Libyan desert glass is a material of unknown origin scattered across a large swath of the Sahara. Among it, scientists found Hypatia stones , a strange phosphorous-nickel alloy recently determined to be extra-terrestrial. (more…)
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Mysterious extraterrestrial minerals discovered in the Sahara
Apple is way ahead of the pack, but even the losers at Oracle are making $279 a second. The original graphic , by Pablo Gomez , is interactive and a must-see.
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Apple makes $1,445 a second
London has fatbergs : glistening, multiton agglomerations of fat, sanitary napkins, “flushable” wipes, human waste, dirty diapers, used condoms, and delicious strawberry jam; New Orleans has 93,000 pounds of plastic Mardi Gras beads. (more…)
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One quarter of New Orleans’ catch-basins were clogged to uselessness with 93,000 lbs of plastic Mardi Gras beads
The announcement is more than a year old, but Dan Brown, of The Da Vinci Code fame, is paying €300,000 to have Amsterdam’s Ritman Library digitize thousands of books about “alchemy, astrology, magic and theosophy.” One particularly important text that will be digitized is the first English translation of the works of Jakob Böhme, a 17th-century German mystic. Says Esther Ritman, the library’s director and librarian, “When I show this book in the library, it’s like traveling in an entire new world.” Once the work is available online, she says, “We can take everyone along the journey of this book digitally.” The last update was a while back, though, with no updates. Previously: New documentary is a magic portal into a weird and wonderful library
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Occult manuscripts to be digitized and posted online
A common misconception is that bitcoin transactions are anonymous. The truth is, unless you are very careful about covering your tracks, your bitcoin transactions can be connected to you. And the transaction records on bitcoin’s public database (the blockchain) can never be changed or deleted, meaning they will forever be searchable by authorities or anyone else. Andy Greenberg of Wired reports that researchers were able to “connect someone’s bitcoin payment on a dark web site to that person’s public account.” [T]he Qatari researchers first collected dozens of bitcoin addresses used for donations and dealmaking by websites protected by the anonymity software Tor, run by everyone from WikiLeaks to the now-defunct Silk Road. Then they scraped thousands of more widely visible bitcoin addresses from the public accounts of users on Twitter and the popular bitcoin forum Bitcoin Talk. By merely searching for direct links between those two sets of addresses in the blockchain, they found more than 125 transactions made to those dark web sites’ accounts — very likely with the intention of preserving the senders’ anonymity — that they could easily link to public accounts. Among those, 46 were donations to WikiLeaks. More disturbingly, 22 were payments to the Silk Road. Though they don’t reveal many personal details of those 22 individuals, the researchers say that some had publicly revealed their locations, ages, genders, email addresses, or even full names. (One user who fully identified himself was only a teenager at the time of the transactions.) And the 18 people whose Silk Road transactions were linked to Bitcoin Talk may be particularly vulnerable, since that forum has previously responded to subpoeanas demanding that it unmask a user’s registration details or private messages. “You have irrefutable evidence mapping this profile to this hidden service,” says Yazan Boshmaf, another of the study’s authors.
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If you bought something on Silk Road with bitcoin, the blockchain will remember it forever and possibly reveal your identity
Physicists at BYU have demonstrated a volumetric projection system that works by using a laser to unevenly heat single cellulose molecules in order to shove them around in 3D space, then painting the positioned molecules with lasers that cause them to glow; by choreographic both sets of lasers, extremely high-resolution moving images can be attained. (more…)
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Floating 1,600dpi 3D projections made by pushing around flecks of cellulose and hitting them with a laser
In Ankara, Turkey, one person’s trash is literally another’s treasure. Garbage collectors started saving books once destined for the landfill and opened a public library. CNN reports : For months, the garbage men gathered forsaken books. As word of the collection spread, residents also began donating books directly. Initially, the books were only for employees and their families to borrow. But as the collection grew and interest spread throughout the community, the library was eventually opened to the public in September of last year… Today, the library has over 6,000 books ranging from literature to nonfiction. There is also a popular kid’s section with comic books and an entire section for scientific research. Books in English and French are also available for bilingual visitors. The library is housed in a previously vacant brick factory at the sanitation department headquarters… The collection grew so large the library now loans the salvaged books to schools, educational programs, and even prisons. ( For Reading Addicts ), image via CNN
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Garbage collectors open a public library with discarded books
Late last year, a redditor called Deepfakes gained notoriety for the extremely convincing face-swap porn videos he was making, in which the faces of mainstream Hollywood actors and rockstars were convincingly overlaid on the bodies of performers in pornography. (more…)
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Deepfakes has democratized the creation of extremely realistic video faceswapping, especially in porn
Probably the best cyberpunk anime ad for stout ale in the world. [via Tim Soret ]
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Cyberpunk anime ad for Murphy’s Irish Stout (UK, 1997)
MG’s Mr Self Destruct project takes the USB Killer to new levels, combining a $1.50 system-on-a-chip with a variety of payloads: smoke bombs, “sound grenades,” and little explosives, cleverly choreographed with keystroke emulation, allowing the poisoned drive to first cause the connected computer to foreground a browser and load a web-page that plays an appropriate animation (a jack-in-the-box that plays “Pop Goes the Weasel” with the drive’s explosive detonating for the climax). (more…)
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Self-destructing thumb drives with smoke loads, glowing elements, tiny explosives