Discoblog » Crime & Punishment

Go Ahead and Gossip—Science Says It’s the Right Thing to Do

Valerie Ross — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:58:36 +0000

He did what? Innnnteresting…

Thorough scientific study has revealed that lots of supposed vices can have surprising upsides: alcohol, sex, caffeine. Thanks to UC Berkeley researchers, we can now add another so-bad-but-oh-so-good habit to the list: Gossip, their new study suggests, can be a selfless act of public service.

Surreptitiously passing along the news that someone has behaved badly—what’s technically called “prosocial gossip”—can relieve stress, as well as warn others to regard the rule-breaker with a wary eye, the researchers say. (The study didn’t look directly at other forms of gossip—rumormongering, telling lies, anything said to a confessional cam on reality TV—so make of that what you will.)

In one experiment, the scientists found that people’s heart rates spiked when they saw one of two people playing a game cheating, but calmed again when they had the chance to jot a note, middle school-style, to the next competitor about what they’d seen. “Spreading information about the person whom they had seen behave badly tended to make people feel better, quieting the frustration that drove their gossip,” one of the researchers said in a statement—scientific confirmation of that scratching-a-lingering-itch feeling of relief we get from clucking our tongues ...

Say No to Chicken Pops—Buying Infected Lollipops Online Is Most Likely a Bad Idea

Douglas Main — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:42:36 +0000

Don’t lie. Don’t steal. And don’t buy lollipops allegedly mouthed by infected children peddled over the internets. Apparently the third piece of advice doesn’t go without saying; parents who don’t want to give their kids vaccines in several states have turned to Facebook to find lollipops, spit, or rags from chickenpox-ridden youngsters, according to the Associated Press. Federal prosecutor Jerry Martin warns that the practice is dangerous and illegal—it’s a federal crime to ship known pathogens across state lines. It’s also likely to fail at spreading the virus since chicken pox needs to be inhaled to infect children, according to doctors, and is dangerous, since it could spread other diseases that more readily persist in saliva like hepatitis.

One post from a Facebook group called “Find a Pox Party in Your Area” (a closed group, but with pictures of its hundreds of members) reads, ”I got a Pox Package in mail just moments ago. I have two lollipops and a wet rag and spit.” Another woman warns, “This is a federal offense to intentionally mail a contagion.” Another woman answers, “Tuck it inside a zip lock baggy and then put ...

Smartphone Apps Tell Your Friends You’ve Been Arrested, Help You Stay Calm in the Clink

Douglas Main — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:40:05 +0000

Hopefully this guy has the “I’m Getting Arrested” app.

Plan on going to #OccupyWallStreet and getting arrested? There’s an app for that! A Brooklyn programmer (abhorred by getting so much coverage in the “lame-stream” press, no doubt) has made a free android app that allows would-be arrestees to alert their friends. Beforehand, you can program in a message and recipients, who you can alert upon pushing a single button. The app is appropriately called “I’m Getting Arrested.”

Once you’re in jail, you may need help calming down (if you manage to smuggle in your phone). Look no farther than MyCalmBeat, a smartphone app that measures your heart rate and helps you establish an optimal breathing rate, or “resonant frequency.” It works by calculating the breathing rate at which your heart rate has the highest variability, which is correlated with how relaxed you feel. Stressed people, the app’s programmers say, have relatively constant rates of heart rate, which makes stress worse.

Now all we’re missing is an app that redistributes wealth and does our job for us.

Image: WarmSleepy / Flickr

Your Bare Feet Betray You, Scientists Say. So Don’t Take Off Your Shoes.

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:34:52 +0000

That’s walking dangerously—better slip on your flip-flops to avoid the cops.

Your walk is surprisingly distinctive, and it’s not just the way you waggle your fanny: it’s how your feet touch the ground. Just a few steps is enough for a program to recognize you 99% of the time, report scientists who had more than a hundred people leave their prints on sensors. The goal? Identifying people through carpet, of course. In case you can’t get to their fingerprints or retinas and so on.

