About
If you've got a story, picture, or link that's beyond belief, send it to tipline@haveigotoneforyou.com with your name and where you heard about it and we'll add it!
Accounts
Click here to check if anything new just came in.
April 18 2012
The Laws of Physics, Officer, Outrank the Laws of California
I think this picture says it all, officer. Clear as day!
To all those police officers out there on traffic duty: Be real careful about ticketing physicists. You might be proven wrong in elaborate mathematical detail.
Dmitri Krioukov, a physicist at UC San Diego, was pulled over for running a stop sign. However, he had not in fact run it, and his sense of injustice was apparently so inflamed that he undertook a rigorous mathematical explanation of what had happened, eventually posting a paper on the ArXiv showing that the police officer had fallen prey to a perceptual illusion (although the paper was posted on April 1, if it’s a joke, Krioukov is sticking to his guns; he’s spoken to PhysicsCentral about the work). At the stop sign, he had seen Krioukov’s car, a Toyota Yaris, disappear on the far side of a station wagon in the lane closest to the officer and subsequently accelerate away, but he mistakenly concluded that Krioukov had not stopped during that moment, because—this is the clincher—he had been visually measuring not the linear but the angular speed of the car! To put it in Krioukov’s own words:
“Police officer O ...
April 16 2012
Dog Ate My Experiment—And Now Dog Is My Experiment
Please don’t make me eat thallium.
If you’re an average normal person and your dog eats thallium-tainted agar plates from the trash, you’d probably take Rover to the vet. If you’re a vet and your dog eats thallium-tainted agar plates, you start taking notes—and blood and hair samples too.
That’s the backstory to a recent paper published in the Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation. A poor, overly curious one-year-old shepherd mix broke into the laboratory trash and gobbled up 15 agar plates containing thallium. The poisonous compound is used in labs to isolate Mycoplasma fungi because it pretty much kills everything else that could grow on agar. Known as “the poisoner’s poison,” thallium has also been implicated in a number of famous murders and was a favorite of Saddam Hussein. (So if you are a non-scientist with thallium in your trash, it is kind of suspect…)
The dog’s owner, a vet, knew immediately the thallium was bad news. At the onset, the dog refused to eat and lost weight. And then things only got worse over several weeks as she lost control of her muscles, seized, caught pneumonia twice, and lost a ...
January 18 2012
Go Ahead and Gossip—Science Says It’s the Right Thing to Do
He did what? Innnnteresting…
Thorough scientific study has revealed that lots of supposed vices can have surprising upsides: alcohol, sex, caffeine. Thanks to UC Berkeley researchers, we can now add another so-bad-but-oh-so-good habit to the list: Gossip, their new study suggests, can be a selfless act of public service.
Surreptitiously passing along the news that someone has behaved badly—what’s technically called “prosocial gossip”—can relieve stress, as well as warn others to regard the rule-breaker with a wary eye, the researchers say. (The study didn’t look directly at other forms of gossip—rumormongering, telling lies, anything said to a confessional cam on reality TV—so make of that what you will.)
In one experiment, the scientists found that people’s heart rates spiked when they saw one of two people playing a game cheating, but calmed again when they had the chance to jot a note, middle school-style, to the next competitor about what they’d seen. “Spreading information about the person whom they had seen behave badly tended to make people feel better, quieting the frustration that drove their gossip,” one of the researchers said in a statement—scientific confirmation of that scratching-a-lingering-itch feeling of relief we get from clucking our tongues ...
November 08 2011
Say No to Chicken Pops—Buying Infected Lollipops Online Is Most Likely a Bad Idea
Don’t lie. Don’t steal. And don’t buy lollipops allegedly mouthed by infected children peddled over the internets. Apparently the third piece of advice doesn’t go without saying; parents who don’t want to give their kids vaccines in several states have turned to Facebook to find lollipops, spit, or rags from chickenpox-ridden youngsters, according to the Associated Press. Federal prosecutor Jerry Martin warns that the practice is dangerous and illegal—it’s a federal crime to ship known pathogens across state lines. It’s also likely to fail at spreading the virus since chicken pox needs to be inhaled to infect children, according to doctors, and is dangerous, since it could spread other diseases that more readily persist in saliva like hepatitis.
One post from a Facebook group called “Find a Pox Party in Your Area” (a closed group, but with pictures of its hundreds of members) reads, ”I got a Pox Package in mail just moments ago. I have two lollipops and a wet rag and spit.” Another woman warns, “This is a federal offense to intentionally mail a contagion.” Another woman answers, “Tuck it inside a zip lock baggy and then put the baggy in the envelope : ) Don’t put anything identifying it as pox.” Very clever.
