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The company’s lettuce bot rolls slowly (1 mile per hour) down a row of lettuce plants, with a camera pointed at the ground. One set of algorithms determines whether or not the robot is seeing a plant, another set of algorithms determines if the plant is a weed or not (to about 98 or 99 percent accuracy) and a third set of algorithms determines when the correct moment is to inject the deadly dose of fertilizer on the weed.

We have the technology — or soon will.

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One of the barriers to the continuing shrinking of electronics is that as you pack more features into a smaller space, you also pack more heat into that space. That makes heat a hurdle standing in the way of our ability to keep Moore’s Law going for as long as possible.

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, have found that a single-atom-thick graphene coating on either side of a copper track – a graphene-copper-graphene sandwich – gave a 24 per cent better heat conduction than copper alone.

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Well, it had to happen.

‘Sasha’ is pretty cute — too bad she has a boy’s name … apparently brains skipped a generation in her family.

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I am not making this up.

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How ’bout that Global Warming, huh?

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Doubters have been poo-pooing Texas’ economic growth ever since it shook off the economic recession even as the rest of the country continues to try to scrape the thing off its shoes. Yeah, Texas may be creating jobs, they say, but only for burger-flippers. But data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas shows that those must be some well-paid burger-flippers. Texas, according to a new paper, outstrips the rest of the country when it comes to creating not just jobs, but jobs that pay well.

Damn straight.

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After successful testing last year, the Navy is preparing to deploy its first directed energy weapon to the fleet. When it puts to sea this summer, the afloat forward staging base ship USS Ponce will be equipped with the Navy’s Laser Weapon System (LaWS).

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The folks at Oscar Mayer have found a way around that, though – an iPhone app and dongle that will make sizzling sounds and release a bacon scent when your alarm goes off.

The aroma comes from a diffuser made by Scentee, which uses high-frequency waves to release the aroma of a bacon scent capsule.

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The supercomputer made its debut as a chef at a Las Vegas tech conference last week, and so far has produced gourmet, fusion fare like a Swiss-Thai asparagus quiche, an Austrian chocolate burrito, and a pork belly moussaka.

I am not making this up.

Don’t laugh–– she’s got tenure.

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4 AXYZ’s printing method involves adapting an existing German woodworking machine to operate in 3D. It works by combining small, uniformly cut pieces of wood. Shah actually prefers to put the manufacturing technique under the broader term of “additive manufacturing,” as there is at no point any liquid “ink” involved, as is generally the case in 3D printing.

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Sgt. Maj. Walter Valentine, 89, served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam over three decades with the Marines and then spent another three decades helping comrades make a smooth transition into civilian life when they retire.

Whatever the correct term is the antonym of ‘slacker’, he’s it.

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The business of America is business.

Note the picture: This chick is of the Asian persuasion.

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

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Orangeburg, South Carolina Sheriff Leroy Ravenell cited self defense for a woman who shot her enraged boyfriend after he beat her and dragged her through the yard and across the floor on February 2nd.

Sounds about right. Would that more would do the same.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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The Four Chaplains, also sometimes referred to as the “Immortal Chaplains,” were four United States Army chaplains who gave their lives to save other civilian and military personnel during the sinking of the troop ship USAT Dorchester on February 3, 1943, during World War II. They helped other soldiers board lifeboats and gave up their own life jackets when the supply ran out. The chaplains joined arms, said prayers, and sang hymns as they went down with the ship.

Name an atheist who has saved someone’s life at the cost of his own. I can wait.

John Biggs takes a look.

On January 26, 1974 the world changed. A panoply of creatures popped into existence – Owlbears lumbered out of the woods while Bullettes snuffled out of caves, blinking in the sunlight. Adventurers donned metal plate armor and led their ambling pack horses into darkened dungeons. Traps sprung, capturing teams of dwarves in iron nets while gold glittered tantalizingly close to a shambling skeleton. For some, the ’70s were an era of free love. For others they were the era of untrammeled adventure.

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Anglo-Dutch consumer products giant Unilever spent more than 20 years trying to beat butter at its own game. But the maker of Flora, Country Crock, and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, appears ready to give up the fight.

Butter is better. Next up: Potatoes.

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The move comes after Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst penned a January 21, 2014 letter welcoming the conservative icon, in response to Hannity’s remarks that he was considering such a move. The letter signed by the legislators was penned by Texas House Ways and Means chairman and candidate for Texas Comptroller Harvey Hilderbran. Rep. Hilderbran spearheaded the effort to get the signatures. Breitbart News was the first to learn of the effort.

Y’all come back now, hear?

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I think it captures her soul, don’t you?

