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
David Yanofsky and Tim Fernholz created an interactive chart showing the weight, national origin and position of more than 1,300 active satellites orbiting the planet Earth. The data was sourced from the Union of Concerned Scientists . It goes out in bands: there’s a cloud in low-earth orbit bulked up with the International Sapce Station and surveillance satellites. Satellite phone networks such as Iridium and Globalstar form conspicuous rings about 800 and 1500 km up. 20km up are the navigation networks GPS and Glonass. 37km up is a mess, with so many geostationary satellites clustered together that they become a rainbow blur in the graphic.
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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
Image: David Weekly/Flickr Western Union admitted it behaved criminally through its “willful failure to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program and aiding and abetting wire fraud,” reports Forbes. They’ve agreed to pay a $586 million fine. From the Forbes article : In a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission on Thursday, authorities describe insufficient or poorly enforced policies that resulted in the funneling of hundreds of millions of dollars in proceeds from illegal gambling, fraud and drug and human trafficking. … In one case, illegal immigrants from China sent money back to the people who smuggled them across the border. With the help of employees, the payments were structured so that they didn’t trigger reporting requirements under the Bank Secrecy Act, say authorities. In another example, Western Union processed hundreds of thousands of transactions for an international scam, wherein fraudsters directed people to send money in order to claim a prize or help a relative. Western Union employees often processed the payments in return for a cut of the proceeds, say authorities. From CFO : Wifredo A. Ferrer, the U.S. Attorney in Miami, said the misconduct reflected “a flawed corporate culture that failed to provide a checks and balances approach to combat criminal practices.” “Western Union’s failure to implement proper controls and discipline agents that violated compliances policies enabled the proliferation of illegal gambling, money laundering and fraud-related schemes,” he added. I’m not a fan of civil asset forfeiture, which is basically a way for law enforcement to steal money and assets from anyone without charging them with a crime. But in this case, it seems appropriate for the government seize the assets of the CEO of Western Union, Hikmet Ersek, until he can prove that his $8.5 million salary didn’t depend on Western Union’s admitted criminal activities.
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Western Union fined $586 million for colluding with organized crime
YouTuber and photographer Timmy Joe saw spectacular light pillars on an arctic January night from his northern Ontario home. He thought they were northern lights until he went to investigate. It’s a totally different phenomenon, as he helpfully explains. (more…)
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Weather phenomenon of light pillars vs. northern lights