“Pox parties” are nothing new—although they’ve become less common since the chicken pox vaccine was introduced in 1995. But the ability to easily connect with like-minded, vaccine-wary parents around the country is. These parents, skeptical about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, would probably do well to ditch their credulity regarding the diseased bodily fluids of complete strangers.
[Via The Associated Press]
Image: jelene / Flickr
October 26 2011
Smartphone Apps Tell Your Friends You’ve Been Arrested, Help You Stay Calm in the Clink
Hopefully this guy has the “I’m Getting Arrested” app.
Plan on going to #OccupyWallStreet and getting arrested? There’s an app for that! A Brooklyn programmer (abhorred by getting so much coverage in the “lame-stream” press, no doubt) has made a free android app that allows would-be arrestees to alert their friends. Beforehand, you can program in a message and recipients, who you can alert upon pushing a single button. The app is appropriately called “I’m Getting Arrested.”
Once you’re in jail, you may need help calming down (if you manage to smuggle in your phone). Look no farther than MyCalmBeat, a smartphone app that measures your heart rate and helps you establish an optimal breathing rate, or “resonant frequency.” It works by calculating the breathing rate at which your heart rate has the highest variability, which is correlated with how relaxed you feel. Stressed people, the app’s programmers say, have relatively constant rates of heart rate, which makes stress worse.
Now all we’re missing is an app that redistributes wealth and does our job for us.
Image: WarmSleepy / Flickr
September 02 2011
German Prostitutes Pay Streetwalking Fee at Parking Meter-Like Machine
Get yer streetwalking permit here!
From 8:15 pm to 6:00 am each day, prostitution is legal in Germany, where working call girls staff brothels, sauna clubs, and other such establishments. In the city of Bonn, which, uh, “boasts” around 200 prostitutes, an average of 20 freelancers go cruising each night, picking up clients on the street and heading to garage-like structures called “consummation areas” the city put up especially for that purpose. They’ve thought of everything, those Germans!
Girls in the various brothel-like establishments have always been subject to a prostitution tax, but streetwalkers, apparently, haven’t being paying. Now, though, the city has a way to make things fair for everyone: a parking meter for prostitutes.
The meter looks just like the sidewalk ticket-dispensers you’ve probably used in numerous cities to park your car, but for about $8.70, this one dispenses a pass allowing the holder to cruise for johns all night. When the city emptied one after the first night, it yielded a haul of $375, prompting various media outlets to comment on how honorable the city’s prostitutes must be. But one has to wonder how many people just bought a ticket for the novelty and ...
August 11 2011
June 10 2011
In Soviet Russia, ATMs Interrogate YOU
Not just the Russians: A biometric ATM in Korea
ATMs in Russia may soon be outfitted with intelligence services–style lie detection software, designed to help banks pick out consumer credit fraud—without bank employees actually having to go through the arduous business of talking to and evaluating potential cardholders.
People will be able to apply for credit cards by chatting with one of the new machines about their financial history. But these ATMs won’t just take your word for it: They come equipped with voice analysis software meant to pick out telltale signs of lying, made by a company that supplies nifty technologies to the Federal Security Service, a successor to the KGB. Even better, these new cash-and-credit dispensers are currently being developed by the country’s biggest bank, Sberbank—of which the Russian government is the majority shareholder.
To design these voice analysis programs, the company put to use hours and hour of interrogations recorded by the Russian police, in which the person being question was found to be lying. The stress of lying is thought to cause involuntary physiological changes that alter the patterns of a person’s voice. The software’s hard to fool, the company says, since, like a ...
May 02 2011
Man Accidentally Live-Tweets Osama bin Laden Raid (No, It Wasn’t “The Rock”)
IT consultant Sohaib Athar was just “taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops” in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad when he described, in 140 characters or less, a helicopter hovering overhead and a “huge window shaking bang”—accidentally live-tweeting the U.S. raid that ended a decade-long manhunt and killed Osama bin Laden.
It’s clear from Athar’s tweets (@ReallyVirtual) that he had no idea what was going down—as evidenced by his reference to the “abbottabad helicopter/UFO“—but the unusual presence of helicopters and Taliban disclaimer suggested to him that whatever was happening, it “must be a complicated situation.” UFO, not so much; situation, definitely.
Nor was Athar the only one to discuss the raid on Twitter before President Obama’s announcement last night. Keith Urbahn, Donald Rumsfeld’s Chief of Staff, tweeted several hours later: “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.”
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson seems to have been among the first to know, as well. Around the same time as Urbahn, Johnson tweeted: “Just got word that will shock the world – Land of the free…home of the brave DAMN PROUD TO BE AN ...
