https://youtu.be/ukug2h1kS4Q Electric eels are incredible animals. Besides being able to shock animals, it uses radar to locate prey. This 1950s film features a happy scientist and his beloved pet eel, Joe, who happily shocks five people in the office with his superpower.
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How electric eels work
In Eastern Europe, organized crime and the government are the same thing, so the US is having a tough time stopping the ransomware attacks emanating from those countries. The LA Times has a story about a recent attack on a community college in Los Angeles: Phil Lieberman, a cybersecurity expert, said attacks such as the one at Los Angeles Valley College are common among companies and government agencies that use the Internet. “The attacks generally come out of Eastern Europe and cannot be stopped because the United States does not have pacts with the countries where the attacks are launched,” he said. Ransomware is usually delivered via email or through an infected website and immediately locks a computer system, Lieberman said. After a payment is received, hackers provide an “unlock code.” Finding the hackers isn’t the hard part, he said. The problem, according to Lieberman, is that “the U.S. government has no way to stop them, since the governments of the countries that launch this are uncooperative and in fact benefit from the criminal activity going on within their borders.” Here are 27 screenshots of ransomware . Most of them look like computer screens from bad 1990s hacker movies.
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Los Angeles Valley College pays $28,000 in bitcoin ransom to hackers
YouTuber Proto G shot these cool experiments with plasma vortex force fields . Scientists are looking into large-scale practical applications of the force field generated in this manner: (more…)
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Fun with plasma vortex force fields
m0nster0 posted this 3mm-thick slice of a Seymchan pallasite meteorite to Reddit. He says its “one of my favorite bits of space rock.” I can’t argue with that! He bought it on eBay from this guy , who sells some stunning specimens.
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Beautiful Seymchan pallasite meteorite
Tofugu (where my wife Carla is exec editor) has a great article about the 20 best anime movies not made by Studio Ghibli ( Totoro, Spirited Away ). https://youtu.be/xGOneMdjpw4 19. REDLINE Often times, “anime” is defined by its lack of motion . Redline punches this “limited animation” concept in its motionless face. It’s easily the busiest, most overstimulating animated film we’ve ever seen. A daredevil speedster named JP enters the Redline, a high-stakes, weaponized space race that nearly took his life. But first, he’s gotta get back into racing shape to challenge the best in the universe with pure speed and guts. Along his comeback trail, JP meets Cherry-Boy Hunter, a young female competitor who unearths old memories. Can JP return to form in time for the Redline? Is Cherry-Boy Hunter friend or foe? Can JP survive the intergalactic conspiracy that saturates the race? Sure, Redline’s plot plays like a giant stone soup of anime tropes: space, vehicles, aliens, and giant pompadours. Check, check, and check. The film took seven years and 100,000 hand drawings to create, all that hard work paid off. Down to its pop-art presentation, Redline is anime pulp fiction at its best. What it lacks in depth, it makes up for with an adrenaline-fueled circus of speed and action.
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The 20 best anime movies not made by Studio Ghibli
As someone who’s struggled with his weight all his life (and who comes from a family with similar problems), I’ve long been fascinated with the science of weight and obesity; many years ago I listened to a Quirks & Quarks segment detailing the theory that the modern obesity epidemic was the result of a bird flu that affected our gut flora and changed our metabolisms to make us hungrier and more susceptible to convert the food we ate to fat. (more…)
Link:
A virus first found in chickens is implicated in human obesity
Despite what you might have read in this alarming story in the Washington Post , Russia did not hack Vermont’s power authority. (more…)
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No, Russia didn’t hack Vermont’s power grid
André Roubo’s series on carpentry called L’Art du Menuisier mentions a polissior , a small device made of broom straw for polishing wood. In the two centuries since Roubo’s book, the device had faded from memory until a couple of years ago, when Don Williams recreated one from an illustration in Roubo’s book. It turned out to work amazingly well. (more…)
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Artisans revive the polissoir, a nearly-forgotten woodworking tool
Here’s a free 853-page Kindle edition of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian Stories . I got it and the formatting looks good, which is not often the case for free/supercheap ebooks. I read the reviews and people complained about missing chapters, but it looks like the publisher made corrections.
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Conan the Barbarian: The Complete Collection – free Kindle edition
Peter Kogler projects or applies patterns to the surfaces of rooms that can be quite disorienting for anyone who enters. Most of his work uses warped black and white lines to distort the size and shape of floors, walls, and ceilings. He also makes a lot of cool creations involving images of mice and ants. • Peter Kogler site (via Colossal )
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Dizzying designs by Peter Kogler seem to warp space