Richard Branson invests in Square
Square launched in 2010 provides an innovative way for individuals and businesses to accept credit card payments on their mobile devices. The company distributes an elegant and easy-to-use card reader and mobile application, which has seen widespread adoption.
Liquid lakes close to moon's skin
Scientists have found the best evidence yet for water just beneath the surface of Jupiter's icy moon, Europa.
Analysis of the moon's surface suggests plumes of warmer water well up beneath its icy shell, melting and fracturing the outer layers.
The results, published in the journal Nature, predict that small lakes exist only 3km below the crust. Any liquid water could represent a potential habitat for life.
From models of magnetic forces, and images of its surface, scientists have long suspected that a giant ocean, roughly 160km (100 miles) deep, lies somewhere between 10-30km beneath the ice crust.
Ninth human foot in a shoe found in Canada
British Columbia has been plagued by human feet, eight of which have recently washed ashore in the province, with another appendage found on the shore of Sasamat Lake near Port Moody on Friday, The Vancouver Sun reports.
This is at least the ninth foot discovered in British Columbia since 2007, according to The National Post. By other counts, there have been a dozen feet found.
The case of the mysterious feet has vexed authorities and the public, with details of the latest find differing from its predecessors in two ways, the CBC says.
The ninth foot, found last Friday by a child at a camp, was in a body of fresh water. All the previous feet, believed to have come from six different people, were in saltwater. And unlike the first eight, which were inside running shoes, the latest foot was in a hiking boot, media outlets said.
We are paid too much, bankers confess in St Paul's survey
A survey of 500 workers in City financial institutions, carried out for the Christian think-tank St Paul's Institute, found that "a substantial number" believed they were overpaid compared with other professions – particularly frontline workers including teachers and, most of all, nurses.
Someone joked, "I'll believe corporations are 'persons' when Texas executes one".
Corporations do all manner of things to benefit the shareholders but sometimes their actions are anti-social (dumping toxins in rivers and aquifers, etc, etc, etc... Such corporate actions are akin to a psychopathy, which is not surprising given they are inhuman/immortal entities.
So why not create laws which effectively execute these 'persons' for heinous crimes against society?
Their family (the shareholders) shouldn't be able to benefit directly from the break-up of the company, rather the proceeds should go to the individuals affected or the community generally.
Clock ticking: GMT could be history
Tiny variations between Earth speed and atomic speed have become a problem for GPS, the global positioning systems and mobile phone networks on which the modern world relies.
"These networks need to be synchronised to the millisecond," Dr Arias said. "We are starting to have parallel definitions of time. Imagine a world where there were two or three definitions of a kilogram."
A meeting in London will look at the implications of abolishing the leap seconds required by GMT/UTC and moving fully to atomic time. That would see atomic time slowly diverge from GMT, by about one minute every 60 to 90 years, or by an hour every 600 years, and there would need to be "leap minutes" a couple of times a century to bring the two in line.
Did You Hear the One About the Bankers?
Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers — securities that it knew were likely to go bust — and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities — that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust.
It doesn’t get any more immoral than this.
As the Securities and Exchange Commission civil complaint noted, in 2007, Citigroup exercised “significant influence” over choosing $500 million of the $1 billion worth of assets in the deal, and the global bank deliberately chose collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s, built from mortgage loans almost sure to fail.
One trader outside Citigroup described the portfolio as resembling something your dog leaves on your neighbor’s lawn.
About 15 hedge funds, investment managers and other firms that invested in the deal lost hundreds of millions of dollars, while Citigroup made $160 million in fees and trading profits.
NASA’s “most important” Jupiter discovery previously published by UFO contactee
According to NASA, the most important discovery of the 1979 Voyager mission to Jupiter was that its moon, Io, was the most volcanically active body in the solar system. The mission also established that there were rings around Jupiter, some comprised of volcanic material from Io, and that the moon Europa was covered in ice
It now appears to have been conclusively proven, in part by skeptical challengers, that Swiss UFO contactee Billy Meier first published that information – five months before NASA’s discovery.
There is a legend which points to previous pre-scientific discovery of astronomical knowledge, such as the Dogon tribe of Africa and their understanding of Sirius as a multiple star system.
