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The system works by pairing an internal reading of a person’s heartbeat with an external reading touched to their body by the medical care provider. If the two match, the provider is then able to access the implanted device. Even if someone nearby intercepted the heartbeat, heartbeats change so frequently that a minute later the intercepted beat would no longer work.

The researchers said the system would work with existing implanted devices and still allow emergency workers quick access in a dire situation.

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The biometrics hacking team of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has successfully bypassed the biometric security of Apple’s TouchID using easy everyday means. A fingerprint of the phone user, photographed from a glass surface, was enough to create a fake finger that could unlock an iPhone 5s secured with TouchID. This demonstrates – again – that fingerprint biometrics is unsuitable as access control method and should be avoided.

Gee, that didn’t take long.

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Of course, the New York Times, a Voice of the Crust, would prefer that Americans by their cloth from factories in America paying above-market rates to unionized labor, but that ain’t gonna happen.

Bayard Winthrop, the founder of the sweatshirt and clothing company American Giant, was at the mill one morning earlier this year to meet with his Parkdale sales representative. Just last year, Mr. Winthrop was buying fabric from a factory in India. Now, he says, it is cheaper to shop in the United States. Mr. Winthrop uses Parkdale yarn from one of its 25 American factories, and has that yarn spun into fabric about four miles from Parkdale’s Gaffney plant, at Carolina Cotton Works.

Mr. Winthrop says American manufacturing has several advantages over outsourcing. Transportation costs are a fraction of what they are overseas. Turnaround time is quicker. Most striking, labor costs — the reason all these companies fled in the first place — aren’t that much higher than overseas because the factories that survived the outsourcing wave have largely turned to automation and are employing far fewer workers.

Read it. And take the test … if you dare.

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Funny how that works. Let me guess: It isn’t where white people live.

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Works of art, every one.

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, provides some inconvenient truth.

While standard economic theory doesn’t predict that a higher minimum wage will necessarily reduce the number of hours of paid work by low-skilled workers – employers, for example, might adjust to the higher minimum wage exclusively by working all of their low-skilled workers harder – reduced employment for low-skilled workers remains among the most plausible consequences of the adjustments that employers inevitably will make to a rise in the minimum wage.

W.S. Siebert, an economist at the University of Birmingham, has a very nice article in the Summer 2013 issue of Economic Affairs reviewing much recent research on the employment effects of minimum-wage legislation.  This research, in toto, pretty convincingly shows that higher minimum wages promote higher unemployment among low-skilled workers.  Here’s a recent blog post that Prof. Siebert wrote to summarize his article’s findings.

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Welcome to another episode of “Cool Science Stuff That Probably Will Have Some Effect On Our Lives Later But We Probably Won’t Realize It.” In this week’s installment we present graphene photosensors.

Read it. And watch the video.

Developer Metaio knows a thing or two about augmented reality, and building on the magic of its Audi eKurzinfo app, it’s created some prototype software for Google Glass that straps a car’s instruction manual to your face. Instead of relying on markers, GPS or point-cloud processing, the Glass app uses reference CAD models to identify what you’re looking at and overlay directions on a 3D plane.

We have the technology.

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That’s where Dryft’s special sauce comes into play. Instead of forcing users to acclimate to the keyboard layout of whatever touchscreen device they’re using, the Dryft keyboard appears on screen only when the user places their fingers on the display. In short, the home row (and by extension, the rest of the keyboard) follows your fingers no matter where you put them on the screen. Once your fingers have settled into a resting position, those home row keys appear under them and the rest of the keys blossom out around them.

Of course, this only works when (a) the person is already a trained touch-typist who can type accurately without looking at the keys and (b) the travel distance for this on-screen keyboard matches the ‘muscle memory’ of the typist. If you are accustomed to a full-sized keyboard and you’re typing on an iPad, for example, thinking you’re typing a ‘U’ and getting a ‘7’ instead all of the time will get old very very quickly.

Still, it’s a step in the right direction.

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Matthew Shepard was the winsome young homosexual in Laramie, Wyoming who in October 1998 was tortured, killed, and left hanging grotesquely from a fence. He was discovered almost a day later and later died in the hospital from his horrific wounds.

…

As gay journalist Aaron Hicklin, writing in The Advocate asks, “How do people sold on one version of history react to being told that the facts are slippery — that thinking of Shepard’s murder as a hate crime does not mean it was a hate crime? And how does it color our understanding of such a crime if the perpetrator and victim not only knew each other but also had sex together, bought drugs from one another, and partied together?”

…

He was beaten, tortured, and killed by one or both of the men now serving life sentences. But it turns out, according to Jiminez, that Shepard was a meth dealer himself and he was friends and sex partners with the man who led in his killing. Indeed, his killer may have killed him because Shepard allegedly came into possession of a large amount of methamphetamine and refused to give it up.

