We All Scream For Ice Cream

Markus Miller, an Oklahoma ice cream man, opened fire on a customer after a summer ice cream sale degenerated into a heated argument. It is not a normal or legal thing, anywhere in the country to carry a handgun without a permit while selling ice cream, said Sgt Eric Holtzclaw, a spokesman with the Enid Police Department — via Die Puny Humans

Australian Copyright Criminalises iPod

Anyone who has copied songs from a CD onto an iPod or computer hard drive has fallen foul of Australian copyright laws, which critics argue are failing to keep pace with technological change. Copying music for personal use is generally okay in the US and Europe. But not in Australia — via BoingBoing

Memory Card Torture Tests

Five types of memory cards were dipped into cola, put through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled by a skateboard, run over by a child’s toy car and given to a six-year-old boy to destroy. All came through with flying colours. They didn’t survive the extra tests of being smashed by a sledgehammer and nailed to a tree, but it was still possible to retrieve photos from the xD and Smartmedia cards

Guerrilla Drive-Ins

There’s a new fad sweeping the underground: guerrilla drive-ins [BugMeNot]. Essentially, someone sets up a DVD player, LCD projector, and wireless transmitter next to any blank wall (preferably on someone else’s property — to make it more fun), and people come to watch movies. As you would expect, the movie studios aren’t too thrilled

Living Without A Pulse

Can you live without a pulse? Yes, now you can. The reason why we have a pulse is because it’s hard for evolution to result in turbines or continuously spinning things. The next generation of artificial hearts may have no pulse. They also have no bearings, so they should last much longer than previous attempts. In fact, engineers don’t give a predicted lifespan on these models

1,000 Year Old Brewery Unearthed

US researchers have unearthed what they say may be the oldest known brewery in the Andes, a pre-Incan plant at least 1000 years old that could produce drinks for hundreds of people at one sitting. The University of Florida said its archaeologists and researchers from the Field Museum in Chicago found the brewery at Cerro Baul, a mountaintop religious centre of the Wari empire that ruled what is now Peru hundreds of years before the Incas

Yahoo, Google Irresponsible In China

Human rights organisation Reporters sans Frontières has accused Yahoo! and Google of deliberately conspiring to censor the Web. RSF called the pair irresponsible for blocking some content labelled as subversive by the Chinese government — sites relating to Tibet’s independence, for example. Such sites disappear from the Chinese language version of Yahoo and a Yahoo-parented search engine, Yisou, while a local search engine that Google now owns a share of, Baidu, also censors its results

MP3 Inventor Designs New 3D Audio System

Karlheinz Brandenburg, director of Germany’s prestigious Fraunhofer Institute for Media Technology, known for his contribution to the invention of the MP3 codec, has demonstrated a new technology that could create super-realistic sound for theatres, theme parks and home-entertainment systems. Iosono is described as true three dimensional audio, which can give the impression that a noise occurring in a movie sounds exactly like someone shouting from outside the theatre walls. The best surround sound speakers on the market today can approximate this for a sweet spot of only a few feet wide, but Iosono would create the same realistic illusion for all the people sitting in a theatre

Secret Squirrel

While studying ground squirrels, researchers noticed that some of them made faint whispering sounds, as if they had lost their voices. But when these silent screams were processed by a bat detector, an abundance of ultrasound was detected. The researchers believe the whispers might be secret alarm calls — that the squirrels’ predators cannot hear — via meta-roj blog

Baby Rhino In Plaster After Mum Steps On Foot

A new-born baby rhinoceros in a Berlin zoo is in plaster after his mother carelessly trod on his foot one day after his birth. Patna, born last week to mother Betty and father Belur, will have to wear a plaster cast on his left lower leg for up to five weeks to heal a broken leg