Cthulhu lives.. on your shirt! Original design of our favourite scary octopus headed god — via Design by Humans
Artist Catherine Rosselle created an amazing series of creepy embroidered insects called Insectomanie — via MAKE
An Austrian man is to be charged with disturbing the peace of the dead after police found 56 human skulls and 55 other bones at a museum he had created in his home.
Police in the province of Burgenland said the relics were taken without authorisation from a church cemetery and had now been returned.
The 47-year-old man, whose name was not immediately released, came to the attention of police when he tried to sell three skulls and two thigh bones at a flea market — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Whose little feet are those? They belong to one of the new White Canadian Wolf pups born at Berlin Zoo. On 29 April, keepers noticed that the four-year-old Ava, who had been pregnant, emerged from the wolf cave looking considerably leaner. It was not long before five pups ventured out to be seen by staff and visitors alike. They sport their puppy coat of brownish spotted fur, but in time will come to have the magnificent white coat of their parents — via ZooBorns
A museum in China has a problem. It seems to have a few fakes in its vast collection. Well, as many as 40,000. Everything it owns may be nothing more than a mass of crude forgeries.
Wei Yingjun, a consultant to the Jibaozhai Museum in Jizhou, about 150 miles south of Beijing, insists the situation is not that bad. He is quite positive
that 80 or even more pieces out of tens of thousands in the museum are authentic.
In spite of this sterling defence, regional authorities in Hebei province have closed the museum amid a national scandal driven by some very free speech on China’s internet. One online satirist suggested it should reopen as a museum of fakes — If you can’t be the best, why not be the worst?
Maybe that’s a good idea. All museums have a couple of fakes in their collections. Sometimes they own up to them, sometimes they put any dubious artefacts in a dark storeroom – and sometimes they don’t know. But a collection that its accusers claim is entirely inauthentic is in its way a masterpiece of museology — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In a very unique marketing gesture and implementation of the micro-datacentre concept, telecommunications provider aql, of Leeds, UK is repurposing 1930’s era telephone boxes as WiFi hotspots containing a micro-datacentre.
The antique phone boxes, which will be painted blue, rather than their traditional red, will be sealed to the public but will host a local hotspot and have a touchscreen that will allow users to make phone calls, including calls to the police emergency number. The boxes will be solar powered and wirelessly connected so that they can be installed anywhere without the need to dig up the streets to provide power and connectivity — via redwolf.newsvine.com
On 24 April, an octet of Arctic Fox kits was born at Mulhouse Zoo in France. While eight kits might seem like a lot, it isn’t unusual for this species: Arctic Foxes may give birth to up to 20 offspring. However, they may only be able to raise two to four of their many kits successfully in the wild, depending on the availability of prey — via ZooBorns
A web with web fonts is more beautiful, readable, accessible and open. Google Fonts makes it quick and easy for everyone to use web fonts, including professional designers and developers. We believe that everyone should be able to bring quality typography to their web pages and applications. Our goal is to create a directory of web fonts for the world to use. Our API service makes it easy to add Google Fonts to a website in seconds. The service runs on Google’s servers which are fast, reliable and tested. Google provides this service free of charge
For a series entitled Bottom Feeders, New York-based ceramic artist Mary O’Malley created a variety of wonderful porcelain teacups, saucers, teapots, and vases adorned with and inhabited by a variety of porcelain crustaceans
. Mary’s pieces don’t appear to be made by hand. Instead they look as though they spent ages on the ocean floor where they were overtaken and inhabited by all sorts of undersea creatures before being brought to the surface for display.
If you head over to Mary O’Malley Etsy shop you’ll find many original pieces from the Bottom Feeders series available for purchase. They’re perfect for your next underwater-themed high tea or a meeting of your local Lovecraftian book club — via Archie McPhee
Day in and day out copyright holders send hundreds of thousands of DMCA takedown notices to Google, hoping to make pirated movies and music harder to find.
During the past month alone copyright holders asked Google to remove 14,855,269 URLs from its search results. Unfortunately, not all of these requests are legitimate.
In some cases the notices are flagged as false because the content has already been removed from the original site. But the automated systems used by copyright holders also include perfectly legitimate content. While Google keeps a close eye on this type of abuse
the search engine can’t spot them all.
One good example of such a mistake is contained in a recent demand by HBO. The network is faced with a high demand for pirated copies of Game of Thrones and over the past months they asked Google to remove tens of thousands of links to the popular TV-show.
