We’ve found Kermit the Frog in real life and it’s a species of glassfrog just recently discovered called Hyalinobatrachium dianae in Costa Rica. It’s bright green just like Kermit, has big white adorable eyeballs just like Kermit and the males have a very unique mating call… just like Kermit, I guess? Anyway, the resemblance is uncanny. Read more…
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Newly discovered frog species looks a lot like Kermit the Frog
A team of cosmologists is creating an enormous map of how dark matter is distributed across the Universe—and this is the first section to be completed. Read more…
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This Is the First Section of a Giant Map of the Universe’s Dark Matter
An anonymous reader writes There’s great news coming out of Russia for epic road trip lovers. Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin has proposed building a highway that would reach from London to Alaska via Russia, a 13, 000-mile stretch of road. “This is an inter-state, inter-civilization, project, ” the Siberian Times quoted Yakunin. “The project should be turned into a world ‘future zone, ‘ and it must be based on leading, not catching, technologies.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Russian Official Proposes Road That Could Connect London To NYC
Producing quality 360-degree video for Oculus Rift-like headsets is still really difficult to do, which is why high-tech porn company Huccio had the $250, 000, seven camera rig above custom-designed for its venture into the world of immersive video. Read more…
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The Insane Camera Rig Being Used to Shoot 360-Degree Oculus Porn
An anonymous reader tips an Associated Press report saying that Healthcare.gov is sending users’ personal data to private companies. The information involved is typical ad-related analytic data: “…it can include age, income, ZIP code, whether a person smokes, and if a person is pregnant. It can include a computer’s Internet address, which can identify a person’s name or address when combined with other information collected by sophisticated online marketing or advertising firms.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation confirmed the report, saying that data is being sent from Healthcare.gov to at least 14 third-party domains. The EFF says, “Sending such personal information raises significant privacy concerns. A company like Doubleclick, for example, could match up the personal data provided by healthcare.gov with an already extensive trove of information about what you read online and what your buying preferences are to create an extremely detailed profile of exactly who you are and what your interests are. It could do all this based on a tracking cookie that it sets which would be the same across any site you visit. Based on this data, Doubleclick could start showing you smoking ads or infer your risk of cancer based on where you live, how old you are and your status as a smoker. Doubleclick might start to show you ads related to pregnancy, which could have embarrassing and potentially dangerous consequences such as when Target notified a woman’s family that she was pregnant before she even told them. ” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Healthcare.gov Sends Personal Data To Over a Dozen Tracking Websites
An anonymous reader sends a report of a bug in Steam’s Linux client that will accidentally wipe all of a user’s files if they move their Steam folder. According to the bug report: I launched steam. It did not launch, it offered to let me browse, and still could not find it when I pointed to the new location. Steam crashed. I restarted it. It re-installed itself and everything looked great. Until I looked and saw that steam had apparently deleted everything owned by my user recursively from the root directory. Including my 3tb external drive I back everything up to that was mounted under /media. Another user reported a similar problem — losing his home directory — and problems with the script were found: at some point, the Steam script sets $STEAMROOT as the directory containing all Steam’s data, then runs rm -rf “$STEAMROOT/”* later on. If Steam has been moved, $STEAMROOT returns as empty, resulting in rm -rf “/”* which causes the unexpected deletion. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Steam For Linux Bug Wipes Out All of a User’s Files
Dozens of Hong Kong motorists and pedestrians rushed to grab loads of money after an armored truck’s doors opened by accident on a busy road, spilling about $4.5 million dollars in HK$500 notes (US$65) on Christmas Eve, reports the South China Morning Post. Check out all those frantic bastards. Read more…
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Chaos ensues as armored truck spills $4.5 million on road
sciencehabit writes About 1% of the light that strikes plants is re-emitted as a faint, fluorescent glow—a measure of photosynthetic activity. Today, scientists released a map of this glow as measured by the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, a NASA satellite launched in July with the goal of mapping the net amount of carbon in the atmosphere. The map reveals that tropical rainforests near the equator are actively sucking up carbon, while the Corn Belt in the eastern United States, near the end of its growing season, is also a sink. Higher resolution fluorescence mapping could one day be used to help assess crop yields and how they respond to drought and heat in a changing climate. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
We now live in an age where radical technology can help the blind to see , an impressive enough accomplishment in its own right that gets even more mind-bending when you consider what’s it means for the future. UV vision? Eyeballs that zoom in and out like a camera lens? It’s coming! Read more…
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Bionic Eyes Can Already Restore Vision, Soon They’ll Make It Superhuman
sciencehabit writes with this excerpt from Science Insider: New analyses of the hundreds of thousands of technical manuscripts submitted to arXiv, the repository of digital preprint articles, are offering some intriguing insights into the consequences — and geography — of scientific plagiarism. It appears that copying text from other papers is more common in some nations than others, but the outcome is generally the same for authors who copy extensively: Their papers don’t get cited much. The system attempts to rule out certain kinds of innocent copying: “It’s a fairly sophisticated machine learning logistic classifier, ” says arXiv founder Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at Cornell University. “It has special ways of detecting block quotes, italicized text, text in quotation marks, as well statements of mathematical theorems, to avoid false positives.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Study of Massive Preprint Archive Hints At the Geography of Plagiarism