Cody Taylor

eldavojohn writes “What do you do when a foreign species has been introduced to your land from another continent? Bring over the natural predator from the other continent. Scientists in Texas have introduced four kinds of phorid flies from South America to fight fire ants. These USDA approved flies dive bomb ants and lay an egg inside the ant. The maggot hatches and eats away juicy tender delicious ant brain until the ant is nothing more than a zombie that wanders around for two weeks before the head falls off and the ant dies. A couple of these flies will cause the ants to modify their behavior and this will be a very slow acting solution to curb the billion in damage these ants do to Texas cattle ranches and–oddly enough–electrical equipment like circuit breakers. You may remember zombifying parasites hitting insects like cockroaches.”

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The good old days of tons of something for pretty much nothing are coming to an end, and there’s little we can do to stop it.

There are lots of different methods to format nice HTML lists that is used in most web designs not only for navigation menu (vertical or horizontal) but for formatting many design blocks in a stylish and elegant manner.

The UK government is finalizing its approach to dealing with online copyright infringement. Internet disconnections have been publicly taken off the table, but UK creative industries are now lobbying hard for disconnection as the report nears completion. ISPs argue that better licensing and business models would do a better job of solving the probl

Combing through more than two dozen public and private resources on the Web, this author not only found a vast amount of their private information available (name, address, SS#, identifying photographs, family info) but also a fair amount of inaccuracies and outdated details.

An anonymous reader writes “Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway and the founder of the FIRST Robotics Competition has been granted Patent 7,507,169, that describes one of the previous competitions. The main invention is a ranking system that ranks teams not only on their score, but their opponents’ score, so teams are rewarded for helping their opponents score more. It is claimed that this ranking system promotes the made up phrases ‘coopertition’ and ‘gracious professionalism.’ It had three rejections, and even more appeals, before finally being accepted six years after the first application. While a majority of his 130 patents are for things related to his inventions, which are as diverse as medical equipment, unique uses for Stirling engines, and transportation, this one seems a little dubious. Dean opposes the Patent Reform Act of 2009, which would make it easier to overturn patents after they are granted.”

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KentuckyFC writes “Metamaterials are synthetic substances that can steer light in any way imaginable. Their most famous incarnation is in invisibility cloaks which work by steering light around a region of space making any object inside that region invisible. But invisibility is just the start. A team of physicists in Hong Kong (the same guys who recently worked out how to cloak objects at a distance) have worked out how to create a cloak that makes one object look like another. Instead of steering light to make a region of space look empty, the illusion cloak manipulates light in a way that makes a region of space look as if it contains a specific object. So any object within that region of space, a mouse say, takes on the appearance of an elephant.”

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