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Irwin says the “Hello Kitty guns” are popular with bachelorette parties.

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We have the technology.

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Gun Manufacturers Smith & Wesson have unleashed their newest revolver: a monster .460 calibre handgun which they say is ‘great for a back-up gun, or for hunting’.

Named the ‘Backpack Cannon’, the gun was unveiled in Las Vegas on Monday at the Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade show, the largest gun show in the U.S., which around 60,000 gun fans attend every year.

The cannon – officially called the Performance Center Model.460 – features a three-inch barrel, high visibility sights and synthetic shock absorber on the rear of the handle, as well as a massive chamber to fit the gigantic .460 calibre rounds, which are some of the biggest and most powerful bullets in the world.

You aren’t going to get a lot of range or accuracy with only a 3″ barrel. Still….

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Lynn University will phase out its learning management system for the next stage of its tablet-centric evolution. Beginning this fall, the university’s daytime undergraduate courses will be managed through Apple’s course management software, iTunes U.

The move makes Lynn one of only a handful of institutions that offer more than a select few courses through iTunes U, and is noteworthy because Lynn will trade a more comprehensive system, Blackboard Learn, for a product lacking key features such as analytics, attendance tracking and gradebooks.

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Bob Dible is an electrical engineer that works on his family farm in Kansas. He describes the productivity strides made in agriculture. “We generate GPS (global positioning system) yield maps using data from the combine as it harvests. That helps us determine what nutrients are needed the next season at various parts of our four-square-mile farm.”

Dible then programs those different nutrient mixes and locations onto the crop sprayer aircraft. As the crop sprayer flies over the field, it dynamically changes the mix of fertilizer based on its location.

The $900,000 Air Tractor model 802 has 1300hp and a payload of 9,249 lbs. In 2013 the plane can change its fertilizer mix every dozen meters. Dible, as an engineer, knows what is coming. “One day we will monitor and grow the corn on a stalk-by-stalk basis. When we plant crops, GPS with RTK (Real Time Kinematics) gives us 1-inch accuracy.” It’s not hard to see Dible’s vision even now. With today’s technology, a small autonomous robot could drive down the rows of corn.

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All together now: Awwwwwww!

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As John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, always says: Get a government job!

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A Washington Examiner evaluation of Walmart’s employee healthcare plan rated it superior to and more affordable than Obamacare. Over the years, Walmart has been undermined by unions and liberal activists, who claim that the retail giant is “notorious” for providing “substandard” healthcare plans.

The former president of the Illinois State Association of Health Underwriters, Robert Slayton, said that in Chicago, Obamacare offers a restricted list of hospital participation. Walmart, on the other hand, belongs to a national healthcare network that provides almost twice as many participating hospitals. What’s more, Walmart’s network of doctors dwarfs Obamacare’s. “You will notice there are 9,837 doctors [under Obamacare]. But the larger network is 24,904 doctors. Huge, huge difference,” Slayton said.

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

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Automats are before even my time, but I wish I’d thought to ask my father about the introduction of sliced wrapped bread.

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A high school science teacher in Iowa lost 37 pounds and lowered his cholesterol by eating nothing but McDonald’s for three months.

John Cisna told KCCI that his body did not deteriorate like the star from the Super Size Me documentary.

That’s because the star from the Super Size Me documentary was a tendentious asshole who started out with a conclusion and made it happen. Quelle surprise.

Cisna’s “bad cholesterol” actually dropped from 249 to 170, and he said he “embarked on the diet to show how we can eat anything as long as we stick to 2,000 calories per day and stay close to the recommended dietary allowances for nutrients.”

Another big factor in his weight loss was that Cisna “began walking for 45 minutes a day, a factor which no doubt contributed to the results.”

“The point behind this documentary is, ‘Hey, it’s (a) choice. We all have choices. It’s our choices that make us fat not McDonald’s,” he said.

I’m lovin’ it.

Read it. And watch the video. (You know there had to be a video.)

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

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Gov. Scott Walker has signed a bill that legalizes drinking on pedal pubs. Pedal pubs accommodate up to 16 riders that sit across from each other, using peddles underneath their seats to slowly power the quadracycles across city streets.

While a driver steers the multi-pedaled vehicle, riders sit in seats and can rest their tasty alcoholic beverage on the bar mounted in front of them. Although passengers continue to pedal the vehicle, they are still able to raise their glasses and toast each other or citizens that wave to them as they roll by.

I am not making this up.

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Harvard may have met its match. In a segment that aired earlier this week on “The Colbert Report,” Stephen Colbert commented on the fact that 23,000 people applied for 600 jobs at two recently-opened Walmart stores, giving Walmart a frighteningly low acceptance rate of 2.6 percent.

