Just When You Thought Google Glass Couldn’t Get Creepier: New App Allows Strangers to ID You Just by Looking at You (+video)

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Photo Credit: Google Glass/FacebookHave you ever seen someone wearing Google Glass out at the bar? Like a real person at a real bar actually wearing Google Glass? If so, you know how absolutely ridiculous they look. Which may be the only factor we have that will stop this:

A new app will allow total strangers to ID you and pull up all your information, just by looking at you and scanning your face with their Google Glass. The app is called NameTag and it sounds CREEPY.

The “real-time facial recognition” software “can detect a face using the Google Glass camera, send it wirelessly to a server, compare it to millions of records, and in seconds return a match complete with a name, additional photos and social media profiles.”

The information listed could include your name, occupation, any social media profiles you have set up and whether or not you have a criminal record (“CRIMINAL HISTORY FOUND” pops up in bright red letters according to the demo).

Photo Credit: NameTag

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Harley Burial: Rider and Bike are Inseparable, Even in Death

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Columbus Dispatch, Jonathan QuilterA motorcycle-loving man’s family has fulfilled his dying wish — to be buried astride his beloved Harley-Davidson encased in a see-through casket.

But it wasn’t easy. The project required an extra-large cemetery plot to accommodate a Plexiglas casket for Billy Standley and his hulking custom-painted 1967 Electra Glide cruiser. Five embalmers worked to prepare his body with a metal back brace and straps to ensure he’ll never lose his seat.

Standley’s family said he’d been talking about it for years and liked to take people to the garage to show off the unusual casket his two sons had built for him. He told people he didn’t just want to ride off to heaven, he wanted the world to see him do it in the big see-through box.

“He was a quirky man,” daughter Dorothy Brown said. “But when it comes to us kids, he loved us, he raised us well and, of course, we wanted to help him.”

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Food in the Sky? Highrise Farming Idea Gains Ground

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Photo Credit: Yahoo

Photo Credit: Yahoo

Imagine stepping out of your highrise apartment into a sunny, plant-lined corridor, biting into an apple grown in the orchard on the fourth floor as you bid “good morning” to the farmer off to milk his cows on the fifth.

You take the lift to your office, passing the rice paddy and one of the many gardens housed in the glass edifice that not only heats and cools itself, but also captures rainwater and recirculates domestic waste as plant food.

No, this is not the setting for a futuristic movie about humans colonising a new planet.

It is the design of Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut for a 132-floor “urban farm” — the answer, he believes, to a healthier, happier future for the estimated six billion people who will live in cities by 2050.

With food, water and energy sources dwindling, the city of the future will have to be a self-sufficient “living organism”, said the 36-year-old designer of avant-garde buildings some critics have dismissed as daft or a blight on the landscape.

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Want to Get the Flu? Volunteers Sneeze for Science

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

Photo Credit: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

Forget being sneezed on: Government scientists are deliberately giving dozens of volunteers the flu by squirting the live virus straight up their noses.

It may sound bizarre, but the rare type of research is a step in the quest for better flu vaccines. It turns out that how the body fends off influenza remains something of a mystery.

“Vaccines are working, but we could do better,” said Dr. Matthew Memoli of the National Institutes of Health, who is leading the study that aims to infect up to 100 adults over the next year.

Wait a minute: Flu is sweeping the country, so why not just study the already sick? That wouldn’t let scientists measure how the immune system reacts through each step of infection, starting with that first exposure to the virus.

It’s not an experiment to be taken lightly. After all, the flu kills thousands of Americans a year. For safety, Memoli chose a dose that produces mild to moderate symptoms – and accepts only volunteers who are healthy and no older than 50.

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Doctor Offers to Trade Vasectomy for Playoff Tickets

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Photo Credit: Fort Collins Coloradoan

Photo Credit: Fort Collins Coloradoan

A Colorado doctor has an unusual offer for anyone with extra tickets to Sunday’s AFC Championship Game between the Denver Broncos and the New England Patriots: a free vasectomy.

Dr. Steven Broman of Fort Collins is offering to perform the $1,000-plus surgery in return for tickets. A long-time season-ticket holder, Broman and his family will be at Sunday’s game anyway. The extra tickets, he said, would go to his staff.

“The only people who wouldn’t have to pay me in tickets is Tom Brady, but I’d have to do the operation before the game,” Broman said, laughing.

