A Movie Pirate’s Rant on RAR Files
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, someone sends you a weird link that ends being strangely hilarious. This rant—recently posted by a piratebay.org user frustrated with the idiots who subdivide torrented movies into RARs—falls into that category: RAR [files] are a bitch, and vastly illogical in this context. Movies and other large files are…
Darpa’s Butterfly-Inspired Sensors Light Up at Chemical Threats
The Pentagon’s got a new game plan to detect deadly chemical threats: tiny, iridescent sensors that are designed to mimic one of nature’s most colorful creatures: Butterflies. It’s the latest in a series of Darpa-funded efforts to use insects to spot weapons. Last year, the agency tapped researchers at Agiltron Corporation to implant larvae with…
Man Scrawls World’s Biggest Message with a GPS ‘Pen’
One man drove 12,238 miles and across 30 states in the U.S. to scrawl a message that could only be viewed using Google Earth. His big shoutout: “Read Ayn Rand.” Nick Newcomen did a road trip over 30 days that covered stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. First, he identified on a map…
Citizen Scientists Discover Pulsars in Deep Space
While your computer is running idle, it could be finding new pulsars and black holes in deep space—just like the computers of three volunteers running a program called Einstein@Home. Three volunteers running the distributed computing program Einstein@Home have discovered a new pulsar in the data from the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope. Their computers, one in…
