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$900 Million Spent Yearly to Treat Deadly Chagas Disease

2013-02-12T13:01:39-07:00

It turns out that a rather obscure disease is responsible for costing the American economy more than other common illnesses each year. This disease is called Chagas. An illness like Lyme disease which is rather well known in the US costs the economy 2.5 billion a year according to a study done in 1998. Not lagging far behind is Chagas costing the economy 900 million a year. Chagas is also responsible for about 7 billion a year being spent throughout the world on treatment while less than 5 billion is spent on cervical cancer. Just what is Chagas disease to begin with If you re an American living in the northern states it s likely you ve never encountered the word. Chagas is caused by a ...

Fracking: A Godsend or Another Way to Foul Up the Food Supply?

2013-02-04T13:58:57-07:00

To some people the concept of fracking is a blessing and is seen as a great way to keep the nation s fuel coming. Fracking is merely hydraulic fracturing of rock formations in order to extract natural gas. Many people policymakers included are very happy that scientists have discovered a way to drive gas prices down. The problem is that fracking uses fluid with chemicals in it to extract the natural gas. In the process any water exposed to these chemicals becomes polluted. The pollution of the water in these areas is significant because it can affect the crops grown using aforementioned water. It can also affect any animals who happen to drink the water and in turn any humans who consume these animals. While this negative connection between fracking and...

A 3D Printer is Being Used to Print a House

2013-01-24T19:23:14-07:00

A real house printed from a real printer Yes you read that right. The Dutch architecture studio Universe Architecture is putting this idea into action. The house they are planning to print will be the first of its kind and will actually be able to be inhabited. This development could lead to a myriad of possibilities for the future of architecture as well as the way we view building technology in general. The printer responsible for making this concept a reality is the D Shape which is a free form printer that is capable of producing buildings. Similarly to how a regular printer operates on paper the D Shape strains a binder on a layer of sand. The D Shape can turn sand dust or gravel into a compacted state....

Bringing a Neanderthal Baby into the World

2013-01-22T13:44:10-07:00

Fifty eight year old pioneer of genomics and synthetic biology George Church has revealed that he is very close to being able to clone a Neanderthal baby. In case you ve forgotten Neanderthals are Pleistocene era humanoids that have been extinct for over 30 000 years. Church claims to have extracted enough DNA from fossils that he can bring this idea to fruition. All he says he needs is an adventurous female human to act as a surrogate mother which means the woman would carry the child until it s ready to be born. One of the problems with this idea is that Neanderthal babies have more elongated heads than human babies. In the past Neanderthal women had wider birth canals as a result. A female human s body may not be...

North-Korea Launches Satellite into Orbit, it Goes Out of Control

2012-12-14T18:18:20-07:00

So North Korea has managed to get a satellite into orbit. There is a North Korean satellite orbiting above the world right now. Let that sink in for a moment. That s one hell of an achievement for any nation and something that most countries can t claim. Its been confirmed to be up there by many different sources including our own government. Of course things didn t go completely to plan. North Korea s first satellite is not spinning erratically out of control and it is now believed to be quite the hazard to other satellites. People are worried that 1 it might accidentally collide with another satellite or 2 it will tear itself apart leaving millions of deadly little pieces...

Republican Document Slams Copyright Law, Promptly gets Redacted

2012-11-20T18:27:29-07:00

What happens when your party releases a document that lambasts one of your staunchest supporters You redact it of course That s what happened earlier this week with the Republicans. An 8 page document titled Three Myths About Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix It was released by the Republican Study Committee the House s Republican caucus tackled the issue of copyright law. and it didn t tow the usual party line. The document was partly a lesson on what copyright was originally intended to be and part a skewering criticism of the current legal structure. It started off by mentioning that copyright law was originally a method to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts. The original...