The team had their subjects stroll for five steps and got their software observe how people distributed their weight over the soles of their feet. Once the software had been trained, it was able to link a set of prints to the correct individual 99.6% of the time. This in and of itself isn’t a shocker: Many studies have shown that people’s walks are good identifiers. Using camera arrays or sensors on the floor, previous researchers have trained programs to recognize individuals up to 99% of the time. But those studies never involved more than 10 or 11 people, so it wasn’t clear whether this level of accuracy was possible with a larger ...

German Prostitutes Pay Streetwalking Fee at Parking Meter-Like Machine

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:59:21 +0000

Get yer streetwalking permit here!

From 8:15 pm to 6:00 am each day, prostitution is legal in Germany, where working call girls staff brothels, sauna clubs, and other such establishments. In the city of Bonn, which, uh, “boasts” around 200 prostitutes, an average of 20 freelancers go cruising each night, picking up clients on the street and heading to garage-like structures called “consummation areas” the city put up especially for that purpose. They’ve thought of everything, those Germans!

Girls in the various brothel-like establishments have always been subject to a prostitution tax, but streetwalkers, apparently, haven’t being paying. Now, though, the city has a way to make things fair for everyone: a parking meter for prostitutes.

The meter looks just like the sidewalk ticket-dispensers you’ve probably used in numerous cities to park your car, but for about $8.70, this one dispenses a pass allowing the holder to cruise for johns all night. When the city emptied one after the first night, it yielded a haul of $375, prompting various media outlets to comment on how honorable the city’s prostitutes must be. But one has to wonder how many people just bought a ticket for the novelty and ...

5 Things You Really Don’t Want Hacked

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 12:15:45 +0000

Click here to view gallery

In Soviet Russia, ATMs Interrogate YOU

Valerie Ross — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 15:34:20 +0000

Not just the Russians: A biometric ATM in Korea

ATMs in Russia may soon be outfitted with intelligence services–style lie detection software, designed to help banks pick out consumer credit fraud—without bank employees actually having to go through the arduous business of talking to and evaluating potential cardholders.

People will be able to apply for credit cards by chatting with one of the new machines about their financial history. But these ATMs won’t just take your word for it: They come equipped with voice analysis software meant to pick out telltale signs of lying, made by a company that supplies nifty technologies to the Federal Security Service, a successor to the KGB. Even better, these new cash-and-credit dispensers are currently being developed by the country’s biggest bank, Sberbank—of which the Russian government is the majority shareholder.

To design these voice analysis programs, the company put to use hours and hour of interrogations recorded by the Russian police, in which the person being question was found to be lying. The stress of lying is thought to cause involuntary physiological changes that alter the patterns of a person’s voice. The software’s hard to fool, the company says, since, like a ...

Man Accidentally Live-Tweets Osama bin Laden Raid (No, It Wasn’t “The Rock”)

Valerie Ross — Mon, 02 May 2011 14:43:38 +0000

IT consultant Sohaib Athar was just “taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops” in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad when he described, in 140 characters or less, a helicopter hovering overhead and a “huge window shaking bang”—accidentally live-tweeting the U.S. raid that ended a decade-long manhunt and killed Osama bin Laden.

It’s clear from Athar’s tweets (@ReallyVirtual) that he had no idea what was going down—as evidenced by his reference to the “abbottabad helicopter/UFO“—but the unusual presence of helicopters and Taliban disclaimer suggested to him that whatever was happening, it “must be a complicated situation.” UFO, not so much; situation, definitely.

Nor was Athar the only one to discuss the raid on Twitter before President Obama’s announcement last night. Keith Urbahn, Donald Rumsfeld’s Chief of Staff, tweeted several hours later: “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.”

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson seems to have been among the first to know, as well. Around the same time as Urbahn, Johnson tweeted: “Just got word that will shock the world – Land of the free…home of the brave DAMN PROUD TO BE AN ...