Usually these notices ask Google to get rid of links to pirate sites, but for some reason the cable network also wants Google to remove a link to the highly popular open source video player VLC — via redwolf.newsvine.com
…so I came across a lovely pattern on www.ravelry.com that included using, what they called, the Crocodile Stitch — via Yarn Muse
In fact, this monument to 1970s design and 1980s construction was built for far more mundane purposes. Now called the National Lift Tower, it was originally raised by the Express Lift Company for testing elevators prior to installation, and for training the engineers who would tackle the lifts’ maintenance — via The Register
Archaeologists believe they have discovered the world’s oldest lunar calendar
in an Aberdeenshire field.
Excavations of a field at Crathes Castle found a series of 12 pits which appear to mimic the phases of the moon and track lunar months.
A team led by the University of Birmingham suggests the ancient monument was created by hunter-gatherers about 10,000 years ago.
The pit alignment, at Warren Field, was first excavated in 2004.
The experts who analysed the pits said they may have contained a wooden post.
The Mesolithic calendar
is thousands of years older than previous known formal time-measuring monuments created in Mesopotamia.
The analysis has been published in the journal, Internet Archaeology — via redwolf.newsvine.com
One and a half years ago, Jane, a 13-year-old Southern White Rhinoceros, came to the Allwetter Zoo in Münster, Germany from the Scottish Blair Drummond Safari Park and was introduced to the zoo’s bull Rhino, Harry. The two Rhinos got along well and after a 16 month gestation, Jane delivered her first calf, a male, on 23 May — via ZooBorns
Sometime around 1960, Aaron’s grandfather purchased an oscilloscope. He passed it down in his family in excellent condition. Lacking any other use for it, Aaron turned the oscilloscope into a clock — via Neatorama
Let it be noted that on this day, Saturday 13 July 2013, it was still deemed legal in the US to chase and then shoot dead an unarmed young black man on his way home from the store because you didn’t like the look of him.
The killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last year was tragic. But in the age of Obama the acquittal of George Zimmerman offers at least that clarity. For the salient facts in this case were not in dispute. On 26 February 2012 Martin was on his way home, minding his own business armed only with a can of iced tea and a bag of Skittles. Zimmerman pursued him, armed with a 9mm handgun, believing him to be a criminal. Martin resisted. They fought. Zimmerman shot him dead.
Who screamed. Who was stronger. Who called whom what and when and why are all details to warm the heart of a cable news producer with 24 hours to fill. Strip them all away and the truth remains that Martin’s heart would still be beating if Zimmerman had not chased him down and shot him.
There is no doubt about who the aggressor was here. It appears that the only reason the two interacted at all, physically or otherwise, is that Zimmerman believed it was his civic duty to apprehend an innocent teenager who caused suspicion by his existence alone — via redwolf.newsvine.com
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has vowed to push for tougher European laws to protect personal information on the internet.
In a TV interview with the public broadcaster ARD, she said Germany wanted internet companies to tell us in Europe who they are giving data to
.
Her comments follow revelations about a US spying operation that collects users’ data from internet companies.
Mrs Merkel also said she expected the US to abide by German law.
Tensions have been running high between the two countries following reports that the US has been eavesdropping on EU and German officials.
I expect a clear commitment from the US government that in future they will stick to German law,
she said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Meet Sheldon, Point Defiance Zoo’s baby Serval. In addition to little Sheldon, there are a few other young cats at the zoo right now — Kali the Tiger cub and Tien the baby Clouded Leopard. Keepers get them together for playtime both behind the scenes and now at certain times within public view so guests can enjoy their antics. Sheldon can always be identified by his big ears. That size, along with the ability to rotate them independently, allows them to pinpoint small animals close by when hunting — via ZooBorns
Telstra signed a secret agreement a decade ago with US Government agencies such as the FBI and the Department of Justice that provided American law enforcement and national security organisations with an extremely broad level of access to all of the telco’s telecommunications passing in and out of the US, it was revealed late last week.
On Friday independent media outlet Crikey published what what appeared to be the text of the agreement. It notes that it was signed in November 2001 between Telstra and its Hong Kong partner telco PCCW, and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice.
The document cites principles such as the US Government’s need to preserve the national security
of the US and to ensure that US communications were secure in order to protect the privacy of US persons
. It notes that the stimulus for the agreement to be signed was the application of Telstra/PCCW submarine cable joint venture Reach — which operates major underwater fibre links between a number of Asian countries, as well as Australia and the US — to provide telecommunications services from the US back in 2001, shortly after it was formed by Telstra and PCCW.
The agreement states that all telcos operating in the US must maintain facilities that were compliant with US law enforcement regulations in that country, such as the ability to hand over details, including calling data but not the content of communications, of all communications received or which originated in the US.
Data to be stored by Reach for two years included identifying information relating to telephone calls, such as telephone numbers, Internet addressed used, the time, date, size and duration of a communication, any information relating specifically to the identity and physical address of those communicating, and a host of other information, especially billing records, which typically show details of all telephone calls made by telephone service subscribers — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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