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The smugglers selected their targets by placing lookouts at the port of entry who identified vehicles that daily used the SENTRI express lane, according to the affidavit. Once a vehicle and driver were selected, the smugglers would secretly obtain the car’s vehicle identification number. The VIN was then used to make spare keys for that car.
The keys would be used at night by smugglers to unlock the car, put drugs in it and lock it. The next morning, the drivers would get in their cars and drive to El Paso — without ever knowing that drugs had been placed in the vehicles overnight.
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Scientists in London created an artificial windpipe which was then coated in stem cells from the patient.
Crucially, the technique does not need a donor, and there is no risk of the organ being rejected. The surgeons stress a windpipe can also be made within days.
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So much for tagging photographs with names, locations and activities yourself – a new cell phone application can take care of that for you.
The system works by taking advantage of the multiple sensors on a mobile phone, as well as those of other mobile phones in the vicinity.
Dubbed TagSense, the new app was developed by students from Duke University and the University of South Carolina (USC) and unveiled at the ninth Association for Computing Machinery’s International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys), being held in Washington, D.C.
“When a TagSense-enabled phone takes a picture, it automatically detects the human subjects and the surrounding context by gathering sensor information from nearby phones,” said Xuan Bao, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Duke who received his master’s degree at Duke in electrical and computer engineering.
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A top Department of Homeland Security official has admitted to Congress that imported software and hardware components are being purposely spiked with security-compromising attack tools by unknown foreign parties.
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Yikes. Users of fitness and calorie tracker Fitbit may need to be more careful when creating a profile on the site. The sexual activity of many of the users of the company’s tracker and online platform can be found in Google Search results, meaning that these users’ profiles are public and searchable. You can click here to access these results. The Next Web reported this earlier this morning.
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Collusion is a very simple website that visualizes the interwoven mesh and mess of third-party tracking cookies. You install an add-on, and then just start browsing the web. If you have multiple monitors, you can drag the Collusion tab out and watch as your web of browsing history and cookies expands; otherwise, just surf the web for an hour or so, and then take a look at Collusion. What you will see is quite astonishing. Each and every one of the red dots is tracking your movement and behavior across the web. Some of the red dots are obvious, like Google’s DoubleClick ad network — but did you know that the ShareThis and AddThis widgets, which are found on almost every news or blog website, are tracking your clicking and reading habits?
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from the who’s-ripping-off-whom-again? dept
Last year, we had a post on RIAA accounting, detailing how labels screw over many musicians, even some of the best selling ones, such that they never actually make a dime in royalties. Bas points us to an excellent 14 minute video from lawyer Martin Frascogna, entitled How To Sell 1 Million Albums and Owe $500,000
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In conjunction with this week’s 40th anniversary of President Nixon declaring “war on drugs,” a group of police, judges and jailers who support legalization released a report today showing how the Obama administration is ramping up a war it disingenuously claims that it ended two years ago.
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Forty celebrities were arrested for drugs (mostly marijuana) during the first six months of 2011. This doubles the total from the first half of 2010. Last year, 43 celebrities were arrested for drugs. In 2011, that figure will likely double as well
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To produce the potentially deadly drug, which has a comparable effect to heroin but is much cheaper to make, users mix codeine with gasoline, paint thinner, iodine, hydrochloric acid and red phosphorous. Codeine, a controlled substance in the United States used to treat mild to moderate pain, is widely available over the counter in Russia.
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“Our investigation shows that not only have police employees been found to have run background records checks on friends and possible partners, but some have been convicted for passing sensitive information to criminal gangs and drug dealers,” said Daniel Hamilton, director of the Big Brother Watch.
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It’s great when cops catch criminals after they’ve done their dirty work. But what if police could stop a crime before it was even committed? Though that may sound like a fantasy straight from a Philip K. Dick novel, it’s a goal police departments from Los Angeles to Memphis are actively pursuing with help from the Department of Justice and a handful of cutting-edge academics.