Condé Nast or Conned Nast? Man Reels in $8M From Publisher With Single Phishy Email

Patrick Morgan — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 16:39:56 +0000

“Phishing” is the word used for the now-ubiquitous scams that try to pry money and personal information out of anybody being careless online. “Spear-phishing” is the term used for the more artful and dangerous practice of directed scams—the kind that can steal $8 million with a single email. Which is exactly what happened recently to magazine publisher Condé Nast.

It all started with an email last November from a man allegedly named Andy Surface to the accounts payable department of Condé Nast, which publishes Wired, Vogue, and many other popular magazines. The email provided a bank account number and asked Condé Nast to send its printing payments to the new account from now on. Because this new account was for Quad Graph, and Condé Nast’s printer is a company called Quad/Graphics, everything looked legitimate, which is why a company employee signed the request and began funneling payments.

By late December, the publishing company had payed Surface $8 million. But on December 30, the real Quad/Graphics asked Condé Nast why they hadn’t been paid since mid-November. So the company scrambled to reverse a $36,000 payment it was about to send ...

Watch Where You Put That Thing: Wiretapped Teddy Brings $120K Fine

Jennifer Welsh — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 21:02:26 +0000

Tap that teddy bear and pay the price: $120,000. Or at least, that’s what Dianna Divingnzzo and her father, Sam Divingnzzo, are due to pay out after being slapped with federal wiretapping charges.

The fines arose from a custody case over Divingnzzo’s daughter with ex-husband William “Duke” Lewton. After Lewton was awarded unsupervised visitation, Divingnzzo put a recorder inside her daughter’s teddy bear (cutely, if not creatively, named “Little Bear”) to document suspected physical and verbal abuse by Lewton. The recorder taped continuously, while Divingnzzo occasionally copied the files and sent them to her father for transcription.

The Little Bear plan got hairy when Divingnzzo tried to use the material to win back sole custody, explains Ars Technica:

All of this material was then turned over to Dianna’s lawyers, who submitted it to the state court and waited for a ruling on its legality. In the summer of 2008, the state judge decided that the recordings were not admissible as evidence in the custody trial, since they violated the Nebraska Telecommunications Consumer Privacy Protection Act and were therefore obtained illegally.

This also meant ...

Judge Performs Own Experiments & Rules That Pizza Is, in Fact, a Solid

Patrick Morgan — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 15:07:44 +0000

When you think of the great court cases in the past century where science meets the law, you’re probably thinking about cases like Roe v. Wade or the Scopes Monkey Trial—not Commonwealth v. Fennie. And that’s deservedly so, because this latest science-in-the-courtroom case sounds more like science meets clown: A judge passed his verdict after he methodically proved that pizza’s state of matter is indeed a solid.

It all started last October, when 20-year-old William James Fennie III apparently chucked a pizza slice at a passing car in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He then went on to resist arrest, forcing two officers to Taser him to the ground.

Now, based on the fact that Pennsylvania law clearly states that it is illegal to throw “any solid object” toward a roadway, you might think President Judge James P. MacElree’s decision was an easy one: After all, it doesn’t take a degree in pizza mechanics to conclude that pizza counts as “any solid object.” But Fennie’s attorney argued that the legal definitions are vague and pizza shouldn’t legally count as a “missile.”

This prompted Judge MacElree to undertake a high-stakes experiment, with the starting question: Is ...

The Mafia Was Wrong: You Can’t Quickly Dissolve a Body in Acid

Patrick Morgan — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 16:56:51 +0000

It’s a sad day for aspiring kingpins and Mafia godfathers–it turns out that you can’t dissolve a corpse within minutes by dunking it in sulfuric acid. If that’s not bad enough, scientists have also shown that even if you wait days, acid alone cannot fully destroy “the evidence.”