Colbert put it best when he warned applicants to Harvard and Princeton that they may be aiming too low. “It turns out,” he said, “there’s now an even more elite institution on the scene.”

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Vanadium dioxide is poised to join the pantheon of superstars in the materials world. Already prized for its extraordinary ability to change size, shape and physical identity, vanadium dioxide can now add muscle power to its attributes. A team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has demonstrated a micro-sized robotic torsional muscle/motor made from vanadium dioxide that for its size is a thousand times more powerful than a human muscle, able to catapult objects 50 times heavier than itself over a distance five times its length within 60 milliseconds –  faster than the blink of an eye.

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This acoustic cryptanalysis, carried out by Daniel Genkin, Adi Shamir (who co-invented RSA), and Eran Tromer, uses what’s known as a side channel attack. A side channel is an attack vector that is non-direct and unconventional, and thus hasn’t been properly secured. For example, your pass code prevents me from directly attacking your phone — but if I could work out your pass code by looking at the greasy smudges on your screen, that would be a side channel attack. In this case, the security researchers listen to the high-pitched (10 to 150 KHz) sounds produced by your computer as it decrypts data.

Watch it.

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The problem is that those who need it the most are the least likely to use it.

Pinterest has what you need.

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Yeah, everybody’s having a good time:

Soon to be a major motion picture, no doubt. Pixar, are you listenin’?

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Jeff Bezos revealed something that truly would revolutionize e-commerce and online ordering, should it become widely used: automated air delivery drones that could deliver 86 percent of the goods Amazon ships to customers today (packages under 5 pounds), in less than 30 minutes in many cases. That would be a huge change to business as currently conducted by the Amazon giant, and it would mean the end of retail as we know it.

…

When I do still shop retail instead of Amazon, the only real reason that I do so is because I need (or think I need) the item immediately. Amazon’s pricing is better in almost every case, and there’s no worry about whether something is in stock or not, and there’s no compromising about models or the type of item you’re after. If Amazon can promise all of that, combined with a delivery system that essentially beats a round-trip journey by car to the nearest Walmart, then consider it bye-bye brick-and-mortar for me, and, I suspect, for a considerable portion of the population, too.

I bought stock in Amazon when it was 187, heh heh heh….

On the other hand….

Let’s ignore, for a moment, all of the obvious problems with a drone-based Amazon Prime delivery system. Let’s ignore the fact that you can get free stuff if you’re a good shot with a rifle. And let’s ignore the fact that a 10-mile range isn’t much when it comes to underserved rural areas and is a jungle of potential snags and snares in urban, populated areas. Let’s ignore the fact that, unless you’re having Amazon deliver something to your secluded place on Martha’s Vineyard, having a robot drop paperback books on your house sounds like a mess.

Let’s ignore the possibility that a drone falls on a person and gives him or her an Amazon Prime haircut…..

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“(University of) Idaho is a land grant university. Part of the land grant mission is to respond to the needs of the constituent industries and otherwise in your state,” Coats said. “I’m doing this bioplastics research. To make bioplastics, I need a lot of carbon. I need a lot of electrons. Well, they’re in manure. It works out perfectly.”

We have the technology.

Put this in place in D.C. and our need for petroleum would shrink amazingly.

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Here we present our map of American lake monsters (view it large here), showing the spread of cryptids that might be lurking in the depths of the waters of the United States.

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Civilians can still experiment with hydrogenated fats at home, but while Catalan chefs can play with liquid nitrogen and celebrate candy-bar food additives such as lecithin as though they were the Philosopher’s Stone, heaven help the one Mayor Bloomberg catches with a can of Crisco.

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How to continue living in your parents’ basement without the inconvenience of having Mom & Dad hanging around all the time and cramping your style.

As I once told a friend who spent his spare time climbing rocks and jumping out of perfectly good airplanes: ‘You know, if you joined the military they would actually pay you to do that….’

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With his palatial mansion behind him and clouds of steam rising from his body, the wealthy eccentric stood as two large attendants dried him in a plush towel and then wrapped an equally luxurious blanket around his bare shoulders. “In the span of two hours, my machine brought the sea from 47 degrees to a balmy 82,” Hodgegrass announced. “After a few adjustments and a bit of time, I expect all my affluent neighbors to have one of these machines,” he continued, adding, “Nature will no longer dictate how we spend our leisure time.”

I look forward to watching the eco-nazis and global warming control freaks blow a gasket. Pass the popcorn.

Check it out.

The Internet works, even when there’s no point.