Butt biometrics

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There’s a bad moon rising?

Last year, we heard about a new technology to identify individuals based on the pressure signature of their feet on the ground. Now, Japanese scientists at the Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology built a system that can identify an individual by the pressure signature of his or her ass. They’re not, er, resting on their laurels though. There’s work to be done!

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Multitouch Domes are a great way to display maps

DISPLAX Multitouch Globe from DISPLAX™ Interactive Systems on Vimeo.

The demo kind of falls apart when they start poking around Windows, but Displax’s new 40-inch diameter Multitouch Globe looks like an absolute joy when it comes to navigating interactive maps. It’s just too bad it’s a bit impractical…

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U.S. companies that will be the most profitable in 2012

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The market appears to anticipate rapid growth from Apple.

24/7 Wall St. forecasts the publicly traded U.S. companies that will have the highest profits in the year ahead every January.  For 2012, Apple is likely to pass Exxon Mobil as the most profitable corporation in the Fortune 500. It already passed the oil giant in market capitalization for a while last year. The market appears to anticipate rapid growth from Apple comparable to that of the past two years. The stock has reached several all-time highs recently and now trades around $425, up nearly 25 percent in the past year.

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World’s smallest 3D map of the world

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The world’s smallest map is composed of 500,000 pixels, each measuring 20 nm2 and was created in only 2.23 minutes.

Zurich scientists have created the world’s smallest 3D map – of the world.  IBM’s perfectly formed ‘nano-world’, has now been accepted by the Guinness World Record organization.  (Pics)

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Facebook bed for the true Facebook fan

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The FBed

If you are with obsessed with Facebook and  can’t stand being away it out of fear of missing a post or a poke from a friend, we found the bed for you. Of course, you could be like most people and just charge your smartphone at the bedside, but this concept is better for the true Facebook fan. It’s called the Facebook bed. I imagine Zuckerberg has something similar. (Pics)

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Needs your own lobbyist? Kickstarter knock-off funding to Anti-SOPA cause

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A new way to deal with political problems.

Over the past two weeks, staffers from HUGE, the Dumbo-based digital agency, have been at work on a different kind of interactive campaign. Yesterday around noon, a skunkworks team made up of software engineers, interaction designers, information architects, and more finally unleashed their side project on the world: a platform called We the Lobby that “makes the United States political system available to the 99% who can’t afford a lobbying group.”

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The SOPA blackout: Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, Google, and many others protest proposed law

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Two new laws proposed by US legislators, the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, have been attracting a very negative reaction from the web community over the past couple of months, which is today culminating in a day of protests. Aiming to curtail copyright infringement on the web by giving the US government unprecedented new powers, both SOPA and PIPA have been rejected as overreaching and unhelpful laws that cannot coexist with a free and open internet.

A lot of websites (most notably Wikipedia) are going dark today in protest of SOPA.

But the humor site The Oatmeal easily wins for its hilarious GIF about the proposed law. In its own way, it does a better job of explaining what SOPA means than a lot of the serious sites out there.

Here it is after the jump. Watch and laugh…

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No link found between childhood obesity and junk food in schools

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Junk food does not cause obesity in middle school students.

Kids who attend schools that sell junk food such as soda and doughnuts do not gain more weight than students who attend schools where that type of food isn’t available, according to a new study of nearly 20,000 middle schoolers.

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