This Mafia technique of disintegrating human flesh is known as a “white shotgun” (or “lupara bianca”) murder, a term that entered public parlance in the early 1980s when police in Palermo, Sicily, discovered vats of acid in a Mafia boss’s digs. The crime leader, Filippo Marchese, had his goons kill their victims and dissolve the bodies in a room known as “the chamber of death.” But violent people tend to meet violent deaths, and Marchese was himself dissolved in acid sometime in 1982.

At this week’s meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, researchers explained that they wanted to find out whether the Mafia’s claims about sulfuric acid’s extraordinary effectiveness were true. As the forensic researchers told Science News, Mafia informants make some big claims, such as: “We put the people in acid. In 15, 20 minutes ...

In Future Surveillance States, Will Honeybees Narc on Pot Growers?

Patrick Morgan — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 17:07:09 +0000

If one London art gallery is correct in predicting the future of police surveillance, we may have to redefine the meaning of ‘sting’ operation: one artist’s mock-interview with a (fake) beekeeping police officer describes how bees can be used to track down growers of illegal plants–and the scary thing is that this art video is only a hop and a skip from reality.

An exhibition called “High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture” at London’s Wellcome Collection features a short film by artist Thomas Thwaites, entitled “Policing Genes,” in which a mock police officer explains the latest in surveillance trickery. Essentially, the police officers tend bee hives, and when the bees return from their daily pollen-hunt, the officers not only check the bees for pollen from such plants as marijuana, but can also use software to decode the dance of the honeybee. And since pollen-laden bees dance to tell the other bees where they found the pollen, decoding the dance would tell the police the exact location of the illegal plants.

As the officer says in the video, using bees allows the police to ...

Feeling Guilty? Just Give Yourself a Little Pain…

Patrick Morgan — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:47:33 +0000

It turns out self-flagellating medieval monks had it right (sort of): there’s nothing like good, old-fashioned, self-inflicted pain to cleanse your conscience, according to the latest research.

Researchers at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, led by psychologist Brock Bastian, wanted to see whether feelings of guilt diminish with pain. To test this, they split a group of 62 volunteers into three groups and asked two of the groups to write about a scenario in which they rejected another person; the control group was asked to write about a non-guilt-ridden encounter. After assessing their guilt via a questionnaire, they had some volunteers dip their hands in warm water and others to dip their hands in ice water. Finally, the researchers assessed the subjects’ guilt levels once again, as well as their self-reported pain levels. As New Scientist reports:

Participants who had written about rejecting another left their hands in the ice bucket for longer than those who had written about a normal interaction. They also reported more pain – regardless of how long their hand was in the ice. Crucially, participants who placed their hand in ice later had less than half as much ...

Newsflash for Chatroulette Flashers: Your Days Are Numbered

Patrick Morgan — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 18:06:12 +0000

Online flashers could soon be out of a hobby, thanks to a team of software engineers from the University of Colorado and McGill University. The team is developing a system called SafeVchat, which is meant to detect and filter out obscene images, foiling even the fastest of flashers.

The team tested their algorithms at Chatroulette, the infamous online video-chat service that lets you communicate with randomly-selected strangers, and the results looked good.

As you can probably guess, the problem with seeing video images of random strangers is that some of these people are all-too-eager to show off their flesh. Despite the age restrictions on some video-chat sites and the noble-yet-feeble first attempts at creating filtering software, flashers still peddle their wares with ease and have seemed as unstoppable as a bad rash.

But not for long. Enter the engineers.

With SafeVchat, Xingu Ying and his research team have created algorithms that monitor the harbingers of flashing, and wipe away the video output whenever it detects too much flesh. As New Scientist reports:

First, they detect facial features – eyes, nose and mouth – in the video because many “misbehaving ...

How to Repel Pirates? Blast Them With a Laser Cannon

Eliza Strickland — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 18:03:18 +0000

A shaft of green laser light spears out from a cargo ship, targeting a small skiff bobbing in the ocean almost a mile away. The armed miscreants aboard the skiff take one look at the dazzling light and shield their eyes with cries of distress. How can these pirates attack if they can’t see?