It’s called “predictive policing.” The idea: Although no one can foresee individual crimes, it is possible to forecast patterns of where and when homes are likely to be burgled or cars stolen by analyzing truckloads of past crime reports and other data with sophisticated computer algorithms.
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Penis length cannot be determined by how big his hands or feet are — those and other supposed indicators have been widely discredited for years. But now a team of Korean researchers has produced what may be a more reliable guide: the ratio of the length of his index finger to that of his ring finger. The lower that ratio, the longer the penis may be, the researchers wrote Monday in the Asian Journal of Andrology.
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Why The Organic Trade Association and Corporate Organic Food Brands do NOT want Labeling of Genetically Engineered and Genetically Modified Foods
This Video provides financial evidence that the President of the Board of Directors at the Organic Trade Association, Julia Sabin, individually profits off of Genetically engineered foods as a VP and General Manager at Smuckers.
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A man has been charged with breaking Ireland’s bestiality laws for forcing his dog to have sex with a woman who died from an allergic reaction brought on by the perverse act.
Sean McDonnell, the 57-year-old charged in the case, apparently ordered his German Shepard to have sex with a 43-year-old mother of four that he met in an online fetish chatroom, according to the Journal.
They met to perform the kinky act with the canine, but the woman died hours later from an attack similar to a reaction unleashed by a peanut allergy, according to the Irish Daily Star.
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If you read the ingredients label on a loaf of bread, you will usually find an ingredient listed there as L-cysteine. This is a non-essential amino acid added to many baked goods as a dough conditioner in order to speed industrial processing. It’s usually not added directly to flour intended for home use, but you’ll find it throughout commercial breads such as pizza dough, bread rolls and pastries.
While some L-cysteine is directly synthesized in laboratories, most of it is extracted from a cheap and abundant natural protein source: human hair. The hair is dissolved in acid and L-cysteine is isolated through a chemical process, then packaged and shipped off to commercial bread producers. Besides human hair, other sources of L-cysteine include chicken feathers, duck feathers, cow horns and petroleum byproducts.
Most of the hair used to make L-cysteine is gathered from the floors of barbershops and hair salons in China, by the way.
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As Kevin Warwick gently squeezed his hand into a fist one day in 2002, a robotic hand came to life 3,400 miles away and mimicked the gesture. The University of Reading cybernetics professor had successfully wired the nerves of his forearm to a computer in New York City’s Columbia University and networked them to a robotic system back in his Reading, England, lab. “My body was effectively extended over the Internet,” Warwick says.
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This record can easily go from turntable to coffee table. Scottish band Found, looking for an inventive new way to release a new single, baked up a sugary idea: to press the 7” record on chocolate.
The band enlisted the help of a friend, baker Ben Milne who, after several failed attempts, managed to successfully created the Willy Wonka-like treat; the entire record, including the paper label, is edible.
While not audiophile quality by any stretch, the chocolate disc plays a decent version of the band’s “Anti-Climb Paint” single.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has lost a financial lifeline.
Since December bans by the world’s major credit card networks, it has been difficult for supporters of the controversial whistleblower to send him donations. But this week, WikiLeaks gained a brief respite with the unwitting help of an Icelandic bank.
The window was quickly closed.
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A nuclear reactor in Japan was forced to shut down due to infiltration of enormous swarms of jellyfish near the power plant.
A similar incident was also reported recently in Israel when millions of jellyfish clogged down the sea-water cooling system of the power plant.
Such massive invasions of the species have raised speculations and scientists are trying to figure out the reason behind such unusual growing trends.
“The several [power plant incidents] that happened recently aren’t enough to indicate a global pattern. They certainly could be coincidental,” LiveScience quoted Monty Graham, a jellyfish biologist and senior marine scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab off the Gulf Coast of Alabama stating.
Recent studies have found out that jellyfish blooming occurs mostly during the summer and spring months.
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