Facebook is the new frontier for fraud.
Forget those phishing emails that attempt to get your credit card or bank sign-in information. When crooks want to know how to get into your bank account, they post a message on Facebook. These messages appear so innocuous and so appropriate in the Facebook setting that you are likely to not only get conned, but pass on the scam.
The eyes have it – Computer Vision Syndrome!
If you find yourself looking in the mirror at the end of a long day only to see the bloodshot eyes of a crackhead staring back at you, it may be because you are addicted to something —your digital devices.
Continue reading… “Computer Vision Syndrome Sweeping the Country”
Forced perspective photography
You don’t always have to use Photoshop to create optical illusions in your photographs. With a technique called forced perspective you can create illusions that make an object appear farther away, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is. It just takes a little creativity with the placement of the subjects in the shot and the camera angle.
Continue reading… “Brilliant Forced Perspective Photography – Part 2”
Wave rotor motor
Piston engines are big, heavy, dirty, complicated, and expensive pieces of machinery that have been around for a century. It’s about time for something better, and one option could be wave disk engines, which are small, light, clean, simple, and cheap pieces of machinery that aren’t around yet. But they’re close.
Continue reading… “Shock Wave Engine Could Make Hybrid Cars More Fuel Efficient”
The smartest 5 percent, made a big contribution to the strength of their economies.
It’s not just how free the market is. Some economists are looking at another factor that determines how much a country’s economy flourishes: how smart its people are. For a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, researchers analyzed test scores from 90 countries and found that the intelligence of the people, particularly the smartest 5 percent, made a big contribution to the strength of their economies.
Continue reading… “Wealthiest Countries Are Also the Smartest Countries: Study”
When an ageing playground was dismantled by workmen, people living nearby expected new swings, slides and climbing frames. What they ended up with was . . . a brick wall. The old play equipment in Audenshaw’s Shepley Wood Park was taken away two years ago. Town hall chiefs promised to replace it with brand-new facilities.
But when the plug was pulled on government funding last year, the council was forced to think again. Now it has now replaced the equipment – with a wall for kids to kick a ball against. Eileen Pritchard, whose house overlooks the park, said: “We can’t believe what we’re seeing…
Continue reading… “Children’s Playground Replaced With Brick Wall”
The New York Times has created a chart that illustrates changing meat eating habits among Americans over the past century. Chicken, as you can see, is steadily on the rise, whereas lamb (black) eating has dropped to almost nothing…
At age 15, most normal people are going to high school, learning to drive, not listening to their parents, and doing things that they’ll later tell their kids not to do. Josh Buckley is not a normal teenager. At 15, he was selling his first company for just over six figures.
Today, the 18-year-old entrepreneur and angel investor has partnered with 17-year-old engineer Tyler Diaz to co-found MinoMonsters, a social game in which players collect and battle pet monsters.
Continue reading… “Youngest Y Combinator Founders Launch MinoMonsters, The Pokemon Of Social Games”
If the latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is right, the Large Hadron Collider — the world’s largest atom smasher that started regular operation last year — could be the first machine capable of causing matter to travel backwards in time.
Continue reading… “Large Hadron Collider Could Be World’s First Time Machine”
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Creeper, the world’s first computer virus. From Creeper to Stuxnet, the last four decades saw the number of malware instances boom from 1,300 in 1990, to 50,000 in 2000, to over 200 million in 2010.
Besides sheer quantity, viruses, which were originally used as academic proof of concepts, quickly turned into geek pranks, then evolved into cybercriminal tools. By 2005, the virus scene had been monetized, and virtually all viruses were developed with the sole purpose of making money via more or less complex business models…
The US Central Command (Centcom) has purchased software that creates false online personalities for what it calls “information operations.”
Using the software, one member of the U.S. Military can control up to ten different fake accounts that appear to belong to civilians living in other countries. The government purchased the software from California-based Ntrepid for $2.76 million.
The hexayurt is an update on Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome and is a sturdy, affordable, easy-to-build temporary shelter. The geometry has been adjusted slightly to make it easier to build domes from materials like plywood, insulation, plastic, cardboard and more. The hexayurts are made from only one kind of triangle: an 8′ x 8′ isosceles triangle, rather than the strangely-shaped triangles which are standard for Fuller-style geodesic domes. They are not strictly geodesic, either, but it doesn’t seem to matter much in practice. The slightly stiff, angular lines look a lot like any other dome.
The most common place to see hexayurts is at Burning Man…