The book also shows that Shepard’s killer was on a five-day meth binge at the time of the killing.

Whizdom personal urination device

Greyp G-12 bicycle/motorcycle

Sous-vide SDV

Couch Bunker

Ring Watch

Famgro Farms personal organic produce

Powered spaghetti fork

Jack 0′ Lantern Cake Mold

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 “As the legs unfurl to power the jump,” Burrows says, “both have to move at exactly the same time. If they didn’t, the animal would start to spiral out of control.” Larger animals, whether kangaroos or NBA players, rely on their nervous system to keep their legs in sync when pushing off to jump—using a constant loop of adjustment and feedback. But for the issus, their legs outpace their nervous system. By the time the insect has sent a signal from its legs to its brain and back again, roughly 5 or 6 milliseconds, the launch has long since happened. Instead, the gears, which engage before the jump, let the issus lock its legs together—synchronizing their movements to a precision of 1/300,000 of a second.

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We have the technology.

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Technology used to understand distant planets has helped reconstruct two ornate Tudor tombs that were destroyed during King Henry VIII’s anti-Catholic offensive.

The tombs were commissioned by Thomas Howard, the third Duke of Norfolk, in the 16th century for Thetford Priory in Norfolk and when the priory was dissolved in 1540, some parts of the tombs were salvaged while others were abandoned in the ruins until they were excavated in the 1930s.

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A Queens teenager’s obsession with high-powered model helicopters ended in gruesome death yesterday, when one of his beloved toy whirlybirds spun out of control in a Brooklyn park and scalped him, sources said.

Roman Pirozek, 19, — a chopper aficionado who bragged about his exploits on YouTube — was piloting the small machine at Calvert Vaux Park in Gravesend at around 3:40 p.m., when something went horribly wrong, cops said.

The toy aircraft turned toward the teen as he tried to pull off an unusual stunt. It hit him at high speed with the rotors spinning into his head and taking out “good chunk,” law enforcement sources said.

Let that be a lesson to us all….

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That gives us a baseline: Syria is more important than California, but less important than Martha’s Vinyard.

Good to know.

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The drones can carry as much as 6.6 pounds and fly 330 feet in the air.

They couldn’t do that in America, of course, because of government ‘safety’ regulations.

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And soon another rationalization for murdering an unborn child will be history.

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We have the technology.

Read it. And watch the video.

Too bad it won’t be affordable unless heavily subsidized.

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Wave this in the face of your health-freak friends.

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In some of this planet’s driest regions, where rainfall is rare or even nonexistent, a few specialized plants and insects have devised ingenious strategies to provide themselves with the water necessary for life: They pull it right out of the air, from fog that drifts in from warm oceans nearby.

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Presume that you want to do that sort of thing, of course.

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In November 2011 Lee Beaumont paid £10 plus VAT to set up his personal 0871 line – so to call him now costs 10p, from which he receives 7p.

The Leeds businessman told BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours programme that the line had so far made £300.

I think this is a great idea. Telemarketers want to call you? Don’t depend on the No-Call List, which doesn’t work anyway and only wastes taxpayer money; get a pay line and give that out to people who insist on knowing your telephone number. (I’m thinking banks, utilities, online merchants, and similar parasites — I’ve signed up to receive all of my bills electronically, so whenever I get a letter from Chase that says ‘Important Account Information’, I know that it’s actually an attempt to get me to charge stuff at a premium rate of interest, so off to the recyling bin it goes.)

Phone Pay Plus, which regulates premium numbers, said it strongly discouraged people from adopting the idea.

No doubt for fear of government interference, which happens every time somebody comes up with a scheme to interfere with the industries that lobbyists get paid big bucks to have governments regulate.

Once he had set up the 0871 line, every time a bank, gas or electricity supplier asked him for his details online, he submitted it as his contact number.

He added he was “very honest” and the companies did ask why he had a such a number.

He told the programme he replied: “Because I’m getting annoyed with PPI phone calls when I’m trying to watch Coronation Street so I’d rather make 10p a minute.”

He said almost all of the companies he dealt with were happy to use it and if they refused he asked them to email.

And there it is — FREEDOM, which is rapidly disappearing in America and is almost extinguished in Britain.

Because he works from home, Mr Beaumont has been able to increase his revenue by keeping cold callers talking – asking for more details about their services.

Hee hee hee….

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Carbon nanotubes, tiny tubes of rolled up graphene that measure just 1 nanometer across, are super-strong structures that could someday be used in solar cells, batteries, electronic circuits and everyday objects. While researchers are getting better at making large batches of carbon nanotubes, producing them uniformly has been elusive.

