Swedish Man Builds a Bird Feeder That Accepts Bottle Caps In Exchange For Food

Sure, a dog that can bring you a beer from the refrigerator is pretty unique, but in today’s world, you have to think bigger than that. Hans Forsburg, who works with robotics on industrial applications, had an idea on how he could put his knowledge and the family of wild birds living in his backyard to good use. So, he trained the magpies to recycle bottle caps in exchange for food using a machine he built from scratch. Whenever a magpie drops a bottle cap into the designated hole, it gets a treat from the dispenser. The main box contains a Raspberry Pi system with a camera to monitor everything, and there are also electronics and detectors hooked up below the table to process the trigger that dispenses the food. Hans explained that he first had to get the birds interested in the feeder to feed them regularly and to persuade them to visit him during their patrols. In the future, he hopes to teach them to pick up other kinds of trash, like cigarette butts. Maybe this will finally put litter bugs to shame, knowing that even animals participate in recycling.

 

 

Continue Reading...

President Kennedy's Brain Is Still Missing

Who stole JFK's brain? That has been a mystery since 1966 when, three years after the president's assassination, it was discovered that his brain, which had been removed during the autopsy and stored in the National Archives, had gone missing. Conspiracy theorists have long suggested the missing organ would have proved Kennedy was not shot from the back by Lee Harvey Oswald, but from the front. The latest theory puts forward a less juicy cover-up. James Swanson, author of End of Days: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, suggests that the president's brain was taken by his younger brother Robert Kennedy, "perhaps to conceal evidence of the true extent of President Kennedy's illnesses, or perhaps to conceal evidence of the number of medications that President Kennedy was taking.” The latest US government documents incredibly seem to agree with this theory, noting that RFK wanted to keep the brain to prevent "public display.”

Continue Reading...

Meet the 7 People Who Hold the Keys To Internet Security

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction: seven keys, held by individuals from all over the world. Together, their keys create a master key, which in turn controls one of the central security measures at the core of the Web. Their responsibility is to restart the system in case of disaster. Since no one trusts anyone completely on the Internet, the only way to create a key that the Internet will trust, and therefore use, is to have no one party control it. The seven individuals were carefully chosen to make sure different parts of the world were represented. So, who are these keyholders? From the United States is Dan Kaminsky, Chief Scientist of White Ops, a firm specializing in detecting malware activity. Other members include Paul Kane from the UK; Bevil Wooding from Trinidad and Tobago; Jiankang Yao of China; Moussa Guebre of Burkina Faso; Norm Ritchie from Canada; and Ondrej Sury of the Czech Republic. The physical keys unlock safe deposit boxes stashed around the world, and inside those boxes are smart key cards. Put the seven smart keys together and you have the master key. The master key is actually computer code that can access the database of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which is responsible for assigning numerical Internet addresses to websites and computers. If someone were to gain control of ICANN’s database, that person would control the Internet. That’s why it’s important that someone outside of ICANN be able to restart the Internet in the case of an extreme disaster.

Continue Reading...

Why Google Is No Longer the Leading Search Engine

Regardless of where you live, what you do for a living, or what your interests are, it’s likely you’ve performed a Google search at some point in your life. The past few months have been bad for Google’s search reputation. Long considered the “gold standard” in search, Google has seen its search results questioned as never before. First there was “fake news,” followed by biased search results. Today, users are complaining that the once-unrivaled search engine is simply serving up lightweight content to answer common questions. Google has become a jungle — a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. If you search for information about China, chances are the first result you will get is the name and address of your nearest Chinese restaurant. When people search for things, they want specific information, not “related” information. After so many failures, people have been have been abandoning Google in droves, choosing instead to use other search engines like Bing and the privacy search engines DuckDuckGo and StartPage. It’s not clear if Google will be able to solve its biggest issue overall: the drip-drip-drip of criticism. While no search engine is perfect, we have to hold Google and other search engines to a high standard and highlight where things clearly go wrong.

Continue Reading...