Watch Corning’s Paul Then describe a new product called, Corning Fibrance Light-Diffusing Fibre. This glass optical fibre is optimised for thin, colourful, aesthetic lighting in a variety of applications — via Youtube
This week, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott used recent terrorist threats as the backdrop of a dire warning to Australians that for some time to come, the delicate balance between freedom and security may have to shift. There may be more restrictions on some, so that there can be more protection for others.
This pronouncement came as two of a series of three bills effecting that erosion of freedoms made their way through Australia’s Federal Parliament. These were the second reading of a National Security Amendment Bill which grants new surveillance powers to Australia’s spy agency, ASIO, and the first reading of a Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment (Foreign Fighters) Bill that outlaws speech seen as advocating terrorism
. A third bill on mandatory data retention is expected to be be introduced by the end of the year.
Whilst all three bills in this suite raise separate concerns, the most immediate concern—because the bill in question could be passed this week — is the National Security Amendment Bill. Introduced into Parliament on 16 July, it endured robust criticism during public hearings last month that led into an advisory report released last week. Nevertheless the bill was introduced into the Senate this Tuesday with the provisions of most concern still intact.
In simple terms, the bill allows law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant to access data from a computer—so far, so good. But it redefines a computer
to mean not only one or more computers
but also one or more computer networks
. Since the Internet itself is nothing but a large network of computer networks, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that the bill may stealthily allow the spy agency to surveil the entire Internet with a single warrant.
Apart from allowing the surveillance of entire computer networks, the bill also allows the addition, deletion or alteration of data
stored on a computer, provided only that this would not materially interfere with, interrupt or obstruct a communication in transit or the lawful use by other persons of a computer unless … necessary to do one or more of the things specified in the warrant
. Given the broad definition of computer
, this provision is broad enough to authorise website blocking or manipulation, and even the insertion of malware into networks targeted by the warrant — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Innovation in Fabrics from Tom Bihn on Vimeo
Our fabric expert talks about the fabrics we use and the bags he uses
Talk to the hand and Fur Redistribution Program originally uploaded by Red Wolf
After 20 years of eager anticipation, the Zoological Centre Tel Aviv-Ramat Gan (Safari), can now say they are home to a female White Rhino calf — via ZooBorns
Lincoln Children’s Zoo is excited to announce two new additions to the Zoo family. Red panda twins, a boy and girl, were born on 1 July. The cubs, who are being hand raised because their mother needed help taking care of them, are doing great — via Youtube
— via Youtube
José Manuel Hermo Barreiro, Patelo
, is a pensioner from Galicia (Spain). He’s a retired naval mechanic and he has built the smallest engines in the world. This is his story — via Youtube
Last night, researchers at Malwarebytes noticed strange behaviour on sites like Last.fm, The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post. Ads on the sites were being unusually aggressive, setting off anti-virus warnings and raising flags in a number of Malwarebytes systems. After some digging, researcher Jerome Segura realized the problem was coming from Google’s DoubleClick ad servers and the popular Zedo ad agency. Together, they were serving up malicious ads designed to spread the recently identified Zemot malware. A Google representative has confirmed the breach, saying our team is aware of this and has taken steps to shut this down
.
Malware served through ad units (or malvertising
) is nothing new, but this incident is notable because of the unusually broad reach of the attack. It was active but not too visible for a number of weeks until we started seeing popular sites getting flagged in our honeypots,
Segura says. That’s when we thought, something is going on.
The first impressions came in late August, and by now millions of computers have likely been exposed to Zemot, although only those with outdated antivirus protection were actually infected — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Concrete Pour originally uploaded by Red Wolf
A rare Jaguar XKE convertible stolen 46 years ago will be returned to its owner thanks to an eagle-eyed customs agent.
The Californian Highway Patrol are trying to figure out who might have stolen it from outside a New York apartment and why it was in a Californian garage for 40 years.
A man who had recently bought the car submitted paperwork to US Customs and Border Protection in June, and an analyst who checked the vehicle saw it had been reported stolen.
By that time, the 1967 Jaguar was en route to the Netherlands, a hot market for vintage cars, and authorities arranged to have the ship operator bring the car back to California.
According to US Customs, the 82-year-old original owner of the car, retired attorney Ivan Schneider, has called the find a miracle
and said he planned to restore it.
It’s a wonderful car,
Mr Schneider said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
This is needle felted octopus on a real wood branch. Tree branch is painted with acrylic. The octopus is made from wire and roving which is shaped with a barbed needle and then glued on the branch with Weld Bound glue. The wood is from nature but has been thoroughly cleaned with hot salty water and wool steel. Ready to hang with hanging wire. This piece takes two nails to hang on wall. Some of his legs are moveable. Colours of this piece are bright blue, green, white, and black — via Etsy
and then occasionally you see things that remind you that at one point la had the makings of a normal city.
union station is one of those things. it’s a beautiful old train station and it sits nicely in the pantheon of beautiful old train stations. because at one point la was destined to be a normal city, with normal and beautiful buildings and an urban core and public transportation. and then the 20th century happened and la exploded in every direction, literally, metaphorically, figuratively.
little outposts of normalcy were left behind, clustered around a leaking downtown like little dioramas of conventional urbanism. you look at union station and think, wow, this was built when people still expected la to behave like other cities
— via moby los angeles architecture
Aptenia cordifolia, Bee, Vibernum Flowers and Clivea originally uploaded by Red Wolf
PHYSICS PRIZE [JAPAN]: Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, for measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that’s on the floor.
