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Submission + - Medical Staff warned: Shut your mouth about illegal immigrants or face arrest (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A government-contracted security force threatened to arrest doctors and nurses if they divulged any information about the contagion threat at a refugee camp housing illegal alien children at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, sources say.

In spite of the threat, several former camp workers broke their confidentiality agreements and shared exclusive details with me about the dangerous conditions at the camp. They said taxpayers deserve to know about the contagious diseases and the risks the children pose to Americans. I have agreed to not to disclose their identities because they fear retaliation and prosecution.

“There were several of us who wanted to talk about the camps, but the agents made it clear we would be arrested,” a psychiatric counselor told me. “We were under orders not to say anything.”

The sources said workers were guarded by a security force from the Baptist Family & Children’s Services, which the Department of Health and Human Services hired to run the Lackland Camp.

The sources say security forces called themselves the “Brown Shirts.”

Submission + - Chimpanzees Develop A Grass-in-ear Fashion Trend

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Just in time for this year's primate-starring film event, the Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, comes news from Zambia that also chimpanzees seem to form fashion trends. The behaviour appears to be "non-adaptive", i.e., motivated by frivolous rather than functional reasons. Dutch primate specialist Edwin van Leeuwen describes it as "quite unique". He first spotted the trend-setting chimp in 2010 when Julie, an elderly female, repeatedly popped long pieces of grass in her ear and left it there for several hours. The quirky idea was adopted by seven other chimps in her troop, who still continue to do it after her death. This may be the first fashion trend documented in the animal world, according to the study published recently in science journal Animal Cognition.

Comment Re:Ah, Man (Score 1) 133

There were three arcades in the mall near where I lived in the '80s, a proper arcade, a bunch of cabs next door at the movie theater, and a few more cabs next to the Montgomery Ward's entrance. Now that mall is the headquarters of an internet hosting company.

I was in college in the early '80s, and could play Gravitar for like half an hour on a quarter, and two-fisted Gauntlet, pumping dozens of quarters into one character to get a high score on another character that had a single quarter. (high scores were divided by number of quarters inserted)

I remember being really unhappy about Pole Position when it showed up, in that you could only go four or five laps per credit no matter how well you played.

Comment Re:Boards or ROM's (Score 1) 133

In my limited experience, you need a LOT of pixels for a vector emulation to look good on an LCD display. One of my all-time favorites is Gravitar, and the lines are just a bit too faint with a 1080 display, unless you crank things up. (specifically on my 17" MacBookPro, but I haven't tried it with recent emulators)

I think vector games might look pretty good on a 4K monitor, especially one with retina resolution. And then you won't have to worry about the vector driver hardware flaking out and spewing lines randomly all over the screen, something I've seen too many Star Wars cabs do.

Submission + - PayPal freezes account of email encryption startup ProtonMail 1

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: PayPal has frozen more than $275,000 in donations to ProtonMail, claiming the email encryption startup may be illegal. A PayPal alert told ProtonMail that was unsure if ProtonMail has the necessary U.S. government approval to encrypt emails, as though anyone who encrypts needs a license to do so. Of course, it is absolutely legal to encrypt email. The freeze remains in place.

Submission + - Facebook Did Have Permission to Use Your Data for Research

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In light of the media frenzy regarding Facebook's use of user data to conduct a psychology experiment, it's worth noting that Facebook's terms of service gives Facebook the right to utilize user data for 'data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.' To use Facebook at all, users would have had to agree to this provision. Bottom line: if you don't want to be the subject of psychology experiments, read your social media terms of service.

Submission + - All big animals take the same amount of time to pee (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: An elephant’s bladder is more than 3000 times the size of a cat’s, yet the two animals take the same amount of time to urinate. Videos shot of a range of different mammals reveal that, as long as the animals are larger than 3 kilograms, they take approximately 21 seconds to empty their bladders. As an animal’s body size increases, so does the length of its urethra. Because an elephant’s urethra is longer than a cat’s, for example, gravity creates more pressure in the elephant’s urethra, pushing the urine through faster. The rule doesn’t hold for small animals like rats and bats, which take only 0.1 to 2 seconds to urinate. Their urethras are so thin that gravity doesn’t affect the flow of urine. Instead, surface tension pulls the urine through the urethra until it emerges in droplets . The researchers hope that their findings will help engineers build larger systems of pipes and reservoirs that don’t take as long to drain.

Submission + - Match.com, Mensa create dating site for geniuses (cnn.com) 2

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: For one, the elite society only takes individuals with IQ scores in the 98th percentile, meaning just 1 in 50 Americans is eligible.

  Flirting is big business in Big Apple Matchmaker: New York women are 'dumb' Gitmo detainee has Match.com profile
This exclusivity — some might say snobbery — is part of Mensa's lore. Early Mensans in Britain walked around with yellow buttons, organizational publications once referred to non-Mensa members as "Densans," and last year, a top Mensa member and tester called anyone with an IQ of 60 a "carrot."

In short, you don't always join Mensa because you think you're smart. You join to be set apart from most people, who are, as one member put it: "mundane."

But a new partnership between American Mensa and online dating giant Match.com offers a new, enticing reason to join the society of geniuses: true love.

Beginning this week, members of the brainiac group can connect through a separate, exclusive dating service called Mensa Match. In addition, Match.com members can add a special Mensa badge to their profiles, signaling a specific interest in connecting with a single person with a confirmed genius-level IQ score.

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