SNES Classic Edition, much like its predecessor. Of the 21 included titles, a full 14 were published by Nintendo itself. Three games from Capcom, two from Konami, and two from Square Enix round out the package.

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Nintendo’s SNES Classic will cost $80, comes with 21 games

Old games as standalone apps: no emulator necessary

Games Nostalgia is a retrogame site with a useful difference: instead of simply providing files which then must be fed to the often-difficult gods of emulation, it packages the classics as ready-to-click apps for Mac and PC. Examples to eat your morning: seminal Atari/Amiga RPG Dungeon Master , DOS blaster Doom , and 1990’s original RTS Dune II . Then there’s Populous , Archon , Shadow of the Beast … Previously: Vast collection of Amiga games, demos and software uploaded to Internet Archive

A ‘Roomba’ for weeds

The inventor of the Roomba robot vacuum, Joe Jones, has come up with something new: a solar-powered weeding robot called the Tertill. It will patrol your home garden daily looking for weeds to cut down. How does it know what’s a weed and what’s a plant? Tertill has a very simple method: weeds are short, plants are tall. A plant tall enough to touch the front of Tertill’s shell activates a sensor that makes the robot turn away. A plant short enough to pass under Tertill’s shell, though, activates a different sensor that turns on the weed cutter. Get your own weed-killing robot for $249 through the Tertill’s Kickstarter . ( Business Insider )

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A ‘Roomba’ for weeds

A Chinese vitamin MLM cult is replacing healthcare for poor Ugandans

Uganda is so poor that few can afford medical care, giving it one of the lowest life-expectancies on the planet — this toxic combination made the country ripe for infiltration by Tiens, a Chinese Multi-Level-Marketing “nutritional supplements” cult whose members set up fake medical clinics that diagnose fake ailments and proscribe fake medicines, then rope patients into becoming cult recruiters who convince their friends to sign up for the cult. (more…)

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A Chinese vitamin MLM cult is replacing healthcare for poor Ugandans

30 years of graffiti layers taken from a wall in The Netherlands

Enjoy Paul De Graaf’s gallery depicting the sedimentary layers deposited by 30 years of graffiti on a wall in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. It’s a Graffiti Hall of Fame in the city of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. What started as a 70’s Hippie cult place, became a center of music and art in the early 80’s. One of the first places where it was legal to smoke cannabis. It still a Music studio and Graffiti Hall of fame. The building is surrounded by walls that are all spray painted from top to bottom.

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30 years of graffiti layers taken from a wall in The Netherlands

Our brains tell us to avoid people who are sick, even when they don’t show obvious symptoms

People tend to avoid sick people, even if they don’t consciously now that they are sick, according to a new study published in PNAS. Snip: In the perpetual race between evolving organisms and pathogens, the human immune system has evolved to reduce the harm of infections. As part of such a system, avoidance of contagious individuals would increase biological fitness. The present study shows that we can detect both facial and olfactory cues of sickness in others just hours after experimental activation of their immune system. The study further demonstrates that multisensory integration of these olfactory and visual sickness cues is a crucial mechanism for how we detect and socially evaluate sick individuals. Thus, by motivating the avoidance of sick conspecifics, olfactory–visual cues, both in isolation and integrated, may be important parts of circuits handling imminent threats of contagion. David DiSalvo from Forbes has more : Researchers injected one group of people with a harmless bacteria that triggers an immune response for a few hours, causing mild fever and fatigue, but without any really obvious signs of being sick… The researchers exposed the smell samples, photos and videos to another group of people, along with the same set of samples from healthy people… The brain scans showed a signaling effect cutting across the senses when someone looked at a photo or video of a sick person, along with being exposed to the smell samples. The overall effect is a multi-sense brain alarm telling us that someone is sick and should be avoided.

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Our brains tell us to avoid people who are sick, even when they don’t show obvious symptoms

Linux worm turns Raspberry Pis into cryptocurrency mining bots

Linux.MulDrop.14 is a Linux worm that seeks out networked Raspberry Pi systems with default root passwords; after taking them over and ZMap and sshpass, it begins mining an unspecified cryptocurrency, creating riches for the malware’s author and handing you the power-bill. (more…)

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Linux worm turns Raspberry Pis into cryptocurrency mining bots

Clever snap-on USB charger faceplate for normal US/Canadian power receptacles

I’m intrigued by this cleverly designed USB charger faceplate for US/Canadian power receptacles: you unscrew your existing faceplate, insert this one into the receptable so that its USB charger leads make contact with the screws on the sides of the receptacle, and screw it back in, and in theory, you now have two power outlets and two USB charger outlets. (more…)

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Clever snap-on USB charger faceplate for normal US/Canadian power receptacles

Maker Update: Hakko FX-901 cordless soldering iron

This week in Maker Update, Donald Bell presents a zoetrope combined with a fidget spinner, an SLS printer from Formlabs, a Raspberry Pi weather chamber, component carnage, and a tiny OLED Pi screen. Our featured Cool Tool is the Hakko FX-901 cordless soldering iron. Read the full review on Cool Tools .