Finally, You Can Kiss People Over the Internet

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Tactile communications: it may not sound too exciting, but it’s precisely the field of research that produced a device which lets users “transmit the feeling of a kiss” long-distance.

The Kajimoto Laboratory at the University of Electro-Communications has created a device which consists of a hardware receptacle which is placed into the mouth, and software that remembers the movements of your tongue and sends them to the other connected device, which moves accordingly.

Of course, there’s more to a kiss than just the movement of the tongue, and the folks from Kajimoto plan to recreate them all…

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How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis

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The word again today is GREED.

Frederick Kaufman’s piece for Foreign Policy examines how the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI) is responsible for the increase in food prices.

[T]he boom in new speculative opportunities in global grain, edible oil, and livestock markets has created a vicious cycle. The more the price of food commodities increases, the more money pours into the sector, and the higher prices rise. Indeed, from 2003 to 2008, the volume of index fund speculation increased by 1,900 percent. “What we are experiencing is a demand shock coming from a new category of participant in the commodities futures markets,” hedge fund Michael Masters testified before Congress in the midst of the 2008 food crisis…

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Office Chair Racing Championship

More than 50 people participated in Germany’s third annual office chair championships on April 16th, racing each other on a downhill course in the town of Bad Koenig, The contestants were free to adapt their office chairs for race conditions, but were not allowed motors to propel them down the cordoned-off road. Most had mounted inline skater wheels for greater speed…

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Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Apple in US Over Location Tracking Issue

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Apple has been tracking your moves and invading your privacy.

Bloomberg was first to report today that two iPad/iPhone users have filed a class action lawsuit accusing Apple of invasion of privacy and computer fraud, and of “secretly recording movements of iPhone and iPad users.”

Vikram Ajjampur, an iPhone user in Florida, and William Devito, a New York iPad customer, sued April 22 in federal court in Tampa, Florida, seeking a judge’s order barring the alleged data collection.

The complaint cited a report last week by two computer programmers claiming that Apple’s iOS4 operating system is logging latitude-longitude coordinates along with the time a spot is visited…

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USDA Outsources Biotech Crop Evaluation to the GMO Industry

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What kind of logic prevails when environmental impact statements
on biotech crops
are outsourced to the GMO industry itself?

The U.S. is already cultivating 165 million acres of genetically modified crops, up 7 million acres from just two years ago. Modified seeds and large monocultures in general, are monopolizing our nation’s agriculture system like never before and crop after crop are deemed “safe” by the USDA. We’re headed full speed down a dark, winding road and it seems we’re driving blindfolded. And most recently, according to a story on Grist, the USDA is starting a new program which will outsource environmental impact statements on biotech crops to the GMO industry. Obviously, biotech companies are thrilled with the idea…

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Blood-Inspired Perfume Arouses Vampire Curiosity

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Get your blood-fume now!

A new blood-inspired perfume may soon have an ideal group of early adopters: vampires. Last week, a pair of Italian entrepreneurs, Antonio Zuddas and Giovanni Castelli, debuted Blood Concept, a provocative fragrance line based on the four major human blood types: A, B, AB and O… Continue reading… “Blood-Inspired Perfume Arouses Vampire Curiosity”

Funeral Parlor Offers Drive-Through Casket Viewing

Drive through funeral parlour

Convenience for those on the go.

A drive-through funeral parlour in Compton, California, with a glass-encased chamber for the coffin offers convenience to mourners. Robert L. Adams Mortuary also provides a speedy way for well-known community members to be viewed en masse…

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Startup Aims To Build Billboards That Target You, Personally

Digital billboards that display different ads depending on who is looking at them were once only found in Minority Report. But a recently launched startup aims to make targeted billboard advertising as ubiquitous as targeted online advertising.

Immersive Labs introduced its smart billboard technology at TechStars‘ Demo Day in New York on Thursday. The software combines video analytics with environmental factors and Twitter and Foursquare information to decide what the best ad to display at that moment is…

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Whale “Pop Song” Sweeps the Ocean

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Listening for one Whale of a song.

Just like humans, whales also have “pop songs,” complete with music mania that sweeps across the ocean:

The findings are based on 11 years of recordings from underwater microphones slung over the sides of boats, which were collected by marine biologist Ellen Garland of the University of Queensland in Australia and colleagues. Picking out the patterns took a while; the team had to listen to 745 songs in total from six whale populations across the South Pacific over the 11-year period. The researchers identified 11 distinctly different styles (audio). Sometimes the “hit song” contained snippets from previous seasons, sometimes it was entirely revolutionary…

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FBI Shuts Down Poker Sites in Online Gambling Crackdown

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This is not what you want to see on your site when you log in in the morning.

On Friday, the FBI shut down three of the world’s most popular online poker sites, replacing their home pages with the message: “This domain name has been seized by the F.B.I. pursuant to an Arrest Warrant.” (as shown above)

Joe Menn at the Financial Times nails the story first and best, and describes it as “the largest crackdown since Congress banned electronic gambling transactions in 2006.”

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Russians In Mars Space Race Set New Goals

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Russians are aiming at getting to Mars.

An interplanetary spacecraft for a flight to Mars will be created not before 2025 and the maiden flight to the red planet will be possible only after 2035, said Russian space agency Roscosmos chief Anatoly Perminov on Wednesday.

“The possibility of a flight to Mars needs to be combined with the construction of a spaceship having a new nuclear power propulsion unit, which will make it possible to reach the planet in a month,” Perminov said in Russia’s upper house of parliament…

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