An Informative Chart.

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A gang of thieves dressed as knights and armed with a sword and axe robbed the organisers of a medieval festival in France.

Sounds very authentic to me.

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Famed for its strong tidal currents, Cobscook Bay is an ideal location to pilot the (relatively) green energy initiative. The TidGen Power System will initially generate enough electricity to power only 75-100 homes, but there are plans to expand the project to provide electricity to 1,200 homes and businesses. Given Eastport’s population was just 1,131 in 2010, the project will likely make it one of the most energy-sustainable cities in the country.

No mention of how cost-effective this project might be, which suggests that it isn’t, very, and they carefully avoided mentioning that so as not to Interrupt the Narrative.

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ATM card skimming is hardly a new activity, and neither are card skimmers that continue to get smaller and more discreet. As Brian Krebs of the Krebs on Security blog reports, though, a new development out of Europe has now crossed a key, and potentially troublesome threshold. The European ATM Security Team (otherwise known as EAST) has discovered a new type of wafer-thin card skimmer in use in at least one unnamed European country that’s small enough to fit directly in the ATM’s card slot — that’s as opposed to most current skimmers that can be well-disguised but generally sit on top of the card slot. As you can imagine, that makes it considerably more difficult to spot for even the most attentive ATM users, but Krebs notes that the skimmer still requires a secondary device like a camera or keypad overlay to record a person entering their PIN.

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The new system is more complex than a chain and gears and consists of a rope and pulley on each side of the bike. The rotation of the pedals forces arms at each side to swing forward and backward on its shaft. When moving forward, the arm pulls the driving wire that is wound around a drum on the rear wheel, forcing the wheel to rotate. The arms at each side alternate so that when one is moving forward the other is moving backward.

To quote Sonic Charmer: ‘I didn’t read these. Somebody else made that happen.’

Ancestry by DNA.

10 Skills People Want to Learn From YouTube.

17 Tips To Make Your Life Easier,

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Pardon me while I guffaw.

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John Atta Mills, the president of the gold, oil and cocoa-rich West African country of Ghana, has died suddenly from an unspecified illness.

Possibly lead poisoning. I hear that happens a lot in the area.

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A Web site monitoring spyware said statements from Iran suggest nuclear plants were hit by a virus causing computers to play music from rock band AC/DC.

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A student club from the University of Washington has not only used 3D printing to build a boat – it’s taken the boat to second place in the university’s annual Milk Carton Derby at Seattle’s Green Lake.

Even better than that: the 3D printer had to be set up to use HDPE – milk carton plastic – to print the boat, a material which mechanical engineering professor Mark Ganter says is “horrible … it shrinks, it curls, it doesn’t want to stick to itself”.

We have the technology.

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As a telepresence robot, it’s designed to allow doctors to check in on patients remotely. It therefore provides access to some diagnostic devices like ultrasound machines, and it also has an electronic stethoscope built-in. Finally, InTouch Health’s “Telemedicine” system allows for access to patient records.

The last great fields of human activity that haven’t been significantly automated are education and health care. This appears to be a step, although a small one, in the right direction.

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Then again, maybe it was just constipated. You never really know.

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British Boffins from Cambridge, University College London and The Royal Veterinary College have used an Australian farm to research flocking behaviour in herd animals and feel they have validated theories about how herds of animals protect themselves from predators.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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“It can be difficult in this economy to have the flexibility and financial resources to teach yourself new skills,” Mr. Bezos writes. Under a new program, Amazon warehouse workers can receive tuition assistance as long as it is in an Amazon-specified field. Aircraft mechanics, computer-aided design, machine tool technologies, medical lab technologies and nursing meet the criteria.

In the old days, lots of companies had training programs designed to take people with a high school education and make them useful technical workers. Then those programs went away as management gurus saw them as a cost rather than as an investment. It’s all about next quarter’s results! And of course modern technical companies don’t train you; it is to laugh! They expect you to get an expensive college education on your own, going massively into debt if necessary, and then with that and the right semi-autistic personality type, they might deign to give you a job (but only if you’re a ‘ninja’ or ‘rock star’).

