An Apartment Made Entirely of Cardboard

“Casa de Karton” is the name of Don Lucho’s project where he has built an apartment using carton and paper. The apartment has all the furniture and other items that a kitchen or a bedroom is expected to have. Being in these “carton rooms” will make you feel like you’re a part of a drawing.

Beside the house he has also made a car wreck out of carton, and placed it on the street so it looks realistic.

In similarity to this project, another artist made a key card hotel in New York using 200 000 card keys.

An Apartment Made Entirely of Cardboard.

Video: Giant crab spider gives birth to itself

Time-lapse video of the giant crab spider discarding it’s old shell.

Just think if people could do this….

ATM machine attacked with fire

I just saw this. There were several cops and fire engines near a burned ATM on my university campus. Was someone thinking they could burn their way into an ATM? The machine was still working correctly after the fire was put out. Update: This happened at 5:35 AM according to the KCRA news team I spoke to in person. The burned ATM belonged to Bank of America. The Golden One ATM was also attacked, but with much less damage. It seems someone threw a bottle with gasoline or something at the machines. I’m wondering if the cameras on these operate continuously or just during a transaction.

Researcher detained at U.S. border, questioned about Wikileaks

LAS VEGAS — A security researcher involved with the Wikileaks Web site was detained by U.S. agents at the border for three hours and questioned about the controversial whistleblower project as he entered the country on Thursday to attend a hacker conference, sources said on Saturday.

He was also approached by two FBI agents at the Defcon conference after his presentation on Saturday afternoon about the Tor Project.

Jacob Appelbaum, a Seattle-based programmer for the online privacy protection project called Tor, arrived at the Newark, New Jersey, airport from Holland flight Thursday morning when he was pulled aside by customs and border protection agents who told him he was randomly selected for a security search, according to the sources familiar with the matter who asked to remain anonymous.

Appelbaum, a U.S. citizen, was taken into a room, frisked and his bag was searched. Receipts from his bag were photocopied and his laptop was inspected but it’s not clear in what manner, the sources said. Officials from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Army then told him he was not under arrest but was being detained, the sources said. They asked questions about Wikileaks, asked for his opinions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and asked where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is, but he declined to comment without a lawyer present, according to the sources. He was not permitted to make a phone call, they said.

After about three hours, Appelbaum was given his laptop back but the agents kept his three mobile phones, sources said.

Asked for comment, Appelbaum declined to talk to CNET. However, he made reference to his phone getting seized to Defcon attendees. Following a question-and-answer session after his talk on the Tor Project Appelbaum was asked by an attendee for his phone number. He replied “that phone was seized.”

Shortly thereafter two casually dressed men identified themselves as FBI agents and asked to talk to him.

“We’d like to chat for a few minutes,” one of the men said, adding “we thought you might not want to.” Appelbaum asked them if they were aware of “what happened to me?” and one of them replied “Yes, that’s why we’re here.”

“I don’t have anything to say,” Appelbaum told them. One of the agents said they were interested in hearing if “human rights” being “trampled” and said “sometimes it’s nice to have a conversation to flesh things out.”

Marcia Hofmann, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was in the room and asked if the agents were at the event in an official capacity or for personal reasons. “A little of both,” one of the said.

Appelbaum asked when his equipment would be returned and one of them said “We aren’t involved in that; we have no idea,” and walked away when Appelbaum declined to talk further.

The agents declined to identify themselves to CNET. They said they were attending the conference and declined to talk further.

Appelbaum is a hacker and security researcher who co-founded the Noisebridge hacker space in San Francisco’s Mission district. He’s also worked to bypass the security of “smart” parking meters, unearth flaws in Web security certificates, and discover a novel way to bypass hard drive encryption. …

via Researcher detained at U.S. border, questioned about Wikileaks | InSecurity Complex – CNET News.

Solution: be as boring as possible. If you are too interesting your stuff will be taken. This is not cool.

Here’s how to protest: Generate a whole bunch of random files with the this Dummy File Creator tool. Replace the Sample Batch List.txt text with something like this:

C:\Test\hacking.avi    1565421    0
C:\Test\passwor.wmv    7156422    0
C:\Test\hacktrick.flv  1108454    0
C:\Test\2393.flv       4223018    1
C:\Test\4govt.flv      1079571    1
C:\Test\stolendocs.avi    1564424    0
C:\Test\6wikikeaks.pdf    2166422    0
C:\Test\tricksDefon.pdf   1108454    0
C:\Test\realXfiles.flv    8243011    1
C:\Test\6759.flv      1088576    1

Results:

Next encrypt several duplicate multi-GB hard drives and store the random junk files you created using something like http://www.truecrypt.org/, so if they are ever seized at your home or at an airport you will have the last laugh. Great use for failing hard drives. Video tape yourself doing this step by step so you have evidence that rather than being a mad genius, you just have a very weird sense of humor.

Did secret government radar cause the UFO crash at Roswell?