In 1976 Robert K. G. Temple wrote a book called The Sirius Mystery arguing that the Dogon's system reveals precise knowledge of cosmological facts only known by the development of modern astronomy, since they appear to know, from Griaule and Dieterlen's account, that Sirius was part of a binary star system, whose second star, Sirius B, a white dwarf, was however completely invisible to the human eye, (just as Digitaria is the smallest grain known to the Dogon), and that it took 50 years to complete its orbit. The existence of Sirius B had only been inferred to exist through mathematical calculations undertaken by Friedrich Bessel in 1844. Temple then argued that the Dogon's information, if traced back to ancient Egyptian sources and myth, indicated an extraterrestrial transmission of knowledge of the stars.
NASA Says Comet Elenin Gone and Should Be Forgotten - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Latest indications are this relatively small comet has broken into even smaller, even less significant, chunks of dust and ice. This trail of piffling particles will remain on the same path as the original comet, completing its unexceptional swing through the inner solar system this fall.
"Elenin did as new comets passing close by the sun do about two percent of the time: It broke apart," said Don Yeomans of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Elenin's remnants will also act as other broken-up comets act. They will trail along in a debris cloud that will follow a well-understood path out of the inner solar system. After that, we won't see the scraps of comet Elenin around these parts for almost 12 millennia."
Sherpas warn ice melt is making Everest 'dangerous'
Sherpa mountaineers in Nepal say a rise in the rate of snow and ice melt on Mount Everest has exposed bare rock faces and made it dangerous to climb.
FLASHBACK: 2002 Everest Melting? High Signs of Climate Change
Homeland Security moves forward with 'pre-crime' detection
A US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document indicates that a controversial program designed to predict whether a person will commit a crime is already being tested on members of the public (DHS employees who "volunteered" to be test subjects).
DHS is building a "prototype screening facility" that it hopes will use factors such as ethnicity, gender, breathing, and heart rate to "detect cues indicative of mal-intent". DHS calls its "pre-crime" system Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST.
Lytro’s Light Field Camera Creates ‘Living’ Pictures
The Lytro camera is a light-field, or plenoptic, camera. An array of micro-lenses sits over the camera’s sensor, capturing all the light in the scene being photographed (11 million rays of light, to be precise). The Lytro then saves your image in a proprietary file format to deliver a “living picture” that you can manipulate on your computer, much like a raw file. By manipulating key attributes, you can effectively change the focus of the image. That’s right: After the image has been taken.
Iran actress sentenced to 90 lashes and one year in jail
Actress Marzieh Vafamehr has been sentenced to a year in jail and 90 lashes for her role in a film about the limits imposed on artists in the Islamic republic, an Iranian opposition website reported Sunday.
"A verdict has been issued for Marzieh Vafamehr, sentencing her to a year in jail and 90 lashes," Kalameh.com reported.
A computer virus has hit the US Predator and Reaper drone fleet that Washington deploys to hunt down militants, logging the keystrokes of pilots remotely flying missions.
The virus was first detected about two weeks ago by the military's Host-Based Security System, but it had not halted missions flown remotely over Afghanistan and other warzones from Nevada's Creech Air Force Base.
Frightened at what she might find, Irene rushed to Holly's bedroom, and flung open the door - but all that met her eyes was Holly, fast asleep in her bed, and her doll sitting on the bed beside her.
Softly closing the door again, she went back to her friends, who were as puzzled as she was. There had certainly been a strange voice - but even as they spoke, they heard it again!
And this time it was much louder - and it was calling to Holly. "Will you get up, Holly Anne - get up and talk to me!"
Spontaneous combustion killed Irish pensioner, inquest rules
Keiran McLoughlin, a West Galeway, Ireland coroner, gave his first spontaneous combustion verdict in 25-year career after man found dead in unexplained circumstances
Irish pensioner, Micheal O' Fatharta, was found burnt to death at his home due to spontaneous human combustion, an inquest has concluded.
The West Galway coroner, Kieran McLoughlin, said there was no other adequate explanation for the death of 76-year-old Michael Faherty, also known as Micheal O'Fatharta. He said it was the first time in his 25 years as a coroner that he had returned such a verdict.
Plane crashes into NSW ferris wheel
Plane crashes into NSW ferris wheel
The pilot of a light plane that crashed into a ferris wheel at a fair on the New South Wales mid-north coast says he simply did not see it.
Two children had to be rescued from a basket at the top of the ferris wheel and Mr Cox and his son-in-law were rescued after dangling from the top of the wheel inside their plane for more than an hour.
Taree Mayor Paul Hogan says it is amazing no one was killed. "I had to open the ceremony and I said we've witnessed a miracle here today," he said.
