New Stealth Clothing Line Hides Wearer from Drones

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Surveillance cameras are ubiquitous, especially in the U.K.. and in the United States, Congress has already approved the use of drones for domestic surveillance. Then there’s the “Stingray” tool used by the FBI to track cell phones. It’s enough to make even those who’ve gotten nothing hide feel nervous.

New York-based artist Adam Harvey doesn’t like it one bit. So he’s taken it upon himself to design anti-surveillance clothing to foil government snoopers.

Harvey has been looking at the effects of such surveillance on culture for some time. Last year he designed a kind of face makeup called CVDazzle to avert face-recognition software.

In the spirit of fooling cameras – and messing with surveillance – Harvey has now come out in a set of hoodies and scarves that block thermal radiation from the infrared scanners drones use. Wearing the fabric would make that part of the body look black to a drone, so the image would appear like disembodied legs. He also designed a pouch for cell phones that shields them from trackers by blocking the radio signals the phone emits. For those airport X-ray machines, he has a shirt with a printed design that blocks the radiation from one’s heart.

The materials the clothes are made are specialized and expensive, so these aren’t the kinds of fashions that the local discount store will have – at least not yet. Harvey does plan to offer the clothes for sale, though.

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Florida Creep Pleads Guilty To Enema Tampering

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A Florida man faces upwards of 10 years in federal prison after pleading guilty this week to a revolting product tampering scheme in which he returned used enemas to the CVS pharmacy where he purchased the items.

Ronald Robinson, 35, entered his guilty plea to a single felony tampering charge during an appearance Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Jacksonville. A sentencing date has not been set for Robinson, who has been jailed since last year.

As detailed by prosecutors in a January 16 court filing, Robinson’s tampering occurred between April and June 2012 and involved his repeated purchase of enemas (six to a box) from a CVS in Jacksonville.

After using the enemas, Robinson (seen in the above mug shot) placed them back into their boxes, resealed the containers, and returned the products for refunds. The used enemas were then reshelved by CVS workers and later sold to other customers.

Robinson was collared after a CVS employee became suspicious about the frequency with which he was returning enema packages. On one occasion, Robinson told the worker that he had purchased the enemas for his mother, but “she no longer needed them,” according to a Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office report. When the worker examined the returned box, he “observed that all the enemas were used” and that the bottom of the package had been “re-glued…so that it appeared that it had not been opened.”

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Static Electricity May Be Key to Predicting Earthquakes

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A rise in static electricity below the ground could be a reliable indicator that an earthquake is imminent, say scientists who are now launching an experiment to predict quakes well in time to save thousands of lives.

Tom Bleier, a satellite engineer with QuakeFinder, has spent millions of dollars putting specialist measuring equipment – magnetometers – along fault lines in California, Peru, Taiwan, and Greece, the ‘Daily Mail’ reported.

The instruments are sensitive enough to detect magnetic pulses from electrical discharges up to 16 kilometres away, which could give people enough time to get to safety before a quake strikes. Scientists’ theory is that, when an earthquake looms, activity below ground goes through a ‘strange change’, producing intense electrical currents.

“These currents are huge,” Bleier said at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. “They’re on the order of 100,000 amperes for a magnitude 6 earthquake and a million amperes for a magnitude 7. It’s almost like lightning, underground,” Bleier added.

“In a typical day along the San Andreas fault, you might see ten pulses per day. The fault is always moving, grinding, snapping, and crackling,” he told National Geographic News. Before a large earthquake, that background level of static-electricity discharges should rise sharply, Bleier said.

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Video: Deaf Bulldog Dancing to the Vibrations of his Master’s Blues Guitar

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Just because you’re deaf doesn’t mean you can’t have soul.

Which is what Jamynne Bowle’s English bulldog demonstrates when the deaf pooch feels the blues in this adorable viral video.

Bowle’s footage shows her dog rocking back and forth in time to the twelve-bar blues a friend chugs out on their acoustic guitar.

See video below:

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3D Systems’ Outsized Machine Does Multicolor Prints as Big as Your Head

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3D Systems, the industrial 3-D printing giant, is expanding its desktop line of printers with the oversized, multicolor-printing CubeX printers.

The printers, announced today at CES, promise an oversized print platform that can output objects up to 10.8″ x 10.45″ x 9.5″, more than twice the build volume of printers from other manufacturers such as the Makerbot Replicator 2. The line offers from one to three print heads to allow for colorful printouts, although information about the ability to blend the filaments into additional colors was not released.

CubeX appears to be based on 3D Systems’ 3DTouch series of printers, but with various upgrades. In addition to a modified chassis and larger print area, previously only available on the single- and double-head 3DTouch printer, the new machines also use the proprietary smart cartridges 3D Systems uses with entry-level Cube printers, rather than the more common standard spools of filament. These spools trade accessibility for a moisture-inhibiting system that is said to increase shelf life.

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College Students More Narcissistic Than Ever?

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The average college student thinks he possesses above average intelligence, drive, and leadership qualities, according to a new study that shows narcissism among young people is at a 50-year high.