REFERENCE: Frictional Coefficient under Banana Skin
, Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, Tribology Online 7, no. 3, 2012, pp. 147-151.
NEUROSCIENCE PRIZE [CHINA, CANADA]: Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, and Kang Lee, for trying to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.
REFERENCE: Seeing Jesus in Toast: Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Face Pareidolia
, Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, Kang Lee, Cortex, vol. 53, April 2014, Pages 60–77. The authors are at School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Xidian University, the Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, and the University of Toronto, Canada.
PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [AUSTRALIA, UK, USA]: Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons, for amassing evidence that people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, more manipulative, and more psychopathic than people who habitually arise early in the morning.
REFERENCE: Creatures of the Night: Chronotypes and the Dark Triad Traits
, Peter K Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons, Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 55, no. 5, 2013, pp. 538-541.
PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [CZECH REPUBLIC, JAPAN, USA, INDIA]: Jaroslav Flegr, Jan Havlí?ek and Jitka Hanušova-Lindova, and to David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan, Lisa Seyfried, for investigating whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat.
REFERENCE: Changes in personality profile of young women with latent toxoplasmosis
, Jaroslav Flegr and Jan Havlicek, Folia Parasitologica, vol. 46, 1999, pp. 22-28.
REFERENCE: Decreased level of psychobiological factor novelty seeking and lower intelligence in men latently infected with the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii Dopamine, a missing link between schizophrenia and toxoplasmosis?
, Jaroslav Flegr, Marek Preiss, Ji??? Klose, Jan Havl???ek, Martina Vitáková, and Petr Kodym, Biological Psychology, vol. 63, 2003, pp. 253–268.
REFERENCE: Describing the Relationship between Cat Bites and Human Depression Using Data from an Electronic Health Record
, David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan, Lisa Seyfried, PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 8, 2013, e70585.
BIOLOGY PRIZE [CZECH REPUBLIC, GERMANY, ZAMBIA]: Vlastimil Hart, Petra Nováková, Erich Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Vladimír Hanzal, Miloš Ježek, Tomáš Kušta, Veronika N?mcová, Jana Adámková, Kate?ina Benediktová, Jaroslav ?ervený and Hynek Burda, for carefully documenting that when dogs defecate and urinate, they prefer to align their body axis with Earth’s north-south geomagnetic field lines.
REFERENCE: Dogs are sensitive to small variations of the Earth’s magnetic field
, Vlastimil Hart, Petra Nováková, Erich Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Vladimír Hanzal, Miloš Ježek, Tomáš Kušta, Veronika N?mcová, Jana Adámková, Kate?ina Benediktová, Jaroslav ?ervený and Hynek Burda, Frontiers in Zoology, 10:80, 27 December 2013.
ART PRIZE [ITALY]: Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro, and Paolo Livrea, for measuring the relative pain people suffer while looking at an ugly painting, rather than a pretty painting, while being shot [in the hand] by a powerful laser beam.
REFERENCE: Aesthetic value of paintings affects pain thresholds
, Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro, and Paolo Livrea, Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 17, no. 4, 2008, pp. 1152-1162.
ECONOMICS PRIZE [ITALY]: ISTAT — the Italian government’s National Institute of Statistics, for proudly taking the lead in fulfilling the European Union mandate for each country to increase the official size of its national economy by including revenues from prostitution, illegal drug sales, smuggling, and all other unlawful financial transactions between willing participants.
REFERENCE: Cambia il Sistema europeo dei conti nazionali e regionali – Sec2010
, ISTAT, 2014.
REFERENCE: European System of National and Regional Accounts (ESA 2010)
, Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2013.
MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, INDIA]: Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, for treating uncontrollable
nosebleeds, using the method of nasal-packing-with-strips-of-cured-pork.
REFERENCE: Nasal Packing With Strips of Cured Pork as Treatment for Uncontrollable Epistaxis in a Patient with Glanzmann Thrombasthenia
, Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology, vol. 120, no. 11, November 2011, pp. 732-36.
ARCTIC SCIENCE PRIZE [NORWAY, GERMANY]: Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftestøl, for testing how reindeer react to seeing humans who are disguised as polar bears.
REFERENCE: Response Behaviors of Svalbard Reindeer towards Humans and Humans Disguised as Polar Bears on Edgeøya
, Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftestøl, Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, vol. 44, no. 4, 2012, pp. 483-9.
NUTRITION PRIZE [SPAIN]: Raquel Rubio, Anna Jofré, Belén Martín, Teresa Aymerich, and Margarita Garriga, for their study titled Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Infant Faeces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages
.
REFERENCE: Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Infant Faeces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages
, Raquel Rubio, Anna Jofré, Belén Martín, Teresa Aymerich, Margarita Garriga, Food Microbiology, vol. 38, 2014, pp. 303-311 — via redwolf.newsvine.com
This under-the-sea nursery mobile features three quirky, big-eyed octopus. Each one of these sea creatures will have a little bit of their own personality. Each will be needle felted from hand-dyed merino wool in a gradient pattern to give them their unique colour blends. I have a large selection of colours on hand to make custom colour blends just for your decor — via Etsy
Introducing Gertrude the Octopus. She has a sordid past (used to attack ships, sailboats, submarines… pretty much anything that got in her way), but she is a changed octopus. She now leads underwater tours. Good girl. Gertrude is approximately 11 inches high (including her legs) — the perfect height to perform in a finger puppet play, adorn a decorative tree branch, or sit quietly wherever you choose to place her — via Etsy
Mr Desmond Traction. Fear Maintenance Officer
Originally aired on ABC TV: 18/09/2014 — via Youtube
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