Vastrm Fit ID

Nap Pod

Beerviz

Keyprop

Smartkey   I want one of these – unfortunately, not designed for fob-type vehicle keys.

El Jefe, the Boss of Keychains

Dog Activated Outdoor Fountain

Single-Handed Barber

Existential Emergency Phone

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Classmates complain that it has no lunch money to pillage. And stuffing it in a locker is totally no fun.

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The boxy, compact pickup can be disassembled in less than six hours and have all of its parts, including the four-cylinder diesel engine and independent suspension, stored within the confines of its chassis, allowing six of them to fit in a standard shipping container. Three people can then reassemble it in about 12 hours upon delivery. No special tools are required.

Shorter in length than most compact cars, the tough little front-wheel-drive truck can reportedly carry 4400 pounds and ford water two and a half feet deep. Configured for passengers, thirteen people will fit on board, including three in the front cabin. The driver sits in the middle allowing the vehicle to be used in right and left hand drive countries without requiring any extensive reengineering.

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From the Daily Mail: ”Men who are physically strong are more likely to take a right wing political stance, while weaker men are inclined to support the welfare state, according to a new study.”

There it is! The science is in!

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We have the technology.

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In 1771, the young Spanish painter Francisco Goya travelled to Rome to learn and be inspired by the many great artists there. In that year, he is thought to have painted “The Sacrifice to Vesta” depicting a sacrifice to the goddess of fire. The work is important because it shows how Goya was developing artistically at a formative stage in his career.

There is little dispute that Goya is the author of this work– the artist’s skill and style are clear and various experts have confirmed the attribution. However, the painting lacks a signature, a feature that would leave nothing to debate.

Today, Cristina Seco-Martorell at the University of Barcelona in Spain and a few buddies say they have discovered Goya’s signature hidden behind a layer of varnish in the picture. And the trick they used to make this discovery is an entirely type of analysis using terahertz

We have the technology.

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A group of scientists from the University of Alberta have created a process that makes graphene-like nanomaterials out of hemp waste, suitable for use in supercapacitors.

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It’s in the New York Times, so it must be true.

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There are plenty of examples of structures built from recycled materials—even Buddhist temples have been made from them. In Sima Valley, California, an entire village known as Grandma Prisbey’s Bottle Village was constructed from reused glass. But this is no new concept—back in 1960, executives at the Heineken brewery drew up a plan for a “brick that holds beer,” a rectangular beer bottle that could also be used to build homes.

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A city in New Hampshire is suing a group that signs letters “Robin Hood and his Merry Men” that make a point of searching for expired parking meters and paying them before police can issue a ticket.

Seems harmless enough.

The group, comprised of six “Robin Hooders,” search the town of Keene for delinquent drivers and leave a note behind that says, “Your meter expired; however, we saved you from the king’s tariffs.” The note is signed, “Robin Hood and his Merry Men,” and urges recipients to consider “paying it forward,” The Washington Times reported.

Seems harmless enough.

The city, for its part, said the group “intentionally taunted, interfered with, harassed and intimidated” the city’s three parking enforcement officers, the report said. The suit identifies the “Robin Hood” members and was filed on May 2.

That doesn’t sound so harmless. Can we expect an Occupy Parking Space movement in our future?

Mark Steyn is on the case.

After marrying her progeny into the royal houses of Germany, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Greece and Spain, Queen Victoria was known as the grandmother of Europe. The inbreeding among Obama’s court and its press corps is more like one of those “I’m my own grandpaw” deals.

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A maverick neuroscientist believes he has deciphered the code by which the brain forms long-term memories.

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Physicists have finally solved the problem of how pearls form almost-perfect spheres: they rotate as they grow.

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Truly, you can find anything on the Internet.

Alex Tabarrok reports from the field.

In a large, randomized experiment Bowen et al. found that students enrolled in an online/hybrid statistics course learned just as much as those taking a traditional class (noted earlier by Tyler). Perhaps even more importantly, Bowen et al. found that the online model was significantly less costly than the traditional model, some 36% to 57% less costly to produce than a course using a traditional lecture format. In other words, since outcomes were the same, online education increased productivity by 56% to 133%! Online education trumps the cost disease!

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Once, being a college professor was a career. Today, it’s a gig.

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A British industrial designer has come up with a revolutionary alternative to the traditional spoked bicycle wheel that uses flexible curved springs to support the rim and providing a cushioning effect.

Constructed from carbon composite strips developed in conjunction with an archery bow manufacturer, the springs of the so-called Loopwheels have been engineered to provide the same lateral stiffness as standard spoke wheels while also acting as an in-wheel suspension system.

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For centuries, Egypt’s pyramids have been a point worldwide fascination. Scholars have long asked, how did the egyptians build them at all, much less so beautifully? But, when structural engineer Peter James looked at the pyramids, he asked why they were falling apart. The longstanding explanation is that looters have picked apart the pyramids over the years. But James wasn’t convinced by that idea, which led him to a new theory that he wrote about in Structure. The engineer believes that the pyramids were constructed so precisely that they weren’t built to deal with the contraction and expansion of the limestone in the desert heat, and that ironically, the most crudely built one — the Bent Pyramid — has thus held up best over the eons.

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 Researchers attach “viral hitmen” to surfaces to demonstrate a possible antibacterial defense for catheters and other medical devices.

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We see many advantages to these kinds of contracts. In addition to eliminating the stress and “publish or perish” madhouse that comes with pursuing a tenured position, this system promises to keep bad teachers and academic hacks in the classroom for only set amount of time instead of a lifetime. Perhaps the biggest advantage for students will be the opportunity to learn from professionals who know about the world outside of academia.

