A team of roboticists from Caltech and Urbana-Champaign have built a biomimetic “bat bot” that uses nine joints to deform a foot-wide wing membrane to achieve breathtaking aerial maneuvers. (more…)
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Autonomous bat bot weighs 93g, flies like a bat
Civilization was one of the classic games of the 16-bit age, when computers with speedy processors and hundreds of kilobytes of RAM made it possible to model and memorize complex, culture-bound simulations of human history. Twenty years on, though, it’s been ported back to a humble 8-bit system that predated it by years. The genius behind the conversion is Fabian Hertel, and it’s not just a mockup: a fully playable demo is available to enjoy . 8-bit Civ runs on Commodore 64 and, while reduced in scope, features cities, units, AI opponents, scientific advances and wonders of the world. 8 Bit Civilizations (working title) has understandably been reduced in scope from the original PC and Amiga versions. For example you can play against a maximum of 3 AI opponents (or 2 if barbarians are enabled), and the world map is not as large. However even in its current state, the game is every bit as fun as the original, and even includes some innovative new features. Such as you may chose the gender of your nation’s leader, so if you choose to play the English nation, you be Henry VIII as well as Elizabeth I. The game board is played from an isometric perspective, a feature which wasn’t added in the original line of games until Civilization II (1996). It clearly doesn’t shy much from the game’s complexity. Check out the traditionally numbing endgame going on in the screenshot below!
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Civilization ported to 8-bit Commodore 64
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=cJzgiDgBpcw The first iteration of Dial-a-Grue , in 2011, was to kit out an old rotary dial phone with an embedded computer and text-to-speech engine so that you could play Zork with nothing but the handset. The new, 2.0 version of the project, is “to port Zork I (via a z-code interpreter) to an embedded platform, and enclose that and an old modem inside a telephone, so that the game can be played from a teletype, TDD, or old computer with an acoustically coupled modem.” ( via JWZ )
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Dial-a-Grue: play Zork with nothing but an old phone
Authorities say Tulsa maintenance base workers workers for American Airlines found seven bricks of cocaine weighing 31 pounds with a street value of about a half a million dollars hidden in the nose of an AA aircraft. (more…)
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Almost half a million bucks worth of cocaine stuffed up nose of American Airlines plane from Colombia
A young couple and two cats found dead in their Berkeley, Calif., apartment may have been overcome by fumes vented from a 3D printer , reports CBS News . 35-year-old Roger Morash and 32-year-old Valerie Morash were discovered in the morning by a visitor. The source said that the couple was using a laser 3-D printer that was venting into their residence. Symptoms and signs consistent with carbon monoxide poisoning were found in their bodies. Police evacuated the apartment building and called in PG&E and the fire department’s hazardous materials team to look for a gas leak or some other hazard but no contaminant was found. There’s some alarm online about the identification of a 3D printer as generating carbon monoxide (the fine particles are a known risk) . The source probably misidentified a another kind of machine such as a CNC or laser cutter. There’s a crowdfunding effort underway to support the victims’ families; SFGate reports that a memorial for the Morashes was held Saturday .
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Laser cutter fumes suspected in deaths of California couple, cats
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Were police snooping on Women’s March protesters’ cellphones? Too many departments won’t say
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=hL3gA8IMO-w Researchers from Context Security have identified a vulnerability in Samsung Galaxy phones: by embedding commands in the obsolete, 17-year-old WAP proptocol in an SMS message, attackers can put them into endless reboot loops, or encrypt their storage and charge the phone’s owners for a decryption key. (more…)
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You can install ransomware on a Samsung Galaxy by sending it an SMS
Tooth Magnified to the atomic level It’s like Powers of Ten for dentistry.
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Zooming in on a tooth until you can see individual atoms
From Geopolitical Futures via Joshua Landis . Seems rough on details. If Islamic State gets wee satellites down in Yemen, you’d think the Sinai Insurgents would at least get some diagonal shading! (more…)
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Map shows Middle East based on who actually holds territory
In the village of Antia on Greece’s Evia island, shepherds use whistling to communicate over long distances. This isn’t a code but rather a real language. “Whistles let shepherds communicate between distant hillsides because a whistled sound wave travels farther than spoken words.” ( Scientific American )
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The amazing whistling language of Greek shepherds