April 06 2011
Condé Nast or Conned Nast? Man Reels in $8M From Publisher With Single Phishy Email
“Phishing” is the word used for the now-ubiquitous scams that try to pry money and personal information out of anybody being careless online. “Spear-phishing” is the term used for the more artful and dangerous practice of directed scams—the kind that can steal $8 million with a single email. Which is exactly what happened recently to magazine publisher Condé Nast.
It all started with an email last November from a man allegedly named Andy Surface to the accounts payable department of Condé Nast, which publishes Wired, Vogue, and many other popular magazines. The email provided a bank account number and asked Condé Nast to send its printing payments to the new account from now on. Because this new account was for Quad Graph, and Condé Nast’s printer is a company called Quad/Graphics, everything looked legitimate, which is why a company employee signed the request and began funneling payments.
By late December, the publishing company had payed Surface $8 million. But on December 30, the real Quad/Graphics asked Condé Nast why they hadn’t been paid since mid-November. So the company scrambled to reverse a $36,000 payment it was about to send ...
March 09 2011
Watch Where You Put That Thing: Wiretapped Teddy Brings $120K Fine
Tap that teddy bear and pay the price: $120,000. Or at least, that’s what Dianna Divingnzzo and her father, Sam Divingnzzo, are due to pay out after being slapped with federal wiretapping charges.
The fines arose from a custody case over Divingnzzo’s daughter with ex-husband William “Duke” Lewton. After Lewton was awarded unsupervised visitation, Divingnzzo put a recorder inside her daughter’s teddy bear (cutely, if not creatively, named “Little Bear”) to document suspected physical and verbal abuse by Lewton. The recorder taped continuously, while Divingnzzo occasionally copied the files and sent them to her father for transcription.
The Little Bear plan got hairy when Divingnzzo tried to use the material to win back sole custody, explains Ars Technica:
All of this material was then turned over to Dianna’s lawyers, who submitted it to the state court and waited for a ruling on its legality. In the summer of 2008, the state judge decided that the recordings were not admissible as evidence in the custody trial, since they violated the Nebraska Telecommunications Consumer Privacy Protection Act and were therefore obtained illegally.
This also meant ...
March 02 2011
Judge Performs Own Experiments & Rules That Pizza Is, in Fact, a Solid
When you think of the great court cases in the past century where science meets the law, you’re probably thinking about cases like Roe v. Wade or the Scopes Monkey Trial—not Commonwealth v. Fennie. And that’s deservedly so, because this latest science-in-the-courtroom case sounds more like science meets clown: A judge passed his verdict after he methodically proved that pizza’s state of matter is indeed a solid.
It all started last October, when 20-year-old William James Fennie III apparently chucked a pizza slice at a passing car in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He then went on to resist arrest, forcing two officers to Taser him to the ground.
Now, based on the fact that Pennsylvania law clearly states that it is illegal to throw “any solid object” toward a roadway, you might think President Judge James P. MacElree’s decision was an easy one: After all, it doesn’t take a degree in pizza mechanics to conclude that pizza counts as “any solid object.” But Fennie’s attorney argued that the legal definitions are vague and pizza shouldn’t legally count as a “missile.”
This prompted Judge MacElree to undertake a high-stakes experiment, with the starting question: Is ...
February 25 2011
The Mafia Was Wrong: You Can’t Quickly Dissolve a Body in Acid
It’s a sad day for aspiring kingpins and Mafia godfathers–it turns out that you can’t dissolve a corpse within minutes by dunking it in sulfuric acid. If that’s not bad enough, scientists have also shown that even if you wait days, acid alone cannot fully destroy “the evidence.”
This Mafia technique of disintegrating human flesh is known as a “white shotgun” (or “lupara bianca”) murder, a term that entered public parlance in the early 1980s when police in Palermo, Sicily, discovered vats of acid in a Mafia boss’s digs. The crime leader, Filippo Marchese, had his goons kill their victims and dissolve the bodies in a room known as “the chamber of death.” But violent people tend to meet violent deaths, and Marchese was himself dissolved in acid sometime in 1982.
At this week’s meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, researchers explained that they wanted to find out whether the Mafia’s claims about sulfuric acid’s extraordinary effectiveness were true. As the forensic researchers told Science News, Mafia informants make some big claims, such as: “We put the people in acid. In 15, 20 minutes ...
February 16 2011
In Future Surveillance States, Will Honeybees Narc on Pot Growers?
If one London art gallery is correct in predicting the future of police surveillance, we may have to redefine the meaning of ‘sting’ operation: one artist’s mock-interview with a (fake) beekeeping police officer describes how bees can be used to track down growers of illegal plants–and the scary thing is that this art video is only a hop and a skip from reality.
