Password Gropers Hit Peak Stupid, Take the Spamtrap Bait

badger.foo (447981) writes Peter Hansteen reports that a new distributed and slow-moving password guessing effort is underway, much like the earlier reports, but this time with a twist: The users they are trying to access do not exist. Instead, they’re taken from the bsdly.net spamtrap address list, where all listed email addresses are guaranteed to be invalid in their listed domains. There is a tiny chance that this is an elaborate prank or joke, but it’s more likely that via excessive automation, the password gropers have finally Peak Stupid. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Password Gropers Hit Peak Stupid, Take the Spamtrap Bait

A never-ending ocean of 4.5 million flowers in Japan

The Hitachi Seaside Park is one of the most beautiful parks in the planet: A place where millions of flowers grow every year in the most amazing displays of colors imaginable. Here you can see about 4.5 million baby-blue nemophilas blossoming in April—but there’s more, much more. Read more…

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A never-ending ocean of 4.5 million flowers in Japan

Amazing hail storm on a beach looks like the beginning of the Apocalypse

This video captured on a beach in Novosibirsk, Siberia, looks like a scene from a movie about the end of the world. People were enjoying a perfect sunny day—with temperatures of 99F (37C)—when bullet-sized hail started strafing the beach while everyone were running for their lives in panic. Read more…

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Amazing hail storm on a beach looks like the beginning of the Apocalypse

You Can Buy an Actual Viking Ship at Denmark’s Viking Ship Museum

After touring a museum, what do you think is the best gift shop souvenir to commemorate your visit? A post card? A magnet? The online gift shop for the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, has got something far more appropriate: an actual viking boat to stage your own conquests. Read more…

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You Can Buy an Actual Viking Ship at Denmark’s Viking Ship Museum

This Supercooling Fridge Chills Food To Sub-Zero Without Freezing It

The current trend in fridge innovation involves adding extra doors, built-in soda dispensers, and pointless touchscreens. So it’s refreshing when a company like Mitsubishi brings a truly unique advancement to its new refrigerators in the form of a freezer drawer that chills food to three degrees below freezing , without actually freezing it. Read more…

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This Supercooling Fridge Chills Food To Sub-Zero Without Freezing It

Static Electricity Defies Simple Explanation

sciencehabit writes: “If you’ve ever wiggled a balloon against your hair, you know that rubbing together two different materials can generate static electricity. But rubbing bits of the same material can create static, too. Now, researchers have shot down a decades-old idea of how that same-stuff static comes about (study). ‘[The researchers] mixed grains of insulating zirconium dioxide-silicate with diameters of 251 micrometers and 326 micrometers and dropped them through a horizontal electric field, which pushed positively charged particles one way and negatively charged particles the other. They tracked tens of thousands of particles—by dropping an $85, 000 high-speed camera alongside them. Sure enough, the smaller ones tended to be charged negatively and the larger ones positively, each accumulating 2 million charges on average. Then the researchers probed whether those charges could come from electrons already trapped on the grains’ surfaces. They gently heated fresh grains to liberate the trapped electrons and let them “relax” back into less energetic states. As an electron undergoes such a transition, it emits a photon. So by counting photons, the researchers could tally the trapped electrons. “It’s pretty amazing to me that they count every electron on a particle, ” Shinbrot says. The tally showed that the beads start out with far too few trapped electrons to explain the static buildup, Jaeger says.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Static Electricity Defies Simple Explanation

Blood of World’s Oldest Woman Hints At Limits of Life

porkchop_d_clown (39923) writes “When Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper died in 2005, she was the oldest woman in the world. [New Scientist reported Wednesday] that, at the end of her life, most of her white blood cells had been produced by just two stem cells — implying the rest of her blood stem cells had already died, and hinting at a possible limit to the human life span.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Blood of World’s Oldest Woman Hints At Limits of Life

The ridiculed Comic Sans typeface gets its dignity back with Comic Neue

Craig Rozynski is an Australian designer who took upon himself to dignify the most ridiculed and beleaguered typeface in the world: Comic Sans. He turned the horrible typeface into an actually attractive typeface: Comic Neue. It’s a miracle. Read more…

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The ridiculed Comic Sans typeface gets its dignity back with Comic Neue

The A-10 Warthog looks especially awesome and futuristic in this photo

It must be the combination of the steel grey palette, the black accents, and their patches and rivets, but these two A-10s look especially cool and futuristic to me in this photo. Like they can be piloted by this guy: Read more…        

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The A-10 Warthog looks especially awesome and futuristic in this photo