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Putting this announcement on the home page seemed to direct it less to potential employees than current customers, some of whom may have vaguely heard about difficult working conditions in Amazon warehouses through newspaper series in Pennsylvania and Seattle.

‘Vaguely heard’? I don’t live in Pennsylvania and Seattle, and I heard about it. How about ‘getting beaten up in the activist media for keeping their workers in Foxconn-like conditions’ as being a bit more accurate.

Sucharita Mulpuru, the retail analyst for Forrester Research, was unimpressed. “It seemed self-congratulatory,” she said in an interview. “Most companies, when they treat their workers well, that’s just what they do. They don’t say, ‘This is a reason you should do business with us.’ ”

And I, in turn, am not impressed with Sucharita Mulpuru — I guess the new rule is that other people can publicize accusations of treating your employees badly and shout ‘This is a reason not to do business with Amazon’, but you’re not allowed to publicize where you treat your employees well and say ‘This is a reason to do business with Amazon’. Perhaps I need a new Category, Einbahnstrasse.

Gordon Crovitz speaks out.

It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.

Responsible Opposing Viewpoint:  here.

Moral: Don’t believe everything you read.

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And no, this is not a joke lock, this has an actual working five-lever tumbler mechanism and only opens with the correct key (or by lockpicking).

We have the technology.

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A convenient shopping list.

Blue Bell Ice Cream – a Texas tradition.

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Researchers at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany have created high-performance monolithic graphene transistors using a simple lithographic etching process. This could be the missing step that finally paves the way to post-silicon electronics.

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The operation to retrieve the 1,203 bars from the SS Gairsoppa was the heaviest and deepest underwater mission to remove precious metal from sunken vessels.

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We have the technology.

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Tasked with mine detection and eradication in the Persian Gulf, the US Navy has sent a fleet of unmanned submarines to help keep the Strait of Hormuz open in Iran. Dubbed the SeaFox, each vehicle houses an underwater TV camera, sonar and a dose of explosives. Tipping the scales at less than 100 pounds, the subs are about four feet in length and are controlled via fiber optic cable that sends the live feed back to the captain of each ship. SeaFoxes can dive to depths of 300 meters and boasts a top speed of six knots. The units are thrust into action from helicopters, small rubber boats and off the rear of minesweepers and are capable of disposing of the aforementioned weapons of both the floating and drifting sort. There is one small catch: the $100,000 submarine destroys itself in the process, making each successful trek a suicide mission of sorts.

The US Navy has forgotten more than the Iranian Navy ever knew about laying — and sweeping — mines.

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English rocker Jon Lord, who founded Deep Purple and co-wrote their most famous song, Smoke On The Water, has died aged 71.

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Every silver lining comes wrapped in a cloud….

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The ancient people who have long been thought to be the first humans to colonise North America were actually johnny-come-latelies, according to scientists who have comprehesively analysed the ancient fossilised poo of their predecessor Americans.

The new revelations come to us courtesy of Copenhagen university, where some of the investigating boffins are based. The scientists say that their results demonstrate conclusively their somewhat controversial thesis: that the “Clovis” culture dating from around 13,000 years ago – which has long been thought to be the earliest human society in the Americas – was actually preceded by human habitation at the Paisley caves in Oregon.

No doubt UFOs had something to do with it. The Truth Is Out There.

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Apple has done its bit to defuse rapidly escalating tensions between China and Japan, by pulling an inflammatory iOS game in which the player is tasked with defending a disputed set of islands in the East China Sea from the invading Japanese.

Defend the Diaoyu Islands was taken down “recently” from the Chinese App Store, its creator the Shenzhen ZQGame Network Company told China Daily, although apparently no explanation was given by Apple.

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ZTE and its larger Chinese rival, Huawei, have been the subjects of great national security concern for years.  The US intelligence community fears that, if allowed to install equipment here, the two companies will surreptitiously permit Chinese government wiretaps inside the United States .  But proof of this suspicion has been hard to find.  And the firms, backed by Chinese government-subsidized loans, have been able to offer enormous discounts to carriers, devastating the global telecom equipment market and leaving carriers eager to buy their products.  Whether the US government would continue to act on its suspicions in the face of commercial pressure was an open question.