An exhibition called “High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture” at London’s Wellcome Collection features a short film by artist Thomas Thwaites, entitled “Policing Genes,” in which a mock police officer explains the latest in surveillance trickery. Essentially, the police officers tend bee hives, and when the bees return from their daily pollen-hunt, the officers not only check the bees for pollen from such plants as marijuana, but can also use software to decode the dance of the honeybee. And since pollen-laden bees dance to tell the other bees where they found the pollen, decoding the dance would tell the police the exact location of the illegal plants.
As the officer says in the video, using bees allows the police to ...
February 03 2011
Feeling Guilty? Just Give Yourself a Little Pain…
It turns out self-flagellating medieval monks had it right (sort of): there’s nothing like good, old-fashioned, self-inflicted pain to cleanse your conscience, according to the latest research.
Researchers at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, led by psychologist Brock Bastian, wanted to see whether feelings of guilt diminish with pain. To test this, they split a group of 62 volunteers into three groups and asked two of the groups to write about a scenario in which they rejected another person; the control group was asked to write about a non-guilt-ridden encounter. After assessing their guilt via a questionnaire, they had some volunteers dip their hands in warm water and others to dip their hands in ice water. Finally, the researchers assessed the subjects’ guilt levels once again, as well as their self-reported pain levels. As New Scientist reports:
Participants who had written about rejecting another left their hands in the ice bucket for longer than those who had written about a normal interaction. They also reported more pain – regardless of how long their hand was in the ice. Crucially, participants who placed their hand in ice later had less than half as much ...
January 21 2011
Newsflash for Chatroulette Flashers: Your Days Are Numbered
Online flashers could soon be out of a hobby, thanks to a team of software engineers from the University of Colorado. The team is developing a system called SafeVchat, which is meant to detect and filter out obscene images, foiling even the fastest of flashers.
The team tested their algorithms at Chatroulette, the infamous online video-chat service that lets you communicate with randomly-selected strangers, and the results looked good.
As you can probably guess, the problem with seeing video images of random strangers is that some of these people are all-too-eager to show off their flesh. Despite the age restrictions on some video-chat sites and the noble-yet-feeble first attempts at creating filtering software, flashers still peddle their wares with ease and have seemed as unstoppable as a bad rash.
But not for long. Enter the engineers.
With SafeVchat, Xingu Ying and his research team have created algorithms that monitor the harbingers of flashing, and wipe away the video output whenever it detects too much flesh. As New Scientist reports:
First, they detect facial features – eyes, nose and mouth – in the video because many “misbehaving users” hide their ...
January 10 2011
How to Repel Pirates? Blast Them With a Laser Cannon
A shaft of green laser light spears out from a cargo ship, targeting a small skiff bobbing in the ocean almost a mile away. The armed miscreants aboard the skiff take one look at the dazzling light and shield their eyes with cries of distress. How can these pirates attack if they can’t see?
That’s the idea behind an anti-pirate laser cannon being developed by a UK defense company in response to the increase in hijackings off the coast of Somalia. The laser would be used in conjunction with ships’ high-frequency surface radars that detect the small vessels used by Somali pirates, and it would function as a kind of warning shot across their bow. New Scientist reports that the laser isn’t intended to fry pirates to a crisp, nor even to blind them forever:
“This is very much a non-lethal weapon,” says Bryan Hore of BAE Systems in Farnborough, UK, where the system was developed. By taking into account the range of the target, as well as the atmospheric conditions, the system can automatically regulate the intensity of the laser beam to ensure there is no ...
January 04 2011
Power Balance: Our Product Is Backed by “No Credible Scientific Evidence”
In a completely shocking and unexpected turn of events, the company behind Power Balance wristbands has officially admitted that the product isn’t backed by any scientific studies–and that the company’s advertisements were misleading. And right after the holographic technology to improve “balance, strength and energy” was named CNBC’s Sports Product of 2010!
Did you catch that? That was sarcasm. And while we here at DISCOVER may have our own opinions, the product was endorsed by SHAQ (whose name is also spelled in all caps). SHAQ, how could you lie to us after we supported you through the Kazaam! days?
Power Balance claims that the holograms (which are exactly like the ones in your credit cards) embedded in their wristbands or pendants have some sort of “energy flow” which can be manipulated to “resonate” with the body’s natural “energy flow.” In quotes in the Daily Mail, Power Balance co-founder Josh Rodarmel explains how they “work”:
“Everything in nature has a set frequency. The body has a frequency and things which cause negativity to the human body – ...