I have an interest in the Roswell story for several reasons. A few years ago, after getting some “inside information” I traveled to Roswell with a reporter and checked this out for myself. Years later, Roswell researcher Anthony Bragalia contacted me and corroborated what I’d discovered. I’m still not convinced aliens are the answer, but I’m convinced that some believe there were credible eye-witnesses who saw aliens. Aliens, our government, Russians, Germans, some other government, whatever you believe, here is a possible answer for what caused the crash near what was at the time, the only place in the world with an atom bomb: experimental radar.

HOW THE ROSWELL CRASH HAPPENED by Anthony Bragalia

… Many rightly wonder why an ET vehicle with the ability to traverse light years through the cosmos would arrive all the way to Earth – only to crash in New Mexico. How is it that an interplanetary people with such advanced aerial technology could come to such grief on the July-baked desert floor?

… Little known is that the US Government at that time had maintained an interconnected “beyond the fence” radar network. This secret network had served two purposes. It had helped to protect White Sands Proving Ground, Sandia National Lab and Los Alamos National Lab from aerial intrusion. It was also used for the “far-field” tracking of missiles launched from White Sands. Errant V-2′s as early as May of 1947 had crashed their way to Mexico. There was no way that wayward rocket launches could ever get into the hands of civilians or foreign nationals. And our national laboratories needed to be protected from any possible foreign strikes from the air. This covert “outside the fence” radar program helped to provide maximum coverage as it monitored these vitally important skies.

Some of these radar facilities were mobile, highly experimental and lacked more exact “control” of beam path and range. Some of their designs did not have the quality to “contain the energy” as more permanent installations did. If such radar beams played a role in the crash, the radar operators likely did not know that the radar had helped to bring down the craft. The radar was not meant to be used as a weapon. It was an unwitting and non-offensive event. Otherwise, military would surely have gotten to the craft before civilians Mack Brazel and Dee Proctor did- and they would not have had to have been alerted by Brazel to the crash.

The radar project involved highly-classified radar installations that were located at remote off-sites. Towers and arrays were sometimes even sited on private property. Area ranchers and locals knew of the existence of these radar installations (usually hidden in wooded or hilly areas) but said nothing out of a sense of patriotic duty and perhaps through financial inducements. This is a little discussed piece of post WWII history – even by military historians.

Such radar systems were found in places like tiny El Vado, NM. One was called “The Continental Divide.” There was a radar station located just north of US 60 about 45 miles west of Socorro. Another site was a radar tower on the road to the spread of NM rancher Marvin Ake, 10 miles south of State Rd. 60 between Magdelena and Datil. Yet another was near Oscura Park, some miles just outside of White Sands itself.

Given how we know that UFOs are reported to be able to disrupt our cars, TVs and radios through their emanated frequencies and radiations – isn’t it possible that the reverse could be true? Could our technology have (in some as yet unknown way) affected their technology? According to a treatise entitled “Electromagnetic Compatibility“: “After World War II the military became increasingly concerned with the effects of nuclear electromagnetic pulse (NEMP), lightning strike and even high-powered radar beams on mobile vehicles of all kinds and especially on aircraft electrical systems.”

Could a unique and dynamic interplay of lightning, powerful radar beams and the ET craft’s own generated energy field have in some way brought it down?  … – link

Solar system attacked by Centaurs every 200 to 300 years? Library of Ancient Astronauts agrees.

You may have a good reason to be concerned about all the space junk orbiting our planet, but even without our help this  solar system is not a very tidy place.

Just as the threat exists (statistically 1 in 5 billion, but exists nonetheless), that a piece of falling space junk will smash into your house or car and kill you,  there is always the small chance that a comet will end life on earth.

The area around the orbit of Neptune is littered with “the Trojan asteroids”  some of which may swing into the inner solar system becoming comets we can witness every 200 to 300 years.

According to Phenominica:

The origin of … “short-period comets” is unknown but the immediate source is thought to be the Centaurs—these are a collection of an estimated million icy objects more than 1 kilometre across on elliptical orbits that come closest to the sun between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune.

Only about 250 of these Centaurs have been imaged by telescopes. All are on unstable orbits, and have a big chance of receiving a gravitational boost when their orbit brings them near Jupiter or one of the other giant planets. Such perturbation could redirect them into the inner solar system – and possibly towards Earth.

As a wayward Centaur approaches the sun, its heat begins to evaporate the icy contents, resulting in a cometary tail.

Previous simulations of the Centaurs suggest something must be feeding them with extra material – each object will orbit for about 3 million years before it hits a planet, falls into the sun, is ejected from the solar system or simply disintegrates.

via Trojan asteroids around Neptune could hit Earth.

There is a theory that the Ica Stones of Peru are a library from an ancient advanced civilization that once visited our planet. According to the late Dr Javier Cabrera Darquea who owned the collection, the visitors left due to the threat of comets. Of course, skeptics claim that either the images below are not telescopes or the thousands of ica stone carvings were faked by one local man to sell to tourists.

