Kraft Has a 400,000 Sq. Foot Underground Cheese Cave. UFO-Like Clouds Linked to Military Maneuvers? Three nearly identical, UFO-like cloud formations recently appeared over Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, sparking online discussions linking the features to everything from the Second Coming to recent mass bird deaths to secret military experiments.
At least one scientist believes the so-called hole-punch clouds have a military explanation, though it may not be quite what conspiracy theorists expect. On January 7, IT technician Wesley Tyler was running out to his car for a computer part when he noticed the saucer-like formations. (See other cloud pictures.) China's New Super-City Will Merge Nine Urban Centers into a Single, 16,000-Square-Mile Megatropolis. If you're going to build the world's biggest megatropolis in the world's most populous country, you don't start from scratch.
You take nine existing population centers and merge them. At least, that's the thinking behind the "Turn the Pearl River Delta Into One" initiative, which aims to do exactly that. Merging nine cities, China plans to create a 16,000-square-mile urban swath populated by 42 million people in the southeast near Hong Kong. In terms of geography, the new mega-city will be roughly twice as big as New Jersey. More than 150 infrastructure projects costing some $300 billion will link the nine cities together over the next six years, reducing redundancies and bringing nearly ten percent of China's economy under a single umbrella. "Buy A Gun" Google Queries Hit All Time High, And Other Off The Grid Economic Indicators. The Australian Floods, Before and After. Don't Worry About Those 1,000 Dead Birds that Fell From the Sky. High Water: Hottest year ends with unprecedented, “biblical” Australian floods covering an area “the size of France and Germany combined.” « Climate Progress.
By Joe Romm on January 2, 2011 at 12:19 pm "High Water: Hottest year ends with unprecedented, “biblical” Australian floods covering an area the size of France and Germany combined.
" 3-month rainfall totals for Queensland (1200 mm = 4 feet) One of the most basic predictions of climate science is that global warming will cause more intense precipitation. The Year In Illegal Downloads. Japanese Create A Mutant Mouse That Tweets Like a Bird. A laboratory at the University of Osaka running an ongoing study on evolution has revealed that they've produced a genetically engineered mouse that tweets like a bird.
Voyager 1 Arrives at the Outward Reaches of the Solar Wind, Prepares To Enter Interstellar Space. NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, now in its 33rd year on the job, has reached the very edge of our solar system and is nearing the cusp of interstellar space. How does NASA know? The wind has died down. Man Officially Cured of HIV. About:blank. Americans are now spending as many hours online as they do in front of their TV screens, according to a survey released by Forrester on Monday. The average American now spends roughly 13 hours per week using the Internet and watching TV offline, Forrester finds, based on its survey of more than 30,000 customers.
The Internet has long captivated the attention of younger Americans to a greater extent than TV and is now proving more popular to Gen X (ages 31 to 44) for the first time ever. Younger Baby Boomers (ages 45 to 54) are spending the same amount of time per week using both media. While the amount of time Americans spend watching TV has remained roughly the same in the past five years, Internet use has increased by 121% in the same time frame.
Regular Mashable readers will not be surprised to learn that Internet-connected mobile devices have aided this growth in Internet use. So what are Americans doing online? Image courtesy of Flickr, San Jose Library. The 10 Most Destructive Hacker Attacks In The Past 25 Years. From a computer virus named for a stripper to swarming botnet attacks on the Pentagon and Microsoft, The Daily Beast lists the 10 most infamous hacks, worms, and DDoS takedowns in the last 25 years. The unending cyber assault executed last week by a group of anonymous “hacktivists” instilled fear and loathing in the hearts of network administrators at some of the world’s most powerful governments and corporations. It was unprecedented in its scope—attracting thousands of amateur users willing to do battle in the name of free speech on the web.
But amongst the real hackers out there is a feeling of indifference. These “script kiddies”—as those using software to attack Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal are being called—weren’t the cyber warriors the media set them out to be, but amateur, talentless teens launching assaults with the click of a mouse. 10. 9.
The Real Da Vinci Code Discovered. The Reaction of Governments to Wikileaks Should Scare the Hell Out of You. How Secure Is Julian Assange's "Thermonuclear" Insurance File? Once your leader has been compared to a Bond villain, you might as well go all the way, right?
A few months back, Wikileaks released a giant file that's been referred to as the "thermonuclear" option, should the organization's existence be threatened: A huge compendium of some of the most damaging secrets Wikileaks has collected, protected with an intense brand of secure encryption--for use as insurance. With Assange now in police custody on sex crimes charges, the "poison pill" is on everyone's mind. The pill in question is a 1.4GB file, circulated by BitTorrent. Enzymatic Plaque Inhibitor Could Put an End to Cavities. Humans have invented all kinds of high-tech fixes to deal with plaque in the heart, but when it comes to battling tooth decay, a manual scrubbing with a bristle-brush is still our primary line of defense.
But Dutch researchers may have just bested the toothbrush by characterizing and deciphering the structure of the enzyme responsible for plaque sticking to teeth. By adding an inhibitor to toothpaste or even to the food we eat, tooth decay and cavities could soon become a rarity. Glucansucrase, the enzyme that allows bacteria to convert sugars into long, glue-like sugar chains and stick themselves to our teeth, is a close evolutionary cousin to amylase enzymes found in our saliva. iFive: Interpol Chases Assange, Twitter's Value, Blackberry OS Beats iOS, iPad Whups Kindle, Bing, Google Go Hard on Social. Iranians Furious After Finding Jewish Symbol Hidden In Plain View. Cable Viewer. Wikileaks. Chinese Telecom Company Hijacked 15 Percent of Internet. For about 18 minutes in April, a Chinese telecommunications company hijacked 15 percent of the Internet, redirecting U.S. government and military traffic through Chinese servers.
The misdirection affected NASA, all four branches of the military, the office of the Secretary of Defense and the U.S. Senate. We don't yet know what this means — the U.S. -China Economic and Security Review Commission, which released report on the incident today, says it is unclear whether it was intentional or just an accident — but at the very least, it's one more piece of disturbing evidence showing the U.S. is vulnerable to cyberattack. The hijacking was reported when it first happened, but this is the first acknowledgement that American government sites were affected.
It's not clear what happened to the data once it was rerouted through China Telecom, which is denying any hijack of Internet traffic. From the report: "This level of access could enable surveillance of specific users or sites. Banking on a Bailout. Apple Passes Microsoft to Become the World’s Biggest Tech Compan. Oil firms challenge Obama deepwater drilling ban.