Two polar bears at the Singapore zoo — Sheba and her 13-year-old son, Inuka — have started turning green. The green colouring is apparently the work of a harmless algae, the result of Singapore’s warm and humid climate, which has found a new home in the bears’ translucent hair shafts. Got to love rainbow polar bears, Pelusa from Argentina turned purple last year
NEC is working on a concept PC, called P-ISM, that uses five different pens to make a computer. One pen is a CPU, another a camera, one creates a virtual keyboard, another projects the visual output and thus the display and another a communicator or phone. All five pens can rest in a holding block which recharges the batteries and holds the mass storage. Each pen communicates wirelessly with the others
Aspects of the controversial Total Information Awareness DARPA program, officially shut down by the US Congress in September 2003 after a public outcry, seem to have survived. Some projects from Poindexter’s TIA effort were transferred to US intelligence offices, congressional, federal and research officials. In addition, Congress left undisturbed a separate but similar $64 million research program run by a little-known office called the Advanced Research and Development Activity, or ARDA, that has used some of the same researchers as Poindexter’s program
Chemical companies Bayer and Monsanto are prepared to risk farmers’ GM-free contracts overseas to ensure a stockpile of GM canola seed is ready for sale after the next growing season
Two women in the poor farming village of Aji Bai Nazar have emerged as heroines after they witnessed the horror of two small boys being killed as they played with little cluster bombs from an American jet. The two cleared dozens of the bombs with their bare hands and detonated them, protecting the village
The Enigma-E is a kit that enables you to build your own electronic variant of the famous Enigma coding machine that was used by the German army during WWII. It works just like a real Enigma and is compatible with an M3 and M4 Enigma as well as the standard Service Machines. A message encrypted on, say, a real Enigma M4 can be read on the Enigma-E and vice versa
In a ruling released Friday, Judge Susan Illston granted Hollywood studios’ request for an injunction against 321 Studios, saying the small software company has seven days to stop distributing its DVD-copying products on the grounds that they are illegal
Grow is a strange little Rube Goldberg-like game where you try to determine the order in which to drag various items into the middle. Each time you drag an item, the items you’ve already placed grow and interact with each other. The goal is to drag all the items in the right sequence to advance them all to their maximum levels. The maximum score is 20,000, I haven’t managed to get that far. There are quite a few possible sequences that do this, as well as some sequences that don’t reach the maximum but do produce fun effects
Ever wonder where you fall in the Geek Heirarchy? — via Wil Wheaton Dot Net
William Gibson discusses his tech life, the ad that inspired Neuromancer, and his latest book, Pattern Recognition. He says, Between my wife and daughter who still lives at home, I’m always the one with the slowest computer. I don’t find that being really up on all the latest tech ever does me any good
The mysterious dark energy that is pushing apart the universe appears to be the constant force that Albert Einstein once predicted, according to measurements made by the Hubble Space Telescope
Pupils in the UK as young as 14 will be allowed to leave the classroom for two days a week to learn a trade under plans to tackle skill shortages and motivate disillusioned children
Clumsy Britons risk life and limb keeping up with the latest trends such as wooden flooring and micro-scooters — providing they survive putting their trousers on in the morning
A man and his wife ducked behind a refrigerator when bullets began exploding in their oven. It seems the rocket scientist in question had put the ammunition and three handguns in the oven for safekeeping before leaving on vacation. After returning from their trip Tuesday, the wife turned on the oven to prepare dinner and the bullets ignited
Andre Gainey found out the hard way that in the state of New York it’s illegal to drive while watching porn. Police said the 35-year old man from Clifton Park, New York, was watching a adult movie called Chocolate Foam
on Tuesday night while driving his Mercedes Benz in the town of Schenectady when he was spotted by an officer at a stop light
Aloysius, apparently sharing my love of penguins, has found another silly, yet addictive, Flash game where you throw snowballs at penguins. If you hit the penguins, they get embedded in the target and their little feet wiggle. Entertaining
British doctors will be able to prescribe maggots to National Health Service patients with infected wounds from Friday onwards, because the NHS had realised maggots were a cheaper and more beneficial way of treating wounds than using conventional medicine. Patients would be able to treat themselves at home and avoid the possibility of picking up a hospital infection. Maggots have been used for centuries to rid wounds of decaying flesh, but after the discovery of antibiotics their use went into decline
Peace protesters won a landmark ruling that police acted unlawfully by forcing them to return home as they made their way to an anti-Iraq war demonstration. About 120 demonstrators are expected to claim hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages after the High Court ruled in a test case that the human rights of activist Jane Laporte had been breached
Drugs based on CSIRO’s research into the influenza virus have been shown to be effective, in laboratory tests, against a sample of an H5N1 influenza virus currently infecting chickens in Asia
The Australia-US Free Trade Agreement has become the expensive trade agreement as sugar growers claim $600 million from taxpayers in compensation, because the Howard government buckled to the retarded monkey boy over sugar
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