That’s the idea behind an anti-pirate laser cannon being developed by a UK defense company in response to the increase in hijackings off the coast of Somalia. The laser would be used in conjunction with ships’ high-frequency surface radars that detect the small vessels used by Somali pirates, and it would function as a kind of warning shot across their bow. New Scientist reports that the laser isn’t intended to fry pirates to a crisp, nor even to blind them forever:

“This is very much a non-lethal weapon,” says Bryan Hore of BAE Systems in Farnborough, UK, where the system was developed. By taking into account the range of the target, as well as the atmospheric conditions, the system can automatically regulate the intensity of the laser beam to ensure there is no ...

Power Balance: Our Product Is Backed by “No Credible Scientific Evidence”

Jennifer Welsh — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 23:07:42 +0000

In a completely shocking and unexpected turn of events, the company behind Power Balance wristbands has officially admitted that the product isn’t backed by any scientific studies–and that the company’s advertisements were misleading. And right after the holographic technology to improve “balance, strength and energy” was named CNBC’s Sports Product of 2010!

Did you catch that? That was sarcasm. And while we here at DISCOVER may have our own opinions, the product was endorsed by SHAQ (whose name is also spelled in all caps). SHAQ, how could you lie to us after we supported you through the Kazaam! days?

Power Balance claims that the holograms (which are exactly like the ones in your credit cards) embedded in their wristbands or pendants have some sort of “energy flow” which can be manipulated to “resonate” with the body’s natural “energy flow.” In quotes in the Daily Mail, Power Balance co-founder Josh Rodarmel explains how they “work”:

“Everything in nature has a set frequency. The body has a frequency and things which cause negativity to the human body – ...

Husband Caught Spying on Wife’s Email Charged With Hacking

Andrew Moseman — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:28:33 +0000

Checking your wife’s email to see if she’s cheating on you: It definitely makes you a snoop, and possibly a bad husband. But a hacker?

That’s the label prosecutors are trying to lay on Leon Walker, charging the 33-year-old man with breaking a statute that’s more normally applied to people who want to steal your credit card numbers or your identity rather than prove your infidelity. From the Detroit Free Press:

Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper defended her decision to charge Leon Walker. “The guy is a hacker,” Cooper said in a voice mail response to the Free Press last week. “It was password protected, he had wonderful skills, and was highly trained. Then he downloaded them and used them in a very contentious way.”

Mr. Walker is indeed a computer technician, but his defense rests on arguing that his wife had no expectation of privacy because he used the computer in question for work—it wasn’t hers alone. Furthermore, he says, she kept her passwords in a notebook next to the computer (Public service announcement: Don’t ever do this).

Those details will probably end up as a he said-she said ...

GM Recycles Oil-Soaked Booms From BP Spill Into Parts for Chevy Volt

Jennifer Welsh — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 21:00:54 +0000

The Chevy Volt is taking aim at the green market. Not only did it nab the 2010 green car of the year award, but it’s also helping to clean up the mess that big oil company BP made in the Gulf of Mexico.

GM is recycling 10,000 pounds of oil-soaked booms from the gulf into parts for the Volt. Instead of sending the booms to landfills, their absorbent polypropylene (which bears plastic-recycling #5) filler will be cleaned and recycled, GM said in the press release:

“This was purely a matter of helping out,” said John Bradburn, manager of GM’s waste-reduction efforts. “If sent to a landfill, these materials would have taken hundreds of years to begin to break down, and we didn’t want to see the spill further impact the environment. We knew we could identify a beneficial reuse of this material given our experience.”

The used booms will be resurrected as an auto part that deflects air from the radiator; boom material will make up 25 percent of the part, with 25 percent coming from recycled tires and the ...

Are Gun-Toting Climate Skeptics Taking Pot Shots at Wind Turbines?