Oil Platform off the Coast of Louisiana Explodes

2012-11-17T13:04:01-07:00

With the memory of the Deep Water Horizon disaster still fresh in our memory and BP just taking a plea bargain with the US government making them criminally responsible for the incident comes the news of another oil platform explosion. While it doesn t seem to be as severe as the Deepwater Horizon incident was people are dead and this is a tragedy. The platform caught fire earlier this morning. 11 people were airlifted off of the platform but already 2 of the presumed 28 person crew are dead and 4 more injured. Two more are still missing in the water hours later. Apparently they leapt off of the platform when it caught fire. The fire is out now. ...

Next Star Wars Movie to be Penned by 'Toy Story 3' Writer Michael Arndt

2012-11-10T15:08:31-07:00

Good news for Star Wars fans it looks like Disney plans on treating the franchise well. We now know that writer Michael Arndt is doing the script for the new move a good sign considering that his previous credits include Toy Story 3 and Little Miss Sunshine. If anyone can tackle a heartwarming slightly classical script for a movie equally about adventure and magic it would be the man that brought us Toy Story 3. It was only last month that Disney purchased Lucasfilm for 4.05 billion and already Disney is discussing development ideas with a confirmed script writer. Now its true we already know a lot of what would be in a Star Wars Episode VII. The territory has already been covered...

Despite not being Out, The Hobbit Already Outselling Twilight, Skyfall

2012-11-10T15:08:04-07:00

Score one for the good guys despite ticket preorder sales just opening up The Hobbit is already raking in more money each day than the new James Bond move Skyfall or the new Twilight movie Breaking Dawn . The prequel to the Lord of the Rings is looking like it is going to be an enormous success and probably cement the Lord of the Rings series as one of cinema s greatest series. Tickets went on sale last Wednesday and on that day 33% of Fandago s ticket sales were for The Hobbit . That is more than any other movie in theatre right now including two major installments in major series. Now it is true that Breaking...

Ever seen a Parrot Making Tools? Now you have.

2012-11-07T17:53:28-07:00

So the faculty for tool use might just be more widespread than we though. We knew that we could use tools and so could monkeys. Crows have been observed using tools as have dolphins. But apparently now even parrots are capable of using tools as evidenced by a video showing one doing just that. The bird s name is Fiargo and he is in captivity. Unlike most discoveries about this kind of thing no scientists were watching when he started using tools. He just did one day and a caretaker caught him doing it. He was simply playing with a stone when he accidentally dropped it behind a piece of metal he couldn t reach into. When he discovered this...

Voting Machine Changes Vote for Obama to One for Mitt Romney

2012-11-06T17:45:49-07:00

Every election cycle there are swaths of complaints about irregular voting practices and voter fraud. This time though there is tangible proof that at least a few voting machines are doing something a little creepy. A software engineer in Massachusetts recorded a video of his voting machine switching an Obama vote to a Romney vote. Every time he tapped the button it would select Mitt Romney instead of Barack Obama. Being a software engineer he decided to test the machine selecting other candidates to see if it was an isolated problem. It was. He could select Mitt Romney fine as well as other candidates. But whenever he selected Obama the vote would default to Romney. Worse the election official at the...

Victoria Secret Saved the 69th Regiment of the National Guard

2012-11-03T17:28:56-06:00

Say what you will about the lingerie maker when times are tough they are willing to lend a helping hand. Each year for the last three years Victoria Secret has held a fashion show at 69th Regiment s armory. It was preparing to do so this year right up until the moment the hurricane hit. Then the lights went out internet connections went down and the whole city went to hell. Fortunately in order to produce the show Victoria Secret had dragged eight massive generators to the armory. And the producers were more than willing to let the generators power up the regiment s recovery efforts. It took a bit of work but eventually electricians were able to wire the generators...

Virginia Citizen Charged $1.5 million for Downloading 10 Movies

2012-11-02T12:46:51-06:00

Do you use Bit Torrent to download pᴏrn Perhaps its time to move on to more legally sound pastures. A Virginia man has just been fined 1.5 million for sharing 10 pᴏrnographic movies. That works out to a price of 150 000 per movie. Of course that was a maximum sentence. An irate judge hit him with the maximum fine after he failed to show up for court. Pᴏrn publisher Flava Works takes an approach growing in popularity every movie downloaded from their site has a unique cryptographic key stored in the file. That key is the same for every file that user downloads and acts as a fingerprint for them. Then to find out who shared a copyrighted work all Flava Works has to do...

Felix Baumgartner Completed Record-setting Near-Space Jump

2012-10-15T17:29:00-06:00

Some people sit at home blogging about amazing things. Then others do absolutely incredible things that make those sitting at home more than a little jealous. Felix Baumgartner successfully jumped from the edge of space 21 miles up in the sky. He has become the only man ever to break the speed of sound outside of a vehicle reaching mach 1.24 on the way down. That s 833 Mph. The last time that a similar jump was attempted was 1960 when US Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger. He jumped from a height of 19.4 miles and reached 614 Mph as part of testing for high altitude plane ejections. Baumgartner finally managed to break the record thanks to help From Red Bull....

The US Airforce Tried to Build a Flying Saucer

2012-10-09T17:36:55-06:00

The US Air Force had an unnatural obsession with building flying saucers. All their attempts failed but one seems like it might have been feasible if the project had been funded. Project 1794 was a 1956 project to build an aircraft capable of 360 degree movement a 1 000 mile range and a flight ceiling of 100 000 feet. The feasibility study concluded that the design would be capable of all those things all for the low low price of 3 168 000 in 1956 dollars or roughly 26 million today. The Air Force didn t bite and the project was eventually dropped. Instead other attempts were funded all of which ended in failure. It really is pretty disappointing that...

Cliff Bleszinski Leaves Epic Games, What's he Going to do Next?

2012-10-03T17:06:39-06:00

CliffyB the legendary game designer and Epic Games design director has left the company that he helped create. Over his 20 year campaign he has been responsible for a few well known franchise like Unreal which revolutionized first person shooters and Gears of War which brought cover based gameplay to the masses. Cliff Bleszinski has apparently decided that it is time that he move on to the next part of his career. He has shown a fair amount of interest in the Oculus Prime a head mounted display that we have talked about before even showing up in the Kickstarter video for it. I wouldn t be surprised if he was looking to do something with the next generation of games...

Astronauts can now Own a Piece of Space History Legally

2012-09-27T17:09:27-06:00

Space the Final Frontier. As great as it is there hasn t really been a reason to leave the planet and go pick stuff up. Why not Because according to US law anything returned from space by a US astronaut belongs to the government. Well not anymore. Another law just passed that lets the astronauts of the future bring things back and hold on to them. President Obama just signed in a bill that makes it legal for NASA astronauts to keep memorabilia from their trips something that I m sure plenty would have loved to do. While this doesn t apply to moon rocks or anything that the astronauts were required to return it does make it...

Google President Arrested over Political Youtube Ads in Brazil

2012-09-25T19:04:03-06:00

Apparently Brazil is serious about their anti defamation laws. The President of Google Brazil Fabio Jose Silva Coelho has an arrest warrant out for him because he refused to take down two Youtube videos slandering candidate for mayor Alcides Bernal. Google was ordered by the judge to take down the videos last week but Coelho refused. He did not state his reasoning. In response to his refusal however the warrant went out and the Judge ordered Google services blocked for 24 hours within the country. This is the second major story to hit recently involving Youtube the other being the trailer for Innocence of Muslims the slanderous immature work depicting the fouder of Islam as a womanizing buffoon. That as you...

US Government Loses a Nuclear Rod in Texas

2012-09-18T15:54:18-06:00

You know how you occasionally misplace your keys or important documents Well the government has just had one of those moments. But instead of keys they misplaced a nuclear rod. And rather than losing it for a few hours at most the nuclear fuel rod has been missing for over a week. The 7 inch rod was reported lost by Halliburton on September 11th after a three man geological survey crew drove from a site near Pecos to another south of Odessa. That s a 130 mile stretch. Nuclear rods like this are used to identify oil and gas deposits in wells. Fortunately the FBI have concluded that there was no criminal activity involved with the loss of the rod. Likely it...