But wait, there’s more….

In March, Reuters reported that ZTE was supplying the Iranian mullahs with telecoms gear that could spy on Iran’s restive population. ZTE, the news agency reported, “has sold Iran’s largest telecom firm a powerful surveillance system capable of monitoring landline, mobile and internet communications, interviews and contract documents show.”

That was bad.  But it got worse. Reuters further revealed that the ZTE system sold to Iran included equipment from US companies, like HP, Dell, Cisco and Juniper. Such sales violate US export control law. So ZTE soon faced an investigation by the US Commerce Department.

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Researchers have created a new material they’re calling “Aerographite” that has taken the crown of “world’s lightest material” away from the micro-lattice structure that previously held it back in November. With a density of only 0.2 mg/cc, the substance is comprised of 99.99 percent air — though a large piece of it looks like a black, opaque sponge. Aerographite consists of a “seamless interconnected network of closed shell micro tubes” and reportedly can be compressed by a factor of a thousand before springing back to its original shape. Interestingly, it’s also conductive, which the research team from the Hamburg University of Technology and University of Kiel note opens up possibilities in the technology space. MEMS, electrical shielding, and even batteries.

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On Thursday at 5:53pm in London – 12:53pm in New York – the sun let loose with a hefty solar flare, resulting in a coronal mass ejection (CME) headed straight towards Earth that will likely arrive on Saturday at 10:20 UT, give or take about seven hours.

Darwin Award.

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Yet another study has shown that the so-called “obesity” epidemic sweeping the wealthy nations of the world has been massively over-hyped, as new results show that is is far more dangerous to be assessed as “underweight” than it is to be assessed even as “severely obese” – let alone merely “obese” or “overweight”.

“There is currently a widespread belief that any degree of overweight or obesity increases the risk of death, however our findings suggest this may not be the case,” says health prof Anthony Jerant, lead author of the study. “In the six-year timeframe of our evaluation, we found that only severe obesity was associated with an increased risk of death.”

Everything the Voices of the Crust tell you is wrong … but you knew that.

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Saw that coming.

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We have the technology. Or will soon.

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A lot of higher end cars are now coming out with RF fobs that unlock and start the car. There is no longer a physical key that is inserted in the ignition. It turns out that for BMW this means stealing the cars is extremely easy for a sophisticated criminal. We always liked the idea of metal keys that ALSO had a chip in them. The two-tiered security system makes sense to us, and would have prevent (or at least slowed down) the recent  rash of BMW thefts that are going on in the UK.

We They have the technology.

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 Christoph Zollikofer witnessed the first birth of a Neanderthal in the modern age. In his anthropology lab at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in 2007, the skull of a baby Homo neanderthalensis emerged from a photocopier-sized machine after a 20-hour noisy but painless delivery of whirring motors and spitting plastic. This modern miracle had endured a lengthy gestation: it took years for Zollikofer’s collaborators to find suitable bones from a Neanderthal neonate, analyse them with a computed-tomography (CT) scanner and digitally stitch them together on the computer screen. The labour, however, was simple: Zollikofer just pressed ‘print’ on his lab’s US$50,000 three-dimensional (3D) printer.

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A first-aid kit found on a 2,000-year-old shipwreck has provided a remarkable insight into the medicines concocted by ancient physicians to cure sailors of dysentery and other ailments.

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A priceless 12th-century illustrated guide for pilgrims has been recovered by police a year after it was stolen from the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain.

I no longer find Penny Arcade sufficiently entertaining to waste space on it. So I’m deleting the link.

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Printing a chocolate heart is easy enough, but how about an actual organ? There are folks working on it, but it turns out those veins of yours aren’t exactly a breeze to replicate. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and MIT may have found a semi-sweet solution — dissolving a sugar lattice in a batch of living Jell-O. The research team uses a RepRap 3D printer and a custom extruder head to print a filament network composed of sucrose, glucose and dextran which is later encased in a bio-gel containing living cells. Once the confectionery paths are dissolved, they leave a network of artery-like channels in their void. Tissue living in the gel can then receive oxygen and nutrients through the hollow pipes.