The farmer who gave Cabrera his first stone was subsequently arrested for selling the stones to tourists.  In his defence, he said that he had not in fact found them in a cave, as he had told Dr Cabrera, but made them himself. Other local people continue to make these engraved stones. They are selling forged hoaxes – a Bad Archaeology double whammy! However, Cabrera countered this claim with the sheer numbers of stones. As well as the 20,000 or so in his collection and those sold to tourists, he said that locals have found about 50,000, while the cave contains another 100,000. This is too great a number to be the effort of a single poor farmer with little spare time to create so many hoaxes. Nevertheless, he maintained that he carved at least some of them. Neither he nor Dr Cabrera revealed the location of the cave that is supposed to contain the huge cache of stones.

For more about the stones, see my post, Did humans and dinosaurs co-exist?

Scientists Succeed with Teleportation… of an atom.

Would you like to teleport an object all the way across the galaxy instantly?

Image: the Joint Quantum Institute’s Christopher Monroe  sits near  a 16-by-4-foot table covered in optical equipment. His team “teleported” an atom a distance of about 3 feet.

According to a story by Brent Baughman on NPR:

“It’s not exactly the Star Trek version of teleportation, where an object disappears then reappears somewhere else. Rather, it “entangles” two different atoms so that one atom inherits the properties of another.

“According to the quantum theory, everything vibrates,” theoretical physicist Michio Kaku tells NPR’s Guy Raz. Kaku is a frequent guest on the Science and Discovery channels. “When two electrons are placed close together, they vibrate in unison. When you separate them, that’s when all the fireworks start.”

This is where quantum entanglement — sometimes described as “teleportation” — begins. “An invisible umbilical cord emerges connecting these two electrons. And you can separate them by as much as a galaxy if you want. Then, if you vibrate one of them, somehow on the other end of the galaxy the other electron knows that its partner is being jiggled.”

This process happens even faster than the speed of light, physicists say.

Quantum entanglement isn’t a new idea — Einstein once famously referred to it as “spooky action at a distance” — but it wasn’t until the past 30 years that scientists were first able to observe this process.

It could one day lead to new types of computers, and some even think entanglement may explain things like telepathy. Scientists aren’t quite ready to beam up Scotty yet, but this is the technology that one day may lead to such a feat.

via Scientists Take Quantum Steps Toward Teleportation : NPR.

Perhaps in a few years you’ll be able to volunteer at the Joint Quantum Institute website to be the first human. There is a great episode titled “Daedalus” in the Star Trek Enterprise series which features the inventor of the transporter. A debate is retold at one point: is the transported person the same person, or a copy? Is an exact copy still you? Or is it someone else?

Herpes virus used to treat cancer

Doctors say they have used a genetically engineered herpes virus to treat successfully patients with head and neck cancer.

A London hospital trial of 17 patients found that use of the virus alongside chemotherapy and radiotherapy helped kill the tumours in most patients.

It works by getting into cancer cells, killing them from the inside, and also boosting the patient’s immune system.

Further trials are planned for later in the year.

Head and neck cancer, which includes cancer of the mouth, tongue and throat, affects up to 8,000 people every year in the UK.

Study leader Dr Kevin Harrington, who is based at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, said current treatments were effective if the cancer was picked up early but that many patients were not diagnosed until it was more advanced.

The herpes virus, which is also being tested in patients with skin cancer, is genetically manipulated so that it grows inside tumour cells but cannot infect normal healthy cells.

Once there it has a triple effect – it multiplies, killing tumour cells as it does so, it is engineered to produce a human protein that activates the immune system and it also makes a viral protein that acts as a red flag to immune cells. …

via BBC News – Herpes virus used to treat cancer.

After they cure you of cancer, they use modified cancer cells to get rid of the herpes. Just kidding.

Food agency probes cloned cow milk claim

Food safety officials in Britain are to investigate a claim that milk from the offspring of a cloned cow was on sale for public consumption, they said Monday.

The disclosure has provoked concern among some farming campaigners, and the Food Standards Agency FSA is set to investigate a report in Friday’s International Herald Tribune newspaper.

But the body which represents Britain’s dairy industry insisted that there was no danger. The newspaper quoted a British dairy farmer, speaking anonymously, saying that he was using milk from a cow bred from a clone as part of his daily production. The farmer did not want his name to be disclosed because he feared Britons saw cloning as “distasteful” so buyers would stop taking his milk if they knew who he was. The FSA said in response that it regarded meat and products from cloned animals and their offspring as “novel foods” which need to be authorised before being put on sale.

“The agency has not received any applications relating to cloning and no authorisations have been made,” a spokeswoman said.”The agency will, of course, investigate any reports of unauthorised novel foods entering the food chain.” …

via AFP: Food agency probes cloned cow milk claim.