Naki’o is the first dog to be fitted with a complete set of bionic legs that work naturally to allow him to run, jump and even swim. The prosthetics were designed and fitted in a pioneering procedure by Martin Kaufmann, founder of Orthopets
The home-made drug that Oleg and Sasha inject is known as krokodil, or crocodile
. It is desomorphine, a synthetic opiate many times more powerful than heroin that is created from a complex chain of mixing and chemical reactions, which the addicts perform from memory several times a day. While heroin costs from £20 to £60 per dose, desomorphine can be cooked
from codeine-based headache pills that cost £2 per pack, and other household ingredients available cheaply from the markets.
It is a drug for the poor, and its effects are horrific. It was given its reptilian name because its poisonous ingredients quickly turn the skin scaly. Worse follows. Oleg and Sasha have not been using for long, but Oleg has rotting sores on the back of his neck.
Photographs of late-stage krokodil addicts are disturbing in the extreme. Flesh goes grey and peels away to leave bones exposed. People literally rot to death — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Sergeant Major Barrett also tackled questions on the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
, the military’s ban on gays serving openly in uniform. The Department of Defence is preparing to implement repeal, and Sergeant Major Barrett addressed that issue directly.
Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution is pretty simple,
he told a group of Marines at a base in South Korea. It says, ‘Raise an army’. It says absolutely nothing about race, colour, creed, sexual orientation.
You all joined for a reason: to serve,
he continued. To protect our nation, right?
Yes, Sergeant Major, Marines replied.
How dare we, then, exclude a group of people who want to do the same thing you do right now, something that is honourable and noble?
Sergeant Major Barrett continued, raising his voice just a notch. Right?
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Yet if we seek another model, one that emphasizes universal health care and educational opportunity, one that seeks to curb income inequality, we don’t have to turn to Sweden. Rather, look to the United States military.
You see, when our armed forces are not firing missiles, they live by an astonishingly liberal ethos — and it works. The military helped lead the way in racial desegregation, and even today it does more to provide equal opportunity to working-class families — especially to blacks — than just about any social program. It has been an escalator of social mobility in American society because it invests in soldiers and gives them skills and opportunities.
The United States armed forces knit together whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics from diverse backgrounds, invests in their education and training, provides them with excellent health care and child care. And it does all this with minimal income gaps: A senior general earns about 10 times what a private makes, while, by my calculation, CEO’s at major companies earn about 300 times as much as those cleaning their offices. That’s right: the military ethos can sound pretty lefty — via redwolf.newsvine.com
11×14″ gouache on Pastelbord
I don’t think I’ll ever tire of the cephalopods-as-cupid theme. Also, I can’t say enough about how much I like using gouache on Pastelbord. It does chew up brushes, though.
This was my first attempt to apply what James Gurney calls the Windmill Principle. It’s a subtle application, but I like the result — via CrashOctopus Blog
This 1930s public library in Breightmet, Bolton, Lancashire is an amazing building, very much of of its era and with modernism to the fore in its design. Love that central circular entrance — check out the last of our pictures to see it with the window above before the vandals got to it. Inside (thanks to images we’ve seen on the agent’s site), you’ve got those two wings coming off it, with period windows both on the side and on the ceiling — via WowHaus
There have been a lot of yarn bombs going off lately, but Caroline Walshe’s knitting just looks like one. Her pattern is also available to buy on her blog — via CRAFT
The Victorian Government has promised to fix the heating at a secondary school in Melbourne’s north, after students were forced to bring blankets to school to keep warm — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The US Navy wants to put powerful lasers on its ships to shoot down artillery shells and even cruise missiles at the speed of light (and really, who wouldn’t). But there are a few scientific details to sort out before sailors can deploy the beams. First we want to make sure the physics is right before throwing buckets of salt water over the thing,
says Ed Pogue — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Ordinary Internet users frequently are scolded for choosing weak, easily-guessed passwords. New research suggests that hackers in the cyber underground are also likely to pick lame passwords for their favorite online forums — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Canadians will be packing more plastic in their wallets with the launch of new polymer bills that replace paper-cotton notes.
The Canadian dollar has traded above parity with the US greenback for months, and gets technologically tougher with the new plastic money designed to thwart counterfeiters.
The polypropylene substrate lasts 2.5 times longer and makes it harder to copy than the existing paper-cotton money, according to the Bank of Canada. It marks the first full-scale use of a substrate other than paper for Canada’s currency — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Have you ever been followed around the Web for months by ads for a product that you considered (but decided against) buying from an online retailer? Have you seen ads on Facebook offering some product that a marketer thinks a person like you should need and want?
Many people in the Web advertising community seem to believe that consumers will appreciate this kind of personalized targeting, because we’ll only have to look at ads for stuff we’re interested in. For many of us, though, that isn’t the case at all — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In another first, the store will have a 24/7 zone for customers to pick up parcels, vending machines where customers can buy stamps and packaging products as well as weigh and send parcels at any time that suits them — via redwolf.newsvine.com
US software giant Oracle has announced its acquisition of FatWire, whose software is used for developing corporate websites around the world.
Oracle said the acquisition was expected to be finalised mid-year. Financial details have not been released — via redwolf.newsvine.com
He’s best known for a whimsical email exchange, offering to pay a $233 bill with a drawing of a spider. When that email was posted on his site in November 2008, traffic soared from several hundred visits a day to half a million, and the post became fodder for David Letterman’s show.
Though the spider email exchange may be real, it uses a stock photograph and a generic, untraceable name, Jane Gilles
. But former colleagues from advertising agency Demasi Jones, whose real names and faces are used throughout Thorne’s website and new book, say they have been hounded by his fans, many of whom believe that every word is true — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In Vertebrata, photographer Marc Da Cunha Lopez has placed skeletons — properties of a biology department of Paris university — in different empty spaces and interiors that he captured during previous travels around the world.
The feeling that stands out from these pictures is one of waiting. A long expectation, full of hopes and dreams that never came true. Thus, these animals naked to the bones become almost humans — via RJ TimeouT
Ontario Provincial Police have charged a 43-year-old man in connection with the theft of a home from a Toronto-area man.
Last week, police in Dundalk, Ontario — a community of 2,000 located about two hours north of Toronto — were approached by a Brampton man who reported that he had arrived on his nearby rural property only to find that his 45-foot-long, double-wide trailer was missing — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The FBI seized Web servers in a raid on a data centre Tuesday, causing several Web sites, including sites run by the New York publisher Curbed Network, to go offline — via redwolf.newsvine.com
2X5 ink/coffee on Stonehenge — via deviantART
Frank Gehry is not your average architect. He has a history of creating bold, innovative and often controversial buildings that stand out… such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which transformed the town it was built in but had some Spaniards wanting to lynch him — via Big Ideas
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