DarendukesCrowdfunded submarine... huh...
On Friday, the UC3 Nautilus, a famous DIY submarine, sank off the coast of Denmark. Its owner, Peter Madsen, was later rescued and claimed he’d had technical difficulties. Copenhagen police now say that they’ve charged Madsen with killing a Swedish woman who was last seen with him on board the submarine.
For the longest time, Blizzard has been staunchly against the idea of deathmatch modes in Overwatch. It’s a game about teamwork and objectives, after all. Deathmatch has a way of drastically de-prioritizing both of those things. Now, though, the dev team has had a change of heart.
When much-beloved Motörhead frontman Lemmy left our planet for a more metal one back in 2015, the world mourned. But now, the iconic musician has been immortalized in a way we know he’d approve of—by getting a prehistoric beast named in his honor.
Last week, the Internet got conquered by a photo of an orange kitten with curly hair. The picture was shared with the following caption: “I’ve never seen a cat with curls until now.” Well, neither have most of us, but this is no trick – the curly hair on the kitty is the real deal, and here’s why.
The breed of the cat who became Insta-famous last week is most likely the Selkirk rex – and its origins can be traced to one peculiar rescue cat named Miss DePesto.
Miss DePesto was born in a Montana shelter in 1987. She had four siblings, each of which have straight coats, but the kitty stood out due to her unusually curly hair. She was adopted by Jeri Newman, a local Persian breeder.
She bred the cat with with a black Persian and they produced a litter of six babies, all of them with curly hair. Newman realized the curly hair was a dominant genetic trait – and this is how the Selkirk rex was born.
(h/t)
Image credits: meanpIastic
Image credits: meanpIastic
Image credits: meanpIastic
Image credits: shumsende
Image credits: shumsende
Image credits: shumsende
Image credits: Ingrid Matschke
Image credits: ignataliya
Enlarge (credit: Masters of All Science)
Rick and Morty has delivered quotable one-liners since its very first episode. With the show recently starting its third season, it's hard to keep track of the hilariously dark wisdom-drops that come out of each character's mouth. That's where a new online tool comes in: "Master of All Science" is a quote index that lets you search for any Rick and Morty quote and turn it into a meme or create a GIF from your favorite show moments.
The site was made by Paul Kehrer, Sean Schulte, and Allie Young, the team that also created Frinkiac and Morbotron, which are similar meme and gif generators for The Simpsons and Futurama, respectively. "Master of All Science" works like both of the tools that came before it: search for your favorite Rick and Morty quote using keywords (like "pop tart") or phrases (like "existence is pain"), and a bunch of stills pop up that match your search. You can then pick a still image and create a meme using the dialogue from the show as the caption (and you can edit the quote to distill your sentiment even further) or make a GIF by selecting a number of frames that play in succession.
In comparison to The Simpsons and Futurama, Rick and Morty is in its infancy, so "Master of All Science" doesn't have the nearly one million screencaps that Morbotron does, much less the three million screencaps that Frinkiac does. However, Kehrer and the team didn't leave any stone unturned before launching the site—it's already up to date with searchable quotes from all aired Rick and Morty episodes, including the most recent episodes from season three. The team plans to update the site within a few days after each new episode airs as well, so you'll always be able to search for your favorite new quote. According to Kehrer's blog post, the goal is to keep "Master of All Science" running for at least nine years... as long as they get that Szechuan sauce in the end.
Darendukesyup
Darendukesthat's fucking metal
Nature isn’t always sunshine and kitties. This proved itself yet again recently, when researchers at the Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro published a study on a pair of conjoined bat twins discovered in southeastern Brazil back in 2001. The animals were dead when they were discovered, which is almost…
DarendukesEric, you watched any of The Return?
Twin Peaks: The Return is visually stunning and thematically complex, with dozens of characters and plot lines inhabiting a world that’s slowly being invaded by a dark parallel dimension. “Slowly” is a key descriptor, but the show’s unique pace is a very deliberate choice made by David Lynch.
Darendukescool video
They’re not just an animal, they’re a material. And that’s got engineers interested.
Red imported fire ants (solenopsis invicta) are native to South America and an invasive species in the United States. One of the adaptations that makes them so hardy is that they can build large structures by linking their bodies together. This is how they form rafts that can float during floods. When they’re aggregated together, fire ants can be seen as a material and the Hu lab at Georgia Tech has been testing that material for years.
[Vox]
The post The Bizarre Physics of Fire Ants [Science Video] appeared first on Geeks are Sexy Technology News.
Don’t you hate it when the other team’s tank uses glitch magic to shove you into a sealed off area?
Darendukesnice
A 31-year-old man has been charged with stabbing another guy seven times—and hitting him with a mallet—after an argument broke out during a game of Magic: The Gathering.
Darendukesu gon die
Strong multiplayer maps in video games create stories. Their construction and design generate emotional reactions from frustrated defeat to jubilant victory. It is not enough to put players in a space and do battle; strong maps shift and contort in unexpected ways. They are not always fair and they are rarely…
DarendukesBut they want me to be good at the game..
In an interesting turn of events, Blizzard has laid down hard line rules for how Overwatch League teams are expected to treat their players.
See the man in the boat? No seriously: Talk about one hell of a tumultuous modern day tale: Japanese Artist, Megumi Igarashi took the internet by storm last summer when she was arrested for distributing 3D printable files of a toy boat modeled off her vagina. Since then, it's come to light that Igarashi was merely selling these 3D printable files to save up for a full-sized kayak that would help her build a full-sized kayak shaped just like her vagine.
By the time she was arrested she'd amassed almost $10K from sales. She spent five days in jail before the internet managed to pressure the authorities to let her walk free.
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Enlarge / WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 19: Former Texas Governor Rick Perry, President-elect Donald Trump's choice as Secretary of Energy, testifies during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on Capitol Hill January 19, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)
Last week, US Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry took a phone call from two men he thought were the Ukrainian Prime Minister and his translator. But the 22-minute-long phone call was actually two Russian pranksters, Vladimir “Vovan” Kuznetsov and Alexei “Lexus” Stolyarov, otherwise known as the “Jerky Boys of Russia,” in the style of an American prank call duo from the 1990s, according to Bloomberg.
The Washington Post confirmed the conversation with the Department of Energy. In audio originally posted on a Russian website and reposted elsewhere, the dialogue touched on a Baltic Sea pipeline that would pump Russian gas, as well as an expansion of coal and oil and gas interests in Ukraine. Early in the conversation, Secretary Perry tells the pranksters that “the [Trump] administration is broadly supportive of sanctions against Russia at this particular point in time,” and later he offers that “negotiation is always possible” on coal exports to Ukraine.
The Secretary also advised the “Prime Minister” that, without transparency about regulations and geological data about where wells have been or could be drilled, it would be hard for the US to help oil and gas companies expand exploration in Ukraine.
Darendukesthats hawt
Enlarge / A look inside the circuitry of a "decapped" arcade chip. (credit: Caps0ff)
The community behind the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) has gone to great lengths to preserve thousands of arcade games run on hundreds of different chipsets through emulation over the years. That preservation effort has now grown to include the physical opening of DRM-protected chips in order to view the raw code written inside them—and it's an effort that could use your crowdsourced help.
While dumping the raw code from many arcade chips is a simple process, plenty of titles have remained undumped and unemulated because of digital-rights-management code that prevents the ROM files from being easily copied off of the base integrated circuit chips. For some of those protected chips, the decapping process can be used as a DRM workaround by literally removing the chip's "cap" with nitric acid and acetone.
With the underlying circuit paths exposed within the chip, there are a few potential ways to get at the raw code. For some chips, a bit of quick soldering to that exposed circuitry can allow for a dumped file that gets around any DRM further down the line. In the case of chips that use a non-rewritable Mask ROM, though, the decappers can actually look through a microscope (or high-resolution scan) to see the raw zeroes and ones that make up the otherwise protected ROM code.
Darendukessweet nectar
Usually, when television networks resurrect long-canceled series, the newly-revived characters’ stories pick up sometime in the future, with everyone having gone on living their lives. That’s not the case with Rocko’s Modern Life: Static Cling. Apparently, they’ve been stuck in the ‘90s.
Darendukesthose are cool
Three years ago, two sets of NYC-based heroes met up to defeat a supernatural menace in an IDW comic miniseries. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Ghostbusters are doing it again this November, with some very... interesting action figures to match.
DarendukesHat with speakers? Approved!
You’ve probably called someone an asshat before. But do you know what an asshat literally is?
Darendukesfloaty bird!