Can Do, The Lavatory Workstation

Laser Cutter

Long-Life Beer. Gotta love Australians.

Very tall roadside emergency beacon.

Beer drones.

How to Build a Working Digital Computer… out of paperclips

Kevo smartphone-friendly lock

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Working with a continuous record of Arctic climate reaching back 3.6 million years, researchers have documented a period when the region was significantly warmer and wetter than it is today and when the atmosphere’s inventory of carbon dioxide was comparable to today’s levels.

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Hobbits are rather late to the party.

Arnold Kling reviews an important new book.

Weiner looks at the problem of social order from the perspective of legal history and anthropology. He finds a pattern of order that he calls the rule of the clan, which does not require a strong central state. However, he shows that rule of the clan relies on a set of rules and social norms which are inconsistent with libertarian values of peace, open commerce, and individual autonomy. He argues that the atrophy of the state would lead to an undesirable resurgence of the rule of the clan.

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Well, it is Oregon. You know how those people are.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The bottom states are, of course, all Blue states.

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It’s not a secret that replicating what the human brain and senses do naturally still presents a substantial challenge in engineering. New advances in restoring and improving hearing are getting closer to the real thing by going mobile and taking cues from nature.

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Oh, boy.

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Scientists at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine say they’ve discovered a brain region that may control aging throughout the entire body. By manipulating that region, they were able to extend the lives of mice by 20 percent. The finding, detailed in a paper published in Nature on May 1, may lead to new ways of warding off age-related diseases and increasing life spans.

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 Computer simulations show that high blood pressure can be entirely explained by arterial stiffening as we age, say researchers

I hope these are better than the ones they use to predict Global Warming.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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 A quantum internet capable of sending perfectly secure messages has been running at Los Alamos National Labs for the last two and a half years, say researchers

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Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen: Which fascist Democrat legislator will be first in line to ban it?

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And it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

We’ve been saying for some time that Obamacare will be a central issue in the 2014 election, and that it offers Republicans the hope, if they nominate solid candidates, of taking control of the Senate. Now, Senate Democrats have figured this out, as well.

It’s not as if they’d be sacrificing anything like a principle, after all.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

The Other McCain is on the case.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Christos Anesti

Indeed, He is risen.

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Much to the consternation of scientists, the cylindrical platinum-iridium artifacts that represent the kilogram (see image above) have been gradually packing on extra weight due to surface contamination. Since that unit of measure is the last to be based on an artifact and not a physical constant of nature — for instance, a meter is the distance light travels in a vacuum during 1/299,792,458 of a second — it means that scientists no longer know exactly how much a kilogram is. That makes experiments requiring extreme precision more difficult, so researchers from Mettler Toledo, CERN and the EPFL have been working for the last 15 years on a so-called Watt balance, which works on the principle of electromagnetic force restoration. The team managed to created a “load cell” that’s accurate to a 0.3 µg resolution for a 2kg weight, well below the desired level of 1 µg — meaning the goal of replacing a hunk of metal from 1878 with something more, ahem, solid is within reach by the 2015 target date.

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High profile database breaches aren’t a daily thing just yet, but they’re certainly not rare. Linode’s recent system-wide password reset and Scribd’s account compromises were announced just nine days apart. In the last week, there have been breaches at LivingSocial and Reputation.com. Pay attention to the e-mails sent after hacks like these, and you’ll notice they often come with a set of new password recommendations. Password best practices are something Stormpath has already covered in depth, but always from a backend perspective.

So, instead of cautioning against hashing with MD5 again (seriously though, don’t do it), we wanted to take a look at some of the more insidious password myths we run into. We hope this helps developers create smart password policies, which we will shamelessly mention you can set automatically if you use Stormpath.

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Oxford English Dictionary Chief Editor John Simpson is to retire after 37 years at the famous reference work. Here he writes of a life hunting for the evidence behind the birth of words.

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The story of Whitby’s own Saxon princess, St Hilda of Whitby, who founded the first abbey on the East Cliff in 657, is known by many people throughout the world.

However, imagine the shock when, a few years ago, a second Saxon princess was found, buried at Street House in Loftus by Teesside archaeologist Doctor Steve Sherlock who dug her up while looking for iron age finds.

Now a new exhibition at Whitby Museum on loan from Kirkleatham Museum in Redcar pours light on the mysterious princess.

Tek RMD

Survival Straw

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The operation represents a crucial milestone for Geodynamics, which has spent ten years working to get geothermal power a seat at the table in Australia’s renewable energy debate. Its original Habanero 1 heat exchanger in 2003 first demonstrated the potential of the site, and the power plant construction was completed in 2009, but the project has suffered setbacks and some drilling disappointments.

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For years, there have been tales of people in the first permanent English settlement in America eating dogs, cats, rats, mice, snakes and shoe leather to stave off starvation. There were also written accounts of settlers eating their own dead, but archaeologists had been skeptical of those stories.

But now, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and archaeologists from Jamestown are announcing the discovery of the bones of a 14-year-old girl that show clear signs that she was cannibalized. Evidence indicates clumsy chops to the body and head of the girl, who appears to have already been dead at the time.

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What does he know that you don’t? (Well, aside from the fact that he’s got a yacht longer than the street you live on….)

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Hundreds of mysterious spheres lie beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, an ancient six-level step pyramid just 30 miles from Mexico City.

The enigmatic spheres were found during an archaeological dig using a camera-equipped robot at one of the most important buildings in the pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacan.