Now i will have my whole clone army of zombies

A technical breakthrough has enabled scientists to create for the first time dozens of cloned embryos from adult monkeys, raising the prospect of the same procedure being used to make cloned human embryos.

Attempts to clone human embryos for research have been dogged by technical problems and controversies over fraudulent research and questionable ethics. But the new technique promises to revolutionise the efficiency by which scientists can turn human eggs into cloned embryos.

It is the first time that scientists have been able to create viable cloned embryos from an adult primate – in this case a 10-year-old male rhesus macaque monkey – and they are scheduled to report their findings later this month.

Homegrown DHS

A Dutch guy seems to have set up a small network of bluetooth scanners. He has all the information logged to a central database and you can search it over the web. On his website it says "Some of these matches were only minutes apart. Therefore I could even calculate the approximate speed of someone moving from one location to another.". There are also some interesting statistics on his site showing traffic volume in his hometown (based on bluetooth signals) and he even lists popularity of certain Nokia phones. It's interesting to see how much information an individual can gather using old equipment.

Georgian riot cops in Mickey Mouse gas-masks

The Rose Revolution in the former Soviet state of Georgia is collapsing under phalances of riot-cops. This is distressing, but also fascinating -- who knew that the Georgian riot cop standard issue included a freaky white Mickey Mouse mask?

Gojira is Da Bomb!!!

Godzilla Opens in Japan Sept 3rd(1954)
The first Godzilla film opened in Tokyo more than 50 years ago, and its 20,000 ton star, an enormous lizard, has been smashing up cities and towns ever since. Initially inspired by King Kong, Godzilla soon spawned several other motion pictures and TV shows. Its widespread popularity inspired Japanese filmmakers to develop a number of other monsters and heroes, such as Goro and Gamera. Why was the original Japanese version of the film heavily edited before its release in the US? More on Gojira and WW2

Superfast Laser Turns Virus Into Rubble

"In a development reminiscent of nineteenth century pseudo-science, the father-son team of Kong Thon and Shaw Wei Tsen recently demonstrated that the tobacco mosaic virus can be destroyed in vitro by nano-scale mechanical resonant vibrations induced by repeated ultra-short pulses from a laser. The total energy required is reportedly far below the threshold for human tissue damage and the technique should generalize to human pathogens. Cleaning stored blood is one obvious application."

Political Scientists Discover New Form Of Government

Political Scientists Discover New Form Of Government

WASHINGTON, DC—Political scientists at the Cato Institute announced Monday that they have inadvertently synthesized a previously theoretical...

Afro Samurai Creator Takashi Okazaki Confirms Sequel

He wanders the wilderness to avenge his father's death. He is a man of few words, trained in the ancient ways of the Japanese samurai. He sports an unruly Afro.

"Afro Samurai," the star of an animation series of the same name featuring Samuel L. Jackson, is headed for a second run on U.S. network Spike TV — and finally winning a following in its native Japan, where it will debut on the big screen on Saturday.

"I never expected Afro Samurai to get this huge. It started out as doodlings I made in college," creator Takashi Okazaki said in an interview in Tokyo.

"Now, I have Samuel doing Afro's voice, and lots of black kids thanking me for creating an awesome hero," he said. "I just can't believe it."

Afro Samurai's first season, aired as a five-part series on Spike TV early this year, follows the tale of a young samurai with a big Afro who seeks to avenge the death of his father at the hands of a mysterious warrior called Justice.

The Shock Doctrine

Klein has just published a controversial best seller entitled The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it she defines shock doctrine as “the use of public disorientation following massive collective shocks—wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters—to push through highly unpopular economic shock therapy.”

The metaphor of “shock” is important because her thesis stems from a contention that what works on a person also works on a nation. Think 9/11 and fear-induced politics that have eroded some of the fundamentals of what we knew as American democracy. To peer into her thinking, check out the short film by Alfonso Cuaron, who made Y Tu Mama Tambien and Children of Men. Klein was hoping he’d send her a quote for the book jacket, but instead he assembled a team of artists and this short film.
More Shocking Video

A Nature Expedition or Merely Deer Porn?

Despite it all being very natural and above board, there remains something a little weird about groups of humans -- children included -- hiding in the bushes watching animals have sex…and paying for the privilege.

Fair Use Worth More Than Copyright To Economy

"The Computer and Communications Industry Association — a trade group representing Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, among others — has issued a report (PDF) that finds fair use exceptions add more than $4.5 trillion in revenue to the U.S. economy and add more value to the U.S. economy than copyright industries contribute. "Recent studies indicate that the value added to the U.S. economy by copyright industries amounts to $1.3 trillion.", said CCIA President and CEO Ed Black. The value added to the U.S. economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion."

AHH if i had not gone to Thialand with my wife i just might own a bar...

Thailand has become synonymous with crazy vacations where English-speaking tourists can find anything and everything under the sexual sun, but a lot of men who make the journey find something even wilder than they could have imagined—like a girlfriend or even a wife. This interesting mini-documentary about the tropical paradise looks at gents who get more from the nation's famous "bar girls" than a one-night stand. These ladies offer a companion, a travel partner, and in some cases a mate for life, while the guys offer loving attention and financial support (i.e.. a potential way out of the seedy bars and nightclubs.) Oh, and there's the sex, too, but that's just a bonus. Some dudes even chuck their lives back home for a new one on the beach, but you'll only have to give up half an hour to see the video. Check it out before you find some one to love you a very long time

How a handful of desperate innovators took special effects to new heights in two 1977 movies--Star Wars and Close Encounters

You probably recognize this shot...
...because it's the opening shot of the most famous science fiction film ever created.

That shot almost never happened. Indeed, it was so difficult to get that the man who realized it--Richard Edlund, who did visual effects for Star Wars--procrastinated shooting it until the very end of production, when there wasn't enough money left to create this scene using a gigantic, building-wide model of the star destroyer, as he'd hoped.

Instead, he took the biggest model star destroyer he had, which was three feet long, stuck a 24mm lens on the front of his camera, and got it to within 1/32nd of an inch of the bottom of the model, almost scraping off the bottom as his motion-control rig played out the scene.

It may be hard to believe now, but immediately before 1977, the watershed year that witnessed the release of both Lucas's Star Wars and Steven Spielberg's UFO epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, big-budget effects-laden movies were incredibly rare.

Via an exhaustive history of special effects at Invention and Technology.

this fanny shure got a spanking

Socialist Revolutionary Attempts to Assassinate Lenin (1918)
Fanny Kaplan was a political revolutionary who was executed for attempting to assassinate Vladimir Lenin. She became disillusioned with Lenin as a result of the conflict between the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik party and decided to take action, shooting Lenin three times as he exited a Moscow factory. Though she confessed to the shooting, it has been suggested that Kaplan could not have been responsible for the assassination attempt. Why not? More...