Jennifer Welsh — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 18:01:46 +0000

It seems wind turbines aren’t just stirring up energy, but a fair bit of emotion, too. And when that emotion comes in the form of gunshots, it makes the news.

In early December someone sabotaged poor wind turbine number 8 in a wind farm in Bingham township, Michigan by taking out its transformer. The Huron Daily Tribune reports:

A hole found in the transformer’s radiator resulted in damage, which caused oil to leak out. The exact amount of damage to the $50,000 transformer was not reported. The hole in the transformer, according to police, appears to be from a small caliber firearm…. Huron County Sheriff Kelly J. Hanson said the damage to the transformer appears to be “intentional sabotage.”

The hole in the wind turbine’s transformer caused it to break down, which resulted in the turbine overheating and automatically shutting down. The shooter remains on the lam, and his motives are not clear, says Treehugger:

We can’t be sure that the shots fired near Ubly, Michigan, were indeed by a wind power opponent, or coal lover. Maybe ...

Year’s Best Peer Review Comments: Papers That “Suck the Will to Live”

Jennifer Welsh — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 15:29:29 +0000

Peer review: love it or hate it, it’s an integral part of every scientist’s life. The reviews are usually kept secret, but the editors over at Environmental Microbiology like to give a little back during the holidays, and have gifted the internet with a list of some of their favorite quotes from peer reviews done this year:

Our referees, the Editorial Board Members and ad hoc reviewers, are busy, serious individuals who give selflessly of their precious time to improve manuscripts submitted to Environmental Microbiology. But, once in a while, their humour (or admiration) gets the better of them. Here are some quotes from reviews made over the past year, just in time for the Season of Goodwill and Merriment.

Here are some of our favorite catty reviewer quotes from this year’s list:

This paper is desperate. Please reject it completely and then block the author’s email ID so they can’t use the online system in future. The biggest problem with this manuscript, which has nearly sucked the will to live out of me, ...

Canadian Internet Users: Link to This Post at Your Own Risk

Jennifer Welsh — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 18:05:21 +0000

A lawsuit by Vancouver businessman Wayne Crooke might just break Canada’s Internet.

Crooke is suing the publisher of a site called p2pnet for a post about free speech in Canada, written in response to a libel lawsuit brought by Crooke. In the post, publisher Jon Newton linked to the allegedly libelous articles. Crooke asked him to remove the links, but Newton refused, so Crooke accused him of defamation.

If Newton loses in court, anyone who shares a libelous (whether they know it or not) link over the Internet would be guilty of libel themselves, a ruling that would essentially shut down the Internet, Newton explained to Ars Technica:

“If I lose there won’t BE an Internet in Canada,” Jon Newton wrote me this morning as he prepared to step aboard a Vancouver Island seaplane. “Just a shadow.”

The case has been dragging on for years, since the blog post went up in 2006. After Crooke lost in British Columbia court and in his provincial appeal, he successfully appealed his case to the Supreme Court of Canada, a trial that is starting ...

What Does Your City Smell Like? DARPA Wants to Know

Jennifer Welsh — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 18:05:33 +0000

How could the government know about a chemical attack before it wreaks havoc? By smelling it.

But the problem is, to detect an abnormal stench, the government first needs to know the city’s normal aroma, to have an idea of its “chemical profile.” To that effect, DARPA just released a solicitation looking for suggestions on how to best build chemical composition maps of major United States cities. Spencer Ackerman over at Wired’s Danger Room t0ok a look at the solicitation and explained what DARPA is looking for:

The data Darpa wants collected will include “chemical, meteorological and topographical data” from at least 10 “local urban sources,” including “residences, gasoline stations, restaurants and dry cleaning stores that have particular patterns of emissions throughout the day.”

Then, subsequent chemical readings from the area could be compared to the “map” to check for abnormal chemicals in the air. Since many chemicals that can be used in a terrorist attacks are normally found around our cities, it’s difficult to just screen for them without having an idea of their baseline levels, ...