December 27 2010
Husband Caught Spying on Wife’s Email Charged With Hacking
Checking your wife’s email to see if she’s cheating on you: It definitely makes you a snoop, and possibly a bad husband. But a hacker?
That’s the label prosecutors are trying to lay on Leon Walker, charging the 33-year-old man with breaking a statute that’s more normally applied to people who want to steal your credit card numbers or your identity rather than prove your infidelity. From the Detroit Free Press:
Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper defended her decision to charge Leon Walker. “The guy is a hacker,” Cooper said in a voice mail response to the Free Press last week. “It was password protected, he had wonderful skills, and was highly trained. Then he downloaded them and used them in a very contentious way.”
Mr. Walker is indeed a computer technician, but his defense rests on arguing that his wife had no expectation of privacy because he used the computer in question for work—it wasn’t hers alone. Furthermore, he says, she kept her passwords in a notebook next to the computer (Public service announcement: Don’t ever do this).
Those details will probably end up as a he said-she said disagreement. But back to the more peculiar matter at hand: Really? Reading your significant other’s correspondence isn’t just bad form and invasion of privacy, but hacking?
From the Free Press:
Walker’s defense attorney, Leon Weiss, said Cooper is “dead wrong” on the law. “I’ve been a defense attorney for 34 years and I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “This is a hacking statute, the kind of statute they use if you try to break into a government system or private business for some nefarious purpose. It’s to protect against identity fraud, to keep somebody from taking somebody’s intellectual property or trade secrets. “I have to ask: ‘Don’t the prosecutors have more important things to do with their time?’ “
Attorney Deborah McKelvy, who’s not working the case, made a good point, too: “What’s the difference between that and parents who get on their kids’ Facebook accounts? You’re going to have to start prosecuting a whole bunch of parents.”
Related Content:
Discoblog: Can Greasy Fingerprints on Smart Phones Give Away Passcodes?
Discoblog: What’s Easier to Rig—the U.S. Presidential Elections or a Slot Machine?
Discoblog: Gone Legit: First iPhone Hacker Hired to Create iPhone Apps
Image: iStockphoto
December 21 2010
GM Recycles Oil-Soaked Booms From BP Spill Into Parts for Chevy Volt
The Chevy Volt is taking aim at the green market. Not only did it nab the 2010 green car of the year award, but it’s also helping to clean up the mess that big oil company BP made in the Gulf of Mexico.
GM is recycling 10,000 pounds of oil-soaked booms from the gulf into parts for the Volt. Instead of sending the booms to landfills, their absorbent polypropylene (which bears plastic-recycling #5) filler will be cleaned and recycled, GM said in the press release:
“This was purely a matter of helping out,” said John Bradburn, manager of GM’s waste-reduction efforts. “If sent to a landfill, these materials would have taken hundreds of years to begin to break down, and we didn’t want to see the spill further impact the environment. We knew we could identify a beneficial reuse of this material given our experience.”
The used booms will be resurrected as an auto part that deflects air from the radiator; boom material will make up 25 percent of the part, with 25 percent coming from recycled tires and the rest from post-consumer recycled plastics and other polymers. The parts are made with the collaboration of four different companies: Heritage Environmental collected the booms, Mobile Fluid Recovery dried them, Lucent Polymers transformed the material into a resin for die-mold production, and GDC Inc. produced the components, the company explained in the press release:
“Creative recycling is one extension of GM’s overall strategy to reduce its environmental impact,” said Mike Robinson, GM vice president of Environment, Energy and Safety policy. ”We reuse and recycle material by-products at our 76 landfill-free facilities every day. This is a good example of using this expertise and applying it to a greater magnitude.”
GM is now trumpeting some major “green company” status: the company says its facilities recycle 90 percent of the waste they generate, their cars and trucks are at least 85 percent recyclable, and more than half of its worldwide facilities are landfill-free—all manufacturing waste is recycled or used to create energy.
Related content:
Discoblog: Back to The Future: The First Green Flying Car Is Ready For Takeoff
80beats: How Would You Like Your Green Car: Hydrogen-Powered, or With a Unicycle on the Side?
80beats: Around the World in 80 Days: Electric Car Race Begins
80beats: From GM: A 2-Wheeled, Electric, Networked Urban People Mover
80beats: Improved Batteries for Electric Cars Could Recharge in Seconds
80beats: Isn’t It Ironic: Green Tech Relies on Dirty Mining in China
DISCOVER: The Next Source of Green Energy: Your Car Itself
DISCOVER: 6 Blue-Sky Ideas for Revolutionizing the Automobile (Gallery)
Image: Flickr/uscgd8
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
