December 2010
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Google and George Clooney Aim Satellites at Sudan,...
Ahead of an early January referendum, the two partners, along with Harvard and the United Nations, want Sudanese rebels to know that they are being watched.
George Clooney is joining Google, the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and the United Nations in an effort called the Satellite Sentinel Project to monitor violence and human rights violations in Sudan as the country...
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Biomimicry in Action by Maria Popova
Over the past few years, designers have made significant strides on the prosthetics front, blending modernist aesthetics with state-of-the art functionality. At the same time, biomimicry – design and engineering innovation inspired by nature’s systems and organisms – has been a rapidly growing area of R&D interest. Now, from designer Kaylene Kau comes a highly functional, sleek...
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Do We Need Actors? CGI and the Future of Hollywood...
“Wow, how did they do that?” We were watching Tron: The Legacy in 3-D, and our friend was marveling at how 61 year-old Jeff Bridges appeared as young as a man in his early 30s (Bridges has a double role in the movie, one as the hero’s elderly father Flynn, and the other as his ever youthful evil alter ego Clu). “The makeup they can do these days is amazing,” we all gushed. Halfway through the...
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Parts of Me Ooze in All Directions by Michio Kaku
Michio Kaku Professor of Theoretical Physics, CUNY
Because of the wave nature of matter, there is a finite possibility—albeit a minuscule one—that you could go to bed on Earth and wake up the next morning on Mars.
Question: Could one crank up the vibrational frequency of their body to a higher dimension, move around in that dimension, and then crank the frequency back down somewhere else?
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Fossil genome reveals ancestral link by Ewen...
Published online 22 December 2010 | Nature 468, 1012 (2010)
A distant cousin raises questions about human origins.
The ice-age world is starting to look cosmopolitan. While Neanderthals held sway in Europe and modern humans were beginning to populate the globe, another ancient human relative lived in Asia, according to a genome sequence recovered from a finger bone in...
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stupid.com →
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The Israelis who will save the world's fish →
The oceans are emptying, the Chinese become prominent, the Europeans get older, the fish are getting more expensive and the Israelis invent and initiate, with no commitment to a specific domain or site. In this case, fish and algae.
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Google Adds the Human Body to Its Search Functions...
On Dec. 16, Google released the first version of its Body Browser, a simulation of the human body. Users can travel, as in the 1980s movie “Innerspace,” through various layers of human anatomy, zooming in on internal organs, navigating around bones and peeling back layers of the human body until all that’s left are the stringy tangles of the nervous system.
The Body Browser works only in...
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בדיחות מתמטיקאים →
“In a TV interview, Diane Sawyer asked Obama’s Secretary of Homeland...”
– Phil Glowatz
Palestinian Tech Firms Fueled by Israel, Google,...
Peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority have ground to a near-halt again, but the IT departments of the two countries are getting along just fine. Israeli high-tech firms are increasingly outsourcing work to the West Bank, while the State Department, Google and Cisco have all recently announced investments in Palestine’s technical infrastructure.
The...
IBM's 'Watson' Computer to Air on Jeopardy in...
IBM is using the game show to demonstrate the question-answer computer Watson’s capability to quickly answer natural language questions.
IBM’s “Watson” computer will finally make its appearance on “Jeopardy” in February, taking on two of the show’s all-time winners over a three-day span.
The game will test Watson’s abilities to think in a human-like way, not only being able to retrieve...
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No snow leads to cannabis bust
Busted … cops found more than 300 cannabis plants
POLICE busted a “significant” cannabis factory because its grow lights melted all the SNOW on its roof.
Officers responding to reports of suspicious behaviour said the house was the only one not thickly blanketed after last week’s snowfall.
On Thursday they raided the house in Aylestone, Leicester, and found more than...
WatchEmotional Spell-Check
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Steve Jobs In Email Pissing Match with College... →
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What a WikiLeak's leak looks like →
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Amazon Provides a Dose of Humor by David Pogue
Tuscan Whole Milk, the muse of Amazon commenters.