DOGS AWAY! Pups Go Parachuting to Sniff out the Taliban

Jennifer Welsh — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 21:02:34 +0000

Man’s best friend can also be man’s best tandem parachuting partner. The Guardian reports that UK forces have been sending Taliban-hunting dogs into Afghanistan.

Dogs have been used previously by American and Austrian paratroopers, which sheds some light on how the British might be using their pups, says Wired:

SAS pooches are trained for High Altitude High Opening (HAHO) jumps, in which parachutes are deployed at a high altitude and long horizontal distance away from a target location in order to allow jumpers to glide in without detection.

The dogs and their handlers jump from planes at 25,000 feet up and from as far as 20 miles away. Since they initially drop through a low-oxygen environment, the dogs need to be given oxygen through special masks. Reports in The Times from handlers say that the dogs enjoy the ride:

“Dogs don’t perceive height difference, so that doesn’t worry them. They’re more likely to be bothered by the roar of the engines, but once we’re on the way down, that doesn’t matter ...

Beware, Bomb-Makers: This Worm Has Your Number

Eliza Strickland — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 18:41:47 +0000

By Rose Eveleth

Bomb squads have long used metal detectors, x-ray machines, and dogs to uncover threats. Without these tools, authorities may not have intercepted some of the thirteen homemade explosives that froze Greece’s outgoing mail earlier this week. But soon they may have a new tool to help find the bad guys and their bombs: microscopic worms.

In a paper published last month, researchers at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization described the effectiveness of Caenorhabditis elegans–a millimeter-long, mud-loving nematode–in detecting chemicals associated with explosives. If they’re right, bomb detection could get cheaper and easier. But not everyone is convinced.

This nematodes isn’t the first organism investigated for its keen sense of smell. Dogs, rats, pigs, cows, insects, bacteria, and even plants have been used to find explosives. So far, nothing has worked as well as the trusty canine snout.

But according to lead researcher Stephen Trowell, a machine that uses his worms could surpass all these in sensitivity. “All signs are that it’s as good as it gets,” he said.

The nematodes smell chemicals like nitroglyceride and cyclohexanone—both found in the air around homemade C4 explosives—through tiny scent ...

Happy Meal Set to Become a Sad Meal in San Francisco

Jennifer Welsh — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 16:04:02 +0000

A decision made Tuesday by San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors may make little kids (and probably some adults) cry. With an un-vetoable vote of 8 to 3, the board banned restaurant chains like McDonald’s and Burger King from giving out toys with “unhealthy” happy meals within San Francisco’s city limits.

The decision is preliminary and will be followed up by a second debate and vote on Tuesday, November 9.

Under the proposed rule, meals deemed healthy can still be packed with action figures. To meet the city’s “healthy” standard a kid’s meal must contain fewer than 640 milligrams of sodium and 600 calories, and under 35 percent of those calories can come from fat. It also has to include a serving of fruit or vegetable with each meal and meet a number of other requirements (pdf).

The majority of McDonald’s Happy Meal options don’t meet these standards, including ALL of the cheeseburger options and any meal with fries. McDonald’s spokesperson told The New York Times they don’t agree with the Supervisors’ stance:

McDonald’s called the bill misguided. “It’s not what our customers ...

iPhone Alarm Bug Gave Thousands of Europeans an Excuse to Sleep in

Jennifer Welsh — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:13:33 +0000

A glitch in the iPhone’s alarm software gave many Europeans an extra dose of sleep this morning, when their alarms went off an hour later than expected.