Scientists Disprove Batman's Glide in Upcoming Movie

2012-07-16T17:45:41-06:00

Batman may not be able to jump over tall buildings in a single bound but he sure seems to like jumping off of them. That proves to be a problem for some physics students however who decided to run the math on whether the Dark Knight s cape would let him safely glide to the ground. In Christopher Nolan s Batman trilogy the cape is a piece of fabric that becomes rigid when electricity passes through it. When Batman jumps off a building he kicks on the power supply and his cape becomes a glider. And while you could technically glide with such a cape you would still break both your legs. The problem is that the cap has a wingspan only half...

DirectTV losing MTV, Comedy Central, and 24 others

2012-07-10T17:28:33-06:00

Do you have DirectTV Enjoy watching Comedy Central MTV and others well you soon might be in a bit of a pickle. Due to a stall in negotiations you might not have access to your favorite channels by the end of the day. Apparently Viacom decided the current pricing scheme is not profitable enough. They demanded a 30% increase in payments which amounts to around 1 billion more or Viacom would pull their channels from syndication. And then they had the gall to paint DirectTV as the enemy when they were hesitant to pay the blackmail DirectTV for their part has responded with its own campaign on Facebook. They have also created a page that...

Patent Trolls Cost US Economy $29 Billion Yearly

2012-07-03T20:35:22-06:00

It turns out that patent trolls aren t just annoying. They damage our economy too. In fact according to James Besson ad Michael Meuer two academics from Research on Innovation and Boston University School of Law every year patent trolls cost the US economy 29 billion. For comparison Google generated a a little over 3 billion in 2011. Keep in mind that these are direct costs too. A separate study by the same researchers looked at more indirect costs. That one found an even higher number 89 billion annually. The 29 billion is associated directly with the cost of fighting off patent trolls including licensing fees lawyer costs etc. It was determined from a sample...

Human Powered Helicopter Breaks Flight Record

2012-06-24T19:40:25-06:00

We ve reported on the Sikorsky prize before but this time there is a team getting remarkably close to winning it. Gamera II the second iteration of a design from the University of Maryland has managed to stay airborne for a remarkable 50 seconds using only human pedal power. The challenge of the Sikorsky prize is this get a human powered helicopter 3 meters up in the air and keep it there for 50 seconds. So far no teams have managed to get a craft to lift 3 meters off the ground and very few have managed a flight time of longer than a few seconds. The craft must also be somewhat maneuverable as it must stay within a 10 meter square for the entire duration....

Google Gathers Endangered Languages for Preservation

2012-06-21T16:25:53-06:00

It s always sad when a once great language vanishes. A product of the modern interconnected world is that small languages have very little chance to flourish. They are starved out by larger more successful language. If the trend continues in 100 years we ll only have a fraction of the languages we have today. And while that isn t a bad thing languages are little microcosms of culture. Which might by why Google is now preserving them. Google has started the Endangered Languages Project to help catalog languages that are on the verge of extinction. It s a site that will provide information on more than 3 000 different languages providing documents audio recordings videos and more into a comprehensive record...

The US Ordered the Stuxnet Virus Attack, Claims NYT

2012-06-01T19:12:45-06:00

Well we aways suspected it but now we have confirmation of our fears the US is responsible for the Stuxnet virus that attacked Iran s nuclear plants before escaping into the wild. Stuxnet was the most sophisticated virus ever seen and many felt that whatever government deployed it had used it as an act of war. The virus was wildly successful too managing to disable 1 000 of Iran s 5 000 centrifuges. Stuxnet was a project started by Bush that was accelerated by President Obama. Even though he was worried about the ramifications of it escaping he was quoted as asking should we shut this thing down he ordered the attacks to continue. The project wasn t...