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Woman Finds Wrong Body in Her Mother’s Casket

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Photo Credit: chris.corwin/flickr

Photo Credit: chris.corwin/flickr

A woman wants answers after discovering the wrong body in a casket that should have contained her mother, who died unexpectedly while on vacation in St. Maarten.

Lisa Kondvar, of Warwick, and her family discovered another woman’s body in the casket at a New Jersey funeral home last month. The body of her mother, Margaret Porkka, had been prepared at a funeral home on the island.

“I looked up, and I was like, `Good God, are you kidding me?’ I was stunned,” Kondvar said by telephone Friday.

The family proceeded with the wake, with the casket closed, because they discovered the mistake just before calling hours were about to begin.

The relatives believe a hospital or funeral home confused Porkka’s body with that of a Canadian woman who died on the island around the same time. They also think Porkka’s body was cremated in Ottawa.

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‘Hand of God’ Spotted by NASA Space Telescope

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Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/MCGILL

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/MCGILL

Religion and astronomy may not overlap often, but a new NASA X-ray image captures a celestial object that resembles the “Hand of God.”

The cosmic “hand of God” photo was produced when a star exploded and ejected an enormous cloud of material, which NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, glimpsed in high-energy X-rays, shown in blue in the photo. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory had imaged the green and red parts previously, using lower-energy X-rays.

“NuSTAR’s unique viewpoint, in seeing the highest-energy X-rays, is showing us well-studied objects and regions in a whole new light,” NuSTAR telescope principal investigator Fiona Harrison, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a statement.

The new image depicts a pulsar wind nebula, produced by the dense remnant of a star that exploded in a supernova. What’s left behind is a pulsar, called PSR B1509-58 (B1509 for short), which spins around 7 times per second blowing a wind of particles into material ejected during the star’s death throes.

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‘Sticky Balls’ May Stop Cancer Spreading

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Photo Credit: SPL

Photo Credit: SPL

The most dangerous and deadly stage of a tumour is when it spreads around the body.

Scientists at Cornell University, in the US, have designed nanoparticles that stay in the bloodstream and kill migrating cancer cells on contact.

They said the impact was “dramatic” but there was “a lot more work to be done”.

One of the biggest factors in life expectancy after being diagnosed with cancer is whether the tumour has spread to become a metastatic cancer.

“About 90% of cancer deaths are related to metastases,” said lead researcher Prof Michael King.

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Egyptian Puppet Allegedly Sending Coded Instructions to Islamist Terrorists (+video)

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Photo Credit: New York Times

Photo Credit: New York Times

Egypt’s crackdown on support for the Muslim Brotherhood turned surreal this week as prosecutors agreed to investigate the allegation that a puppet that babbles nonsensically in an advertisement for a multinational phone company was in fact sending coded instructions to Islamist terrorists.

Prosecutors said in a statement that officials from Vodafone Egypt, the local branch of a phone company based in Britain, were summoned to respond to a complaint about the ad filed by a counterrevolutionary video-blogger and singer who calls himself Ahmed Spider. In an appearance on Egyptian television on Tuesday, the little-known blogger spent nearly an hour dissecting what he called the secret codes embedded in the ad, in which a puppet widow named Abla Fahita tries to reactivate the phone line used by her late husband.

The ad shows the Muppet-like Abla Fahita babbling to a friend on the phone while her daughter, Karkoura, looks for her dead father’s SIM card. The company explained in a statement that the ad, first broadcast and posted on YouTube last week, was part of a marketing campaign “aiming at explaining how to reactivate a Vodafone SIM card.” The blogger’s reading, the company said, was “irrational” and based on “mere imagination.”

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2014 Rings in the Weird: New Laws Cover Placentas, ‘Transgender’ Kids, Drones and More

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

You may have heard that Colorado residents will be able to legally buy pot next year.

But did you know that in Oregon, mothers will be able to take their placentas home after giving birth? And in Illinois, it will be illegal for police to use a surveillance drone in most cases without a warrant.

These are just a few of the thousands of new laws and regulations going into effect next year — mostly on Wednesday.

They cover everything from the minimum wage to tanning beds to drones, some a bit more unusual than others. But residents might want to brush up on the changes — state lawmakers approved nearly 40,000 bills and resolutions this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The placenta measure in Oregon was approved this past May.

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