We don’t know much about the collective behavior that emerges from panicked crowds — it’s not exactly ethical to start a riot for the sake of science. So this group of researchers turned to the next best thing: Heavy metal concerts
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LOS ANGELES — The death of ex-Los Angeles police officer Christopher Dorner in a fiery standoff with authorities has done little to quell online chatter over a man whose rampage against law enforcement created a small but vocal following.
A Mexican crooner sings a traditional ballad titled “El Matapolicias,” or “The Police Killer,” in a video on Facebook with lyrics paying homage to Dorner’s campaign of revenge against the Los Angeles Police Department.
Sonos is aiming to revolutionize home theater audio by taking all the high quality sound you need and want, and cramming it all into one big ol’ soundbar you can drop at the bottom of your TV. Sure, it’ll work with other Sonos units you have hanging around, the Sonos Playbar is also a starter piece that can stand alone. And for a soundbar, this sucker sounds good. More »
The identities of one very lucky Virginia couple were released Thursday, as they claimed one of the highest Powerball payouts in state history.
Dave and Nancy Honeywell of Fredericksburg, Va., posed for cameras with their massive Powerball check of $217 million, at Richmond International Airport, News4 reports.
The winning numbers in the Feb. 6 multi-state lottery were 5, 27, 36, 38, 41, and the red Powerball number was 12.
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Even though there’s no chance that the asteroid known as DA14 will hit earth on Feb. 15, that doesn’t mean you should ignore it.
The flyby, in which the massive space rock will come within 17,200 miles of our planet, is a unique event, and we’ve compiled a slideshow of essential information about it.
You may have heard that the White House-sized asteroid will whiz by the earth faster than a speeding bullet, but did you that it will come closer to our planet than many orbiting satellites? What about how it’s planning a return trip later this century? And what would happen — hypothetically — if an asteroid the size of DA14 really did hit?
A New York Times reviewer in early February took issue with Tesla’s new “Model S” and panned the distance the electric car could travel between charges. Now, both Tesla and the Times are going the extra mile to prove one another wrong.
After the Times’ review, published on Feb. 8, gave a less-than-stellar look at Tesla’s new East Coast “Supercharging” stations, Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter on Feb. 11 and labeled the review “fake.” On Feb. 13, Tesla released data it says support Musk’s claim.
Scroll down to see Tesla’s charts.
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WASHINGTON — Nothing brings everyone together quite like puppies and kittens.
This goes for lawmakers, too. Thursday’s “Paws for Love” adoption event on Capitol Hill was a bipartisan affair. The Valentine’s Day event hosts, Reps. Jim Moran (D-Va.) and John Campbell (R-Calif.), along with Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), were among the many who gathered to pet cats and dogs from 10 D.C.-area animal shelters.
“There are about seven million animals that are brought to shelters throughout the year, and about half of