This seems like a harmless tube. In fact, it was harmless: Israeli farmers used the first version to scare birds from crop fields. Then, somebody converted it into a crowd dispersion mechanism. And then, they discovered it could kill. The Thunder Generator uses mixture of liquefied petroleum, cooking gas, and air to create explosions, which in return generate shock waves capable of stunning people from 30 to 100 metres away. At that range, the weapon is absolutely harmless, making people run in panic when they feel the sonic blast hitting their bodies. However, at less than ten metres, the Thunder Generator could either cause permanent damage or kill any person
Aurochs were immortalised in prehistoric cave paintings and admired for their brute strength and elephantine
size by Julius Caesar. But despite their having gone the way of the dodo and the woolly mammoth, there are plans to bring the giant animals back to life. The huge cattle with sweeping horns which once roamed the forests of Europe have not been seen for nearly 400 years. Now Italian scientists are hoping to use genetic expertise and selective breeding of modern-day wild cattle to recreate the fearsome beasts which weighed around 2,200lb and stood 6.5 feet at the shoulder. Breeds of large cattle which most closely resemble Bos primigenius, such as Highland cattle and the white Maremma breed from Italy, are being bred with each other in a technique known as back-breeding
. At the same time, scientists say they have for the first time created a map of the auroch’s genome, so that they know precisely what type of animal they are trying to replicate
Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher’s Weekly that publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy
comes a sudden realisation of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were loaned
last year by a cabal of organisations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself. From what we’ve been able to piece together, the book lending
takes place in libraries
. On entering one of these dens, patrons may view a dazzling array of books, periodicals, even CDs and DVDs, all available to anyone willing to disclose valuable personal information in exchange for a card
. But there is an ominous silence pervading these ersatz sanctuaries, enforced by the stern demeanor of staff and the glares of other patrons. Although there’s no admission charge and it doesn’t cost anything to borrow a book, there’s always the threat of an onerous overdue bill for the hapless borrower who forgets to continue the cycle of not paying for copyrighted material
CNN recently published an article entitled Study: Threat of Muslim-American terrorism in US exaggerated; according to a study released by Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the terrorist threat posed by radicalised Muslim-Americans has been exaggerated
. Yet, Americans continue to live in mortal fear of radical Islam, a fear propagated and inflamed by right wing Islamophobes. If one follows the cable news networks, it seems as if all terrorists are Muslims. It has even become axiomatic in some circles to chant: Not all Muslims are terrorists, but nearly all terrorists are Muslims
. Muslims and their leftist dhimmi allies
respond feebly, mentioning Waco as the one counter example, unwittingly affirming the belief that nearly all terrorists are Muslims
. But perception is not reality. The data simply does not support such a hasty conclusion. On the FBI’s official website, there exists a chronological list of all terrorist attacks committed on US soil from the year 1980 all the way to 2005
A deep-sea snail shell’s ability to withstand heavy blows could inspire new generation of body armour. Crysomallon squamiferum, commonly known as the scaly-foot gastropod, was discovered in 1999 in the Kairei black smoker
field on the Central Indian Ridge, at a depth of 2420 metres
A mysterious visitor who each year leaves roses and cognac on Edgar Allen Poe’s tomb in Baltimore, Maryland, has missed his rendezvous for the first time in 61 years, the Poe Society said. He did not show up this morning,
Jeffrey Savoye, secretary and treasurer of the 380 member society, said
The Gmail accounts of foreign reporters in at least two news bureaus in Beijing have been hijacked, a journalists’ group in China said Monday. The news comes just one week after Google said it had been targeted by recent cyberattacks aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The US search giant cited the attacks as one reason it has decided to stop censoring its Chinese search engine and may ultimately close its China offices, a threat China has dismissed. The hijacked Gmail accounts used by the journalists in Beijing had been set to forward all e-mails to a stranger’s address, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China said in an e-mail to members. The group did not name the news organizations hit by the attack or say when the hijacking occurred
Private details of more and more people are finding their way on to databases used by the nation’s police. Information about licensed drivers and car owners are to be added to a network that already holds nearly 9 million police records. Police say it makes their job faster and safer, but critics warn of the potential for the misuse of such mountains of information
Alligators and birds share a breathing mechanism which may have helped their ancestors dominate Earth more than 200 million years ago. Research published in the journal Science found that like birds, in alligators air flows in one direction. Birds’ lung structure allows them to breathe when flying in low oxygen, or hypoxic, conditions. This breathing may have helped a common ancestor of birds and alligators thrive in the hypoxic period of the Triassic
Last week, CYBERsitter sued the People’s Republic of China, the two Chinese software makers, and seven computer manufacturers for distributing Web filtering software known as Green Dam with allegedly stolen code. This week, the law firm representing the company said that it had been targeted in a cyber attack from China. In a phone interview, Elliot B Gipson of Gipson Hoffman & Pancione described what amounts to a spear-phishing attack — the same technique used against Google in China. They were e-mails targeted at individuals in our law firm that were made to appears as if they were coming from other individuals at our law firm,
he said. They attempted to get the target to click on a link or attachment
