ladyliberty's feed

  • 9 years ago
    Current Event ladyliberty

    ISIS To Obama: 'We Will Cut Off Your Head In The White House'

    ISIS militants have threatened to behead Obama in the White House in a video released on Jan. 26. The video shows ISIS militants standing in the streets of Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, following an artillery barrage on the city by Kurdish Peshmerga forces. In front of the militants is seated a Kurdish soldier who is executed at the end of the video. Prior to the Kurdish soldiers execution, the ISIS executioner delivered a message in Kurdish which was subtitled into Arabic in the video...

  • 9 years ago
    Analysis ladyliberty

    BMW Uses Frickin’ Lasers for High Beams That Don’t Blind

    Conventional wisdom and legally-required safety labels have trained us to understand that we shouldn’t look directly at laser lights, lest we become blinded by their eye-searing output. That’s still almost universally true, except when it comes to BMW’s laser-powered headlight concept. These lasers were designed to prevent blindness—specifically when it comes to oncoming drivers and high-beams...

  • 9 years ago
    Comment ladyliberty

    ...and would all the students who paid for it get a refund?

  • 9 years ago
    Analysis ladyliberty

    When T.S. Eliot Invented the Hipster

    January 4th marks 50 years since the death of poet T. S. Eliot. This year also marks the 100th anniversary of one of Eliot’s most famous poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the work that thrust Eliot onto the modernist stage. An embodiment of turn-of-the century angst wrought by a world sucked dry by skepticism, cynicism, and industrialism, Prufrock bears striking similarities to a subculture of mostly white, urban...

  • 9 years ago
    Analysis ladyliberty

    Why We Sign Up For Gym Memberships But Never Go To The Gym

    Gyms take on way more members than they have space for. Here's a look at how they get us to sign up and never show up.

  • 9 years ago
    Analysis ladyliberty

    California Is About To Make Egg Production More Humane, By Giving Hens 70 Percent More Space

    Starting next year, 15 million egg-laying hens in California and millions more providing out-of-state eggs to Californians will be required to have 70 percent more space — going from a minimum of 67 square inches each to nearly 116 square inches, about a 10.7-inch square of space per bird. California is the biggest consumer of eggs in the country, and this new regulations is part of a broader national effort to shift industry focus away from...

  • 9 years ago
    Current Event ladyliberty

    Bedbug bait and trap invented by Simon Fraser University scientists

    After 180,000 bedbug bites and eight years of study, Simon Fraser University scientists say they have invented a new kind of bedbug bait and trap. The trap, which will be available commercially next year, will work by emitting a set of chemical attractants, or pheromones, that lure the bedbugs into traps, and keep them there.

  • 9 years ago
    Analysis ladyliberty

    Pirate Bay Domain Back Online, Waving a Pirate Flag

    After nearly two weeks of downtime the official domain of The Pirate Bay is showing signs of life. For now ThePirateBay.se is only waving a pirate flag, but that's good enough to give many Pirate Bay users hope for a full recovery. On December 9 The Pirate Bay was raided at the Nacka station, a nuclear-proof data center built into a mountain complex near Stockholm.

  • 9 years ago
    Expression ladyliberty

    After exploring glacier caves, hiker looks at his photos & realizes he wasn't alone

    Michael Glidden was wandering the remains of a dripping glacier in the Chugach National Forest Saturday when he spotted one particularly, deep, dark tunnel, he says. The Anchorage retiree and his two American Eskimo Dogs, Shasta and Aspen, ventured inside. Temperatures had dipped to 29 degrees along the riverbeds outside.

  • 9 years ago
    Expression ladyliberty

    Graphene: Fast, Strong, Cheap, and Impossible to Use

    Until Andre Geim, a physics professor at the University of Manchester, discovered an unusual new material called graphene, he was best known for an experiment in which he used electromagnets to levitate a frog. Geim, born in 1958 in the Soviet Union, is a brilliant academic—as a high-school student, he won a competition by memorizing a thousand-page chemistry dictionary—but he also has a streak of unorthodox humor.

  • 9 years ago
    Analysis ladyliberty

    The U.S. Government Has a Secret System for Stalling Patents

    Entrepreneurs and established companies alike depend on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to legally protect their inventions. But the Patent Office has been using a secret system to withhold the approval of some applications. Newly released documents reveal that the office, tasked with evaluating and protecting the rights to intellectual property, has a covert system for delaying controversial or inconvenient patents. It’s a system that attorneys say, if abused...

  • 9 years ago
    Analysis ladyliberty

    New technique offers spray-on solar power

    Pretty soon, powering your tablet could be as simple as wrapping it in cling wrap. That’s Illan Kramer’s (ECE) hope. Kramer and colleagues have just invented a new way to spray solar cells onto flexible surfaces using miniscule light-sensitive materials known as colloidal quantum dots (CQDs)—a major step toward making spray-on solar cells easy and cheap to manufacture.

  • 9 years ago
    Current Event ladyliberty

    Iran moves forward with death penalty over Facebook posts

    A 30-year-old blogger and photographer has been sentenced to death in Iran for "insulting the prophet of Islam" on Facebook, drawing renewed attention to the country's notorious human rights record. The man, Soheil Arabi, was convicted in a Tehran criminal court in August after admitting to posting the defamatory content. His lawyers argued that he had done so while "in poor psychological condition," according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran...

  • 9 years ago
    Analysis ladyliberty

    New materials may change the way temperatures are regulated

    AIR conditioning is a transformative technology. It has made the world’s torrid climes pleasanter to live in, and enabled the siesta-free working habits of the temperate regions to move closer to the equator. But cooling buildings takes a lot of energy. Heat must be pumped actively from their interiors to their exteriors. Fully 15% of the electricity used by buildings in the United States is devoted to this task. If an idea dreamed up by Aaswath Raman of Stanford University...

  • 9 years ago
    Video/Audio ladyliberty

    How to Cut Rope in an Emergency

    How to cut string or rope if you haven't got a knife or a pair of scissors. Great life hack trick to help you in an emergency. Cut rope with string!