You can say what you like about the Internet—it’s filthy, it’s addictive, it breeds isolation. But man, it’s also the greatest platform for humor the world has ever known. I’d say a decent percentage of the most satisfying belly laughs I’ve ever experienced have come from the sheer comic brilliance of ordinary people online. (I collected...
"Turbulence," an Interactive Movie, Coming Soon to...
An Israeli professor of film and television takes a new, more theoretical, approach to developing an interactive film.
The woman’s husband is cheating on her, but she does not know this yet. She stands alone in their dark bedroom. On the floor is her husband’s coat, and a photograph of him with his lover peeks out, just barely, from a pocket. The woman turns, and her eye is caught by...
Twitter's 10 Most Powerful Tweets of 2010 BY KIT...
Ann Curry tweets to convince the USAF to allow a Medecins Sans Frontiers flight to land in Haiti “@usairforce find a way to let Doctors without Borders planes land in Haiti: http://bit.ly/8hYZOK THE most effective at this.”
The White House tweets to welcome president Medvedev to Twitter. No “red phone” required. “Welcome to @twitter President Medvedev! RT...
מפת קווי אגד בחיפה בימי ששי →
Reality Check By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
Go to Columnist Page »
Oil is to Saudi Arabia what unconditional American aid and affection are to Israel — and what unconditional Arab and European aid and affection are to the Palestinians: a hallucinogenic drug that enables them each to think they can defy the laws of history, geography and demography. It is long past time that we stop...
How the Future of Big Tobacco Could Be Tiny...
BY KIT EATONWed Dec 8, 2010
The tobacco mosaic virus is a destructive beast infecting over a hundred different species of plants, including tomatoes. But it may have a weird eco benefit: Incorporated into lithium batteries, it can increase storage capacity ten times.
Scientists in the U.S. had already worked out how to coat the tiny rod-like cells of the virus with conductive materials. But the...
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עקרונות מדיניות משרד התשתיות הלאומיות להפעלת רכב... →
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שיקום הכרמל – עמדת החברה להגנת הטבע →
Microbe Finds Arsenic Tasty; Redefines Life
Henry Bortman
Felisa Wolfe-Simon takes samples from a sediment core she pulled up from the remote shores of 10 Mile Beach at Mono Lake in California.
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: December 2, 2010
The bacterium, scraped from the bottom of Mono Lake in California and grown for months in a lab mixture containing arsenic, gradually swapped out atoms of phosphorus in its little body for atoms of...
"722-4822" by Patrick Hanifin
Now get this. I was sitting at my desk, when I remembered a phone call I had to make. I found the number and dialed it. A man answered nicely saying, “Hello?” I politely said, “This is Patrick Hanifin and could I please speak to Robin Carter?” Suddenly the phone was slammed down on me! I couldn’t believe that anyone could be that rude. I tracked down Robin’s...
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"בסוף הדירות בגוש דן ייגמרו. ומה אז?" פתרונות שהם...
“הכשל הגדול בנושא הדיור בישראל הוא שאין פה תכנון ארוך טווח”, אומר השופט בדימוס שלמה שהם, שכיהן בשנים 2006-2001 בתפקיד נציב הדורות הבאים. במשך חמש שנות כהונתו קיבל שהם לשולחנו כל הצעת חוק עוד לפני שהועברה לדיון בכנסת, ובדק את השפעותיה על דור העתיד של ישראל. לדבריו, גם בשוק הדיור כמו בתחומים רבים אחרים, חברי הכנסת מעדיפים לעסוק בכאן ועכשיו ולהשאיר לבא אחריהם להתמודד עם העתיד.
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Every Playboy Issue, With No Staples in the Way By...
Bondi Digital — the company that took more than 80 years of New Yorker issues and converted them into a browsable, searchable, full-page archive on CD-ROM and a portable hard drive—has added a new magazine title to its list of clients. Playboy Cover to Cover is a portable hard drive that contains every issue from the first, in 1953, to December 2009. It costs $300.
Once the drive is...