The ongoing patent battle between Apple and Nokia escalated Friday, when Apple moved to block imports of Nokia mobile phones to the US. Apple made its request in a complaint filed with the International Trade Commission, an independent federal agency that examines issues including unfair trade practices involving patent, trademark, and copyright infringement
When Ross Clark read in New Scientist that the US military considered the Nintendo Wiimote controller accurate enough to control bomb disposal robots, it set him thinking. Could the Wii’s skiing and snowboarding attachment, the balance board, help rehabilitate people who have had a stroke? I wanted to know if it would be any good for assessing the standing balance of patients,
says Clark. He reasoned that being able to measure the centre of pressure of a person’s foot will be useful to a physio who is helping someone relearn how to stand. Yet the lab-grade force platforms
needed to do that cost more than £11,000 — putting them out of the reach of many physio clinics. So Clark and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne, Australia, took apart a Wii balance board and hacked into its strain gauges and accelerometers to tap into their raw data. We found the data to be excellent. I was shocked given the price: it was an extremely impressive strain gauge set-up
In a statement issued today, the German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology (known as BSI) recommends that all Internet Explorer users switch to an alternative browser. They may resume using Explorer after a fix is issued by Microsoft for a critical vulnerability that has been implicated in the Chinese cyberattack against Google
Electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) are usually associated with warfare. The idea is to use a blast of energy to fry the enemy’s computers and telecommunications gear. One common way proposed to do this is with an atomic bomb. In a less extreme fashion, however, EMPs have peaceful uses. They are already employed industrially to shape soft and light metals, such as aluminium and copper. Now a group of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology in Chemnitz, Germany, has found a way to use an EMP device to shape and punch holes through industry’s metallic heavyweight–steel. This could transform manufacturing by doing away with the need to use large, heavy presses to make goods ranging from cars to washing machines
Updated Hackers who breached the defences of Google, Adobe Systems and at least 32 other companies used a potent vulnerability in all versions of Internet Explorer to carry out at least some of the attacks, researchers from McAfee said Thursday. The previously unknown flaw in the IE browser was probably just one of the vectors used in the attacks, McAfee CTO George Kurtz wrote in a blog post. Using a sophisticated spear-phishing campaign, the perpetrators included malicious links exploiting the bug in emails and instant messages sent to employees from at least three of the targeted companies. Contrary to previous speculation, there was no evidence vulnerabilities in Adobe’s Reader or Acrobat applications were used in any of the attacks, Kurtz said. In its own statement, Adobe concurred, saying researchers have not been able to obtain any evidence to indicate that Adobe Reader or other Adobe technologies were used as the attack vector in this incident
. Kurtz said his findings were based on malware samples taken from three to five
of the targeted companies and he stressed that other zero days or exploits could have been used against other victims
The dangerous Internet Explorer attack code used in last month’s attack on Google’s corporate networks is now public. The code was submitted for analysis Thursday on the Wepawet malware analysis Web site, making it publicly available. By Friday, it had been included in at least one publicly available hacking tool and could be seen in online attacks, according to Dave Marcus, director of security research and communications at McAfee. The attack is very reliable on Internet Explorer 6 running on Windows XP, and it could possibly be modified to work on more recent versions of the browser, Marcus said. The game really changes now that it’s hosted publicly,
he said
John Hunter wants to shoot stuff into space with a 1,000-metre gun. And he’s dead serious — he’s done the math. Making deliveries to an orbital outpost on a rocket costs $5,000 per pound, but using a space gun would cost just $250 per pound. Building colossal guns has been Hunter’s pet project since 1992, when, while a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he first fired a 130-metre gun he built to test-launch hypersonic engines. Its methane-driven piston compressed hydrogen gas, which then expanded up the barrel to shoot a projectile. Mechanical firing can fail, however, so when Hunter’s company, Quicklaunch, released its plans last fall, it swapped the piston for a combustor that burns natural gas. Heat the hydrogen in a confined space and it should build up enough pressure to send a half-ton payload into the sky at 21,000 kph
VeriSign’s iDefense security lab has published a report with technical details about the recent cyberattack that hit Google and over 30 other companies. The iDefense researchers traced the attack back to its origin and also identified the command-and-control servers that were used to manage the malware. The cyber-assault came to light on Tuesday when Google disclosed to the public that the Gmail Web service was targeted in a highly-organized attack in late December. Google said that the intrusion attempt originated from China and was executed with the goal of obtaining information about political dissidents, but the company declined to speculate about the identity of the perpetrator. Citing sources in the defense contracting and intelligence consulting community, the iDefense report unambiguously declares that the Chinese government was, in fact, behind the effort
As mobile phones get more sophisticated, hi-tech criminals are dusting off some old tricks. Security companies have noticed a rise in trojans known as diallers that used to be popular during the days of dial-up net access. On a smartphone the diallers are being used to call premium rate lines leaving victims with a big bill. Experts say the diallers are proving popular as a quick way for criminals to cash in
Channel 4 looks set to become embroiled in another taste row after backing a project which seeks to mummify a terminally-ill volunteer for a TV documentary. The body of the candidate selected to be embalmed could then end up being displayed in a museum. If the project goes ahead it will follow a trail of programmes which seek to challenge views on death
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