The American Freshman Survey, which is published yearly by the Higher Education Research Institution at UCLA, depicts an upward trend in the self-confidence levels of college students since 1966. Over 70 percent of freshman responded that they are more driven than their peers, while over 60 percent thought they were more intelligent and made better leaders than the average student.

But students’ views of themselves are at odds with the facts, according Dr. Jean Twenge, a psychologist and author of the book “Generation Me.”

“Our culture now emphasizes feeling good almost as much as actual success,” she wrote in an email to The Daily Caller News Foundation.

In recent years, respondents showed increasing confidence in their writing abilities. Yet objective measures show that freshmen scored better in writing in the 1960s, when their self-confidence was much lower.

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Drunk Passenger Taped to Seat, Gagged by Flight Crew

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A boozed-up traveler on a Kennedy Airport-bound flight was turned into a tape mummy yesterday by fellow passengers who gagged him and bound him to his seat when they got fed up with his drunken shenanigans.

The passenger, who was on a trip from Iceland, “drank all of his duty-free liquor on the flight,” tried to “choke the woman next to him” and was “screaming the plane was going to crash,” according to passenger Andy Ellwood, who snapped the man’s photo and posted it to his blog.

The meltdown — in which the man also spat on several passengers — began when there were about two hours left on the flight, according to Icelandic news outlet Mbl.is.

He was arrested at JFK after spending the flight’s last two hours with his mouth covered, hands tied behind his back and torso bound to his chair with tape. The man’s name has not been released.

Bizarrely, federal prosecutors declined to prosecute the menace because passengers wouldn’t come forward to detail the man’s threatening behavior to authorities, a source told The Post.

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Video: Life-Size Flying RC Superman Startles Southern California Beach Goers

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A life-size model Superman has been flying up and down southern California’s coast line, startling beach goers.


The nearly-adult sized custom-made Superman looks surprisingly lifelike as it flies a through the air.

It is apparently a remote controlled-craft that has ingeniously hidden a propeller somewhere in the model.

To keep it aloft and rigid, it was likely handcrafted from ultralight materials.

At the end of the video, the model rockets nearly straight up.

Take a look at the fascinating video:

Beware of Years That End in 13

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Before this one, the last year that ended in “13” turned out to be one of the unluckiest in American political history. Now comes word from astronomers that a recently discovered comet is heading our way in 2013, predicted by some to blaze ten times brighter than a full moon. If you’re afflicted with triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13), or if you believe the old myth that a comet is a bad omen, you’re already looking forward to 2014.

I’m not superstitious, but I earnestly hope 2013 doesn’t bring us anything as calamitous as 1913 did. It was a disastrous year that we’re still paying a hefty, annual price for a full century later.

The presidential election of 1912 featured three main contenders: Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat; William Howard Taft, the Republican incumbent; and former president Theodore Roosevelt, the candidate of the Progressive (or “Bull Moose”) Party. Teddy remains an overrated politician, but he was a colorful and commanding figure whose daughter Alice summed him up well: “My father always wanted to be the baby at every christening, the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral.” His vanity and animosity for Taft handed the election of 1912 to Wilson, arguably the worst president of the 44 who have held the office. His first of two dreadful terms commenced in March 1913.

Wilson’s racism and philandering are now legendary among serious historians. As president of Princeton University, he barred blacks from the campus. As President of the United States, he ordered the segregation of all departments within the executive branch and appointed ardent segregationists to high positions. He covered up his adulterous affairs while posturing as a man of personal integrity. He led us into a major war he had promised to avoid, then campaigned for a peace treaty that all but guaranteed the next great conflict. He locked up political dissidents right and left as he trampled on the Constitution’s guarantees of speech, assembly, and press freedoms. His wartime economic controls were hideously stupid and counterproductive.

1913 would rank as an unlucky year if all that had happened was Wilson’s ascendancy to the presidency. Three things he helped give us that year, however, make it unforgettable in the most pejorative sense: the income tax, the direct election of U.S. senators, and the Federal Reserve System.

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Study Suggests Lower Mortality Risk for People Deemed to Be Overweight

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A century ago, Elsie Scheel was the perfect woman. So said a 1912 article in The New York Times about how Miss Scheel, 24, was chosen by the “medical examiner of the 400 ‘co-eds’ ” at Cornell University as a woman “whose very presence bespeaks perfect health.”

Miss Scheel, however, was hardly model-thin. At 5-foot-7 and 171 pounds, she would, by today’s medical standards, be clearly overweight. (Her body mass index was 27; 25 to 29.9 is overweight.)

But a new report suggests that Miss Scheel may have been onto something. The report on nearly three million people found that those whose B.M.I. ranked them as overweight had less risk of dying than people of normal weight. And while obese people had a greater mortality risk over all, those at the lowest obesity level (B.M.I. of 30 to 34.9) were not more likely to die than normal-weight people.

The report, although not the first to suggest this relationship between B.M.I. and mortality, is by far the largest and most carefully done, analyzing nearly 100 studies, experts said.

But don’t scrap those New Year’s weight-loss resolutions and start gorging on fried Belgian waffles or triple cheeseburgers.

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