Ti2 Para-Biners

The Silverback

Tuls credit-card sized multitools

Zeus multi-tool

Infrared Pain-Relieving Wrap. I am not making this up.

iDoor camera

Motion-Activated Sprinkler

Heated Towel Warmer. Live like the 1%.

K-Bar Zombie Chopper. Just in case.

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The two major political parties claim that their policies will lead to better outcomes. What does the data show?

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We have the technology.

The Forth & Clyde Canal was opened in 1790 to provide a coast-to-coast (firth to firth) route as a shortcut for seagoing vessels as well as intra-Scottish trade. It was bankrolled by cash borrowed from the government, but it made money on tolls and taxes.

The Union Canal came 30 years later and spurred off from the Forth & Clyde to link up with Edinburgh, connected with the aforementioned stairway of 11 locks. It too was profitable, carrying horse-powered cargo and travellers on steam-driven “swifts” that featured a projecting scythe to slice through row ropes of cargo craft too slow to move aside. It linked Glasgow to Edinburgh in less than seven hours. But the railways put paid to their profitability, cutting journey time and cost.

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Not bad for something that is ‘just a clump of cells’. Abortion Barbie, call your office.

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Every year, in one of nature’s great spectacles, a staggering 1.3million wildebeest and 200,000 zebra migrate north from the Serengeti plains in search of fresh pasture, negotiating the potentially deadly river on their way before returning later in the year.

Throw some crocodiles in there, and that’s entertainment.

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Authorities in Kyrgyzstan have shut down a secret pipeline used to smuggle thousands of liters of alcohol into the country from Kazakhstan. The 8-inch wide tube was discovered during what’s described as a “routine” patrol by Kyrgyz border guards, according to the AKIpress news agency. Running over a third of a mile in length, the pipeline was situated along the bottom of the Chu river.

Astonishing, especially considering (SFAIK) that both Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan are nominally Muslim countries.

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Sorry, Charlie.

And of course ‘nonprofit ocean protection group Oceana’ is completely and totally objective, as well as being rigidly honest, as all such ‘environmental protection’ groups are — not like those putrid, scum-sucking restaurants and grocery stores….

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Interesting, but I’m going to want to have a couple of years’ worth of data before I try it.

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Next to the Dracula blog, this is my favorite read.

Make your own furniture with real-life Erector Set joints

Sword and the Stone

Lingua.ly Transforms The Web Into A Language-Learning Opportunity

Stantt Uses Body-Scan Data To Create A Shirt For Every Body Type

The Stack

507 Mechanical Movements

Read it.

If, that is, that’s what you want to do. Personally, I can’t stand the stuff, but this is America, so knock yourself out.

Heh.

In short, it’s probably human-caused climate change that did it: specifically the Australian flooding of 2010 and 2011, which is generally thought by climate scientists to be at least partly attributable to rising atmospheric carbon levels caused by human fossil-fuel burning.

They could certainly use the rain.

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And Germans are behind it … let the conspiracy theories bloom….

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An Iron Age settlement unearthed in Devon has been described as one of the most important finds of its kind.

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When manufacturers build a structure like a plane out of ultralight glued-together carbon fibers known as composites, the common technique is to build it with as few parts as possible. That cuts down on the number of joints where cracks and structural failures can start, but also calls for large specialized manufacturing facilities.

A new structure (subscription required) out of MIT takes a different approach. Researchers found that small X-shaped pieces of carbon fiber composite locked together into K’NEX-like lattice structures are 10 times stiffer than existing ultralight materials. Building something with them requires less material to support the same weight, potentially leading to lighter vehicles and lower fuel costs.

More here.

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‘It’s only a model….’

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

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British scientists have achieved a ‘profound’ breakthrough in the fight against cancer that could lead to new treatments and possibly even its prevention.

They have unlocked the DNA secrets of 30 of the most common forms of the disease, bringing us closer to understanding their causes.

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Progress in regenerative medicine has been coming fast and furious in recent months: scientists are now using far-out tissue engineering techniques to restore liver function in mice, regrow human muscle, and even implant bioengineered blood vessels into ailing patients. Now, a team at the University of Pittsburgh has managed to grow human heart tissue that can beat autonomously in a petri dish — an exciting step towards devising transplantable replacement organs.

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A group of Swiss researchers has demonstrated using lasers to control magnetisation at extremely high speed, a line of research they hope will one day will help speed up hard drives.

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 Professor Edward Cocking, Director of The University of Nottingham’s Centre for Crop Nitrogen Fixation, has developed a unique method of putting nitrogen-fixing bacteria into the cells of plant roots. His major breakthrough came when he found a specific strain of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in sugar-cane which he discovered could intracellularly colonise all major crop plants. This ground-breaking development potentially provides every cell in the plant with the ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen. The implications for agriculture are enormous as this new technology can provide much of the plant’s nitrogen needs.

Watch the eco-nazis freak out and get it banned.