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V. Kerry Smith and Carlos Valcarcel Wolloh, economists at Arizona State University, take a look at the effects of the Clean Water Act, enacted 40 years ago in 1972 by President Nixon: “we find average water quality in U.S. lakes is at about the same level in 2011 as it was in 1975.”

Not so’s you’d notice. Nixon was still a shit, for this and other bad legislation.

How to Tie Anything Securely to Your Car.

I reserve the right to correct grammar.

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Apparently, the criteria is that a miniature book must be no more than 3 inches tall, which to me is hardly miniature. Most collectors would spurn an otherwise dull book that commanded a premium because it was that unremarkable height, or even slightly smaller. So when there are so many much smaller books around on ABE –although most seem to be boring Victorian or later bibles commanding prices of around $20–I would suggest that unless you’ve got a thing about bibles, you would do well to seek out books of at least 1 – 1 ½ inches high that are interesting in themselves. But don’t expect anything really small to come onto the market. Something like Chekhov’s Chameleon, which at 0.9mm square (about the size of a grain of salt), was, until very recently, the world’s smallest book, until it was trumped by a ‘ book ‘ that can only be read by an scanning electron microscope, are almost always gimmicky. And I suspect that until recently craft technology was unable to come up with anything smaller that a cm high.

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The Navy’s robotic fighter just got one step closer to earning its wings. The X-47B, an unmanned stealth attack jet, has completed the first major phase of flight testing on its way to become the first aircraft to be able to land and take off from the deck of an aircraft carrier –completely autonomously.

The Navy has had the SPN-42 ACLS (automatic carrier landing system) that can land a plane on a carrier flight deck without the intervention of a pilot since the early 70s — I was part of the crew on the USS John F Kennedy who maintained that gear. So this won’t be a big stretch. The autonomous refueling is the impressive part.

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It’s been an interesting day for a developing market which seems so utterly niche as to be untrue. There really are startups out there linking recipes to supermarket so you can just buy the food you need to make the dishes. Niche, but potentially quite powerful. Two start-ups announced funding today in the UK. Whisk, a startup produced by a minor UK TV celebrity, has raised £170,000 for a product that has yet to launch, while Foodity has secured over £300,000 seed funding for a platform that’s already being traded on and has customers after bootstrapping for two years.

Foodity produces an e-commerce toolkit for recipe publishers on all platforms that lets consumers buy recipe ingredients at major online grocers in the UK, Europe and the US; plus a data platform and an advertising/analytics module. The startup already has Premier Foods, (the UK’s biggest food manufacturer) as a customer and a number of big grocery retailers, as yet unannounced.

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

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Since launching last year, HealthTap has built a network of 12,000 U.S.-licensed physicians — no easy task — to allow its users to get answers to medical questions for free without relying on algorithms — and has raised $14 million from Mayfield Fund, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Esther Dyson, and more. With its new mobile apps, HealthTap is essentially trying to bring the house call back to life, giving users the option to text doctors from their mobile devices for free.

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Dr. Paolo Macchiarini is no stranger to world firsts, and less than a year after performing a synthetic windpipe transplant, the Karolinska Institute Professor has coordinated no less than two successful transplants of synthetic sections of larynx. Amazingly, both patients were able to breathe and talk normally straight after surgery, the basic functions we take for granted that they either struggled with or were simply unable to do before.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Archaeologists in Greece’s second-largest city have uncovered a 70-meter (230-foot) section of an ancient road built by the Romans that was city’s main travel artery nearly 2,000 years ago.

The marble-paved road was unearthed during excavations for Thessaloniki’s new subway system, which is due to be completed in four years. The road in the northern port city will be raised to be put on permanent display when the metro opens in 2016.

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Twenty-year-old models which have suggested serious ice loss in the eastern Antarctic have been compared with reality for the first time – and found to be wrong, so much so that it now appears that no ice is being lost at all.

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