While the time on the phone correctly “fell backward” with Europe’s scheduled switch from daylight saving time, because of a software bug the alarm function didn’t recognize the switch, and all recurring alarms went off an hour later than intended. Frustrated iPhone users took to twitter, said the Daily Mail:

Users of Twitter were also quick to make jokes at Apple’s expense today. Garrettc wrote: ‘Daddy, do you remember where you were during the great iPhone alarm calamity of 2010?’ ‘No son, I was asleep’

Siobhan-83 wrote: ‘Ben’s iPhone alarm didn’t go off this morning, used it as an opportunity to tell him younger, newer models aren’t always the better option.’

And Jamiei said: ‘A whole hour of peace and quiet in the office this morning without any iPhone users courtesy of Apple.’

Hilariously, the bug was discovered a month ago when the exact opposite thing happened in Australia and New Zealand following their “spring forward” daylight switch–everyone got ...

To Catch Hamburglars, McDonald’s Installs DNA-Spraying Security System

Eliza Strickland — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 15:49:21 +0000

A McDonald’s in the Dutch city of Rotterdam has decided to crack down on burglaries with a high-tech security system previously used in the city’s jewelry stores. To catch anyone who makes off with the cash from the till (or a bag of Big Macs), the store’s managers installed a device that stealthily sprays synthetic DNA on the thief.

The system involves a small, strategically placed orange box that shoots out synthetic DNA when an employee pulls an unusual trigger: Removing a €10 bill from a special bill clip behind the counter not only activates the device, it also alerts the police that a robbery is in progress. The synthetic DNA spray is visible under ultraviolet light and contains markers that are unique to that location’s device, allowing police to match a suspect with the locale.

The security-conscious McDonald’s advertises the presence of its system with a sign on the door reading, “You Steal, You’re Marked.” The New York Times explains that the effect of the device is, well, subtle:

The police acknowledge that they have yet to make an arrest based on the DNA mist, which was developed ...

Does a 200-Year-Old Gourd Contain the Blood of a Beheaded King?

Jennifer Welsh — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 16:27:42 +0000

Dried blood on a handkerchief, a $700,000 gourd and one dead king. A forensic murder mystery?

Nope, just another genetics paper. I mean, it is gourd season, what did you expect?

The dead king in question is Louis XVI (the last of the French kings), who was ceremoniously beheaded on January 21st, 1793. After the beheading, attendees rushed the stage and dipped their handkerchiefs in the royal blood.

Over two hundred years later, some of that blood may have been found–dried to the inside of a decorative gunpowder gourd. The story goes that one of the attendees rushed home and stuffed the bloody handkerchief into the gourd for safekeeping.

In a study published in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics, researchers analyzed some of the dried blood scraped from the inside of the gourd to find out if it really could be the king’s blood. They checked the Y chromosome to see if the blood-donor was male, and checked for the presence of a blue-eye gene, HERC2. The blood was indeed from the correct time period and belonged to a blue-eyed male–so far, the evidence fits the blue-eyed king. More ...

2 Ways to Keep an Eye on Illegal Logging: Watch on Tiger-Cam; Bug the Trees

Jennifer Welsh — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 21:24:18 +0000

Motion-activated cameras have been used to catch bad nannies and adulterers for years. But in the forest, a high-tech, heat-detecting nannycam has caught video not just of the rare tigers that were its intended targets, but also of some unexpected forest-dwellers: illegal loggers.

In the video to the right, you can see a rare Sumatran tiger (one of only 400 left in Indonesia) strolling up to the forest spy camera and saying hello in Indonesia’s Riau Province. Seven days later a beast of a very different kind awakens the camera: a bulldozer leveling the forest.

The next day, another tiger passes by the spot, across the front of the clear-cut forest. The forests are being cleared for palm oil plantations, according to the WWF:

“Because of its status, both as a protected area and limited production forest, the area cannot be developed as a palm oil plantation, therefore any forest clearance, including bulldozing activities to clear the path, strongly indicates this excavation was illegal,” said Ian Kosasih, director of WWF-Indonesia’s forest and species program.

The forest in this area, called Bukit Batabuh, is protected because it serves as a corridor between two wildlife parks. Continued bulldozing in this area is ...