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Submission + - Snake eats Bird on Chatroulette (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: I got over 5,000 views (with 24 hours) for a short video I reuploaded on youtube. It shows a chatroulette session (most likely partially faked) of two girls not flashing their boobs to stop a chick from being eaten by a python.

My guess the prerecorded python clip was stopped before the chick gets eaten if the gals flashed their boobs. If they did not, the clip was run till the end and they saw the bird being eaten.

Maybe.. something similar could be done with newborn bunny rabbits and pythons.

Note that I did not promote it beyond facebook, my blog and a couple of other blogs. Most views came from people searching for that clip and forwarding it to others.

Nobody went broke by appealing to the lowest common denominator.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWvj17Rpqdo&feature=player_embedded

Submission + - Self Shots, GPS Enabled Smartphones & Data Min (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: I see a future, very soon, where you could use the cell-phone number of a girl to search for self-shot pictures of her at gray information sites. Given the decreasing cost of data storage, access, transmission and computing power combined with the increased use of smartphones, the possibilities are mind boggling.
Graphics

Submission + - Contest - Bruce Schneier seeks new TSA logo (boingboing.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: TSA Logo Contest
Over at "Ask the Pilot," Patrick Smith has a great idea:

Calling all artists: One thing TSA needs, I think, is a better logo and a snappy motto. Perhaps there's a graphic designer out there who can help with a new rendition of the agency's circular eagle-and-flag motif. I'm imagining a revised eagle, its talons clutching a box cutter and a toothpaste tube. It says "Transportation Security Administration" around the top. Below are the three simple words of the TSA mission statement: "Tedium, Weakness, Farce."
Let's do it. I'm announcing the TSA Logo Contest. Rules are simple: create a TSA logo. People are welcome to give ideas in the comments, but only actual created logos are eligible to compete. (When my website administrator wakes up, I'll ask him how we can post images in the comments.) Contest ends on February 6. Winner receives copies of my books, copies of Patrick Smith's book, an empty 12-ounce bottle labeled "saline" that you can refill and get through any TSA security checkpoint, and a fake boarding pass on any flight for any date.

EDITED TO ADD (1/6): Please leave links to your submissions in the comments, and I will add them to the post. After the contest is over, I'll choose five finalists and post them. The winner will be chosen by popular acclaim.
Privacy

Submission + - Tynt Insight is watching you cut and paste (mattbusse.com) 1

Submitted by jerryasher
jerryasher writes: In recent weeks I've noticed that when I copy and paste text from Wired and other websites, the pasted text has had the url of the original website appended to it. Cool, and utterly annoying, and how do I make that stop? Tynt Insight is a piece of Javascript that sends what you copy to Tynt's webservers and adds the backlinks. Tynt calls that a service for the site owner, many people call that a privacy invasion..

Worse, there are some reports that it sends not just what you copy, but everything you select..

And Tynt provides no opt outs. Not cookie based, not IP based, but stop it you creeps angry phone call based.

It ain't a pure useful service, and it ain't a pure privacy invasion. But I sure wish they'd go away and have had the decency to never start up in the first place. I block it on Firefox with Ghostery.
AMD

Submission + - AMD Launches Radoen HD 5670 Mainstream DX11 GPU

Submitted by Ninjakicks
Ninjakicks writes: AMD announced their new low cost, low power Radeon HD 5670 card today. As its name suggests, the ATI Radeon HD 5670 shares a number of features with its higher-end counterparts in the Radeon HD 5000 series, like Eyefinity multi-display gaming technology and full DX11 support. It's a single slot, low power card that puts up respectable frame rates at HD resolutions. It's also one of the fastest $99 graphics card available right now, which doesn't hurt if you're a gamer on a budget.

Submission + - Does your PC really need a SysRq button anymore? (pcauthority.com.au) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ever wondered what the SysRq key on your keyboard does? Lenovo has decided it's so rarely used that it has started removing the key from some new Thinkpad Edge laptops. We already know that Lenovo are something of the fastidious scientists when it comes to keyboard design. Last time they fiddled with the age-old key layout, it was after painstaking research to count exactly how many times users press the Delete and Escape keys. Now it seems another relic of computer keyboards is starting to disappear.
Mars

Submission + - Martian Microbe Fossils: Not So Debunked Anymore (popsci.com) 3

Submitted by rubycodez
rubycodez writes: Three meteorites, including one that has been in a British museum for over a century, are going to be put under the electron microscope and ion microprobe by NASA. We're "very, very close to proving there is or has been life [on Mars]," said David McKay, chief of astrobiology at Johnson Space Center.

Submission + - Imaging Atomic Orbitals (corante.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: A group at the Kharkov Institute for Physics and Technology in Kharkov, Ukraine has imaged s,p and d orbitals in carbon atoms. Their most recent work is in Physical Review B (approved Sep 03, 2009). However a previous article from the same group hints at their findings in "Field-Ion Microscopy of Quantum Oscillations of Linear Carbon Atomic Chains" NANO LETTERS, 2009, Vol. 9, No. 2, 774-778 (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/nl803399j)- look at Figure 3 and 5.

They used a technique known as 'field emission electron microscopy' in a very innovative (and technically proficient) manner.
_________________________
First Detailed Photos of Atoms

Sep 14, 2009

By Mike Lucibella & Lauren Schenkman
Inside Science News Service

WASHINGTON — For the first time, physicists have photographed the structure of an atom down to its electrons. The pictures, soon to be published in the journal Physical Review B, show the detailed images of a single carbon atom's electron cloud, taken by Ukrainian researchers at the Kharkov Institute for Physics and Technology in Kharkov, Ukraine. This is the first time scientists have been able to see an atom's internal structure directly. Since the early 1980s, researchers have been able to map out a material's atomic structure in a mathematical sense, using imaging techniques.

Quantum mechanics states that an electron doesn't exist as a single point, but spreads around the nucleus in a cloud known as an orbital. The soft blue spheres and split clouds seen in the images show two arrangements of the electrons in their orbitals in a carbon atom. The structures verify illustrations seen in thousands of chemistry books because they match established quantum mechanical predictions.

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