Birds fly. That’s what birds do (most of them at least). But birds don’t fly without moving their wings, because that would defy gravity. Obviously. But as you can see below, sometimes nature does mysterious things when it thinks that us humans aren’t looking. Unknown to the levitating star of this trippy video however, a home security camera caught its mind-boggling stunt on video, and it’s since been viewed over 250k times in just 24 hours after a YouTuber called Ginger Beard uploaded it to the internet.
How did this little feathered fellow do it? Simple. Its wings just happened to perfectly synchronize with the camera’s frame rate, thereby creating the bizarre optical illusion that you see before you. This isn’t the first time this has happened (we previously showed you a helicopter appearing to hover through the air with its rotor blades perfectly still), but it’s the first time we’ve seen an animal demonstrating this bewildering quirk of technology. Either that or we’ve just unknowingly witnessed a rare glitch in the Matrix. What do you think?
More info: YouTube
DarendukesSuch an odd solution to voice chat.
Enlarge / This is not Nintendo's solution for voice chat on the Switch, but it's closer than you might think.
Our recent review of Splatoon 2 wasn't able to test Nintendo's unorthodox new voice-chat app for the Nintendo Switch, which requires a separate smartphone to let you talk to your teammates during a match. That app launched on the iOS and Android app stores today, and while we'll have a full review after more extensive testing, we wanted to point out one baffling design decision immediately.
As Nintendo points out in the app's official FAQ, voice chat cannot run in the background while using your phone for other purposes such as "texts, social media, etc.":
The voice chat will disconnect while you're talking on the phone or using another application, but your voice chat will restart in the same room once you open the Nintendo Switch Online application again as long as the game session is still ongoing.
What's more, early testing confirms that the app won't work if your phone goes into power-saving "sleep mode," with the screen inactive. And don't bother trying to use the app to chat with your Switch friends while away from the system, either: you can only join chat rooms with people when you're actively playing a specific, supported game with them.
Darendukeshuh
In bad movie news, Tommy Wiseau's cult classic, and honorific title holder for world's worst movie ever, The Room is getting the Hollywood treatment with a movie about the movie and its odd writer-director-star. And now, it's got a trailer.
It's quite a statement that a real actor, a qualified actor at that, James Franco, cannot pretend to be bad enough, or odd enough to even come close to as bad as the real thing. That statement bears repeating: Tommy Wiseau's original performance from The Room was so defining and amazingly terrible that a good actor cannot act it bad enough to seem to be as bad or real as the original. If you follow that verbal maze, you might just be astounded watching this trailer.
Darendukesthat's kewl
You might be tempted to think this is just a cool experiment, but don’t be surprised when Mark Zuckerberg rips it off and it’s suddenly packaged with Instagram.
DarendukesWhoa. Let's hope they get some new writers in there too. Been pretty stale lately.
Enlarge (credit: BBC)
Jodie Whittaker, who worked with new Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall on Broadchurch, has been unveiled as the 13th Doctor.
She will be the first female actor to play the Time Lord in the history of Doctor Who.
In a publicity chat with the BBC, Whittaker urged Whovians to be open about the Doctor's gender switcheroo. "I want to tell the fans not to be scared by my gender. Because this is a really exciting time, and Doctor Who represents everything that’s exciting about change. The fans have lived through so many changes, and this is only a new, different one, not a fearful one."
Enlarge (credit: Getty | UniversalImagesGroup)
Sometimes, there’s more to old age than meets the eye—sometimes, it’s 27 contact lenses jammed in there, according to a case study published this month in the British Medical Journal.
A 67-year-old British woman, complaining of eye discomfort and dryness, was scheduled last November to have routine surgery to remove cataracts when doctors discovered a “blueish mass” of 17 disposable contact lenses stuck in one of her eyes. Upon further examination, they fished out 10 more, the case study reveals.
Doctors were startled, according to Rupal Morjaria, a specialist trainee ophthalmologist on the case who spoke with Optometry Today. “None of us have ever seen this before,” she said. “It was such a large mass. All the 17 contact lenses were stuck together. We were really surprised that the patient didn’t notice it because it would cause quite a lot of irritation while it was sitting there.”
Austin Police Sgt. Zachary LaHood told CBS News he’s “lucky to be alive” after experiencing carbon monoxide poisoning from a leak in his Ford Explorer. Six other Austin police officers have also been treated for carbon monoxide exposure in the last week, so the department has taken 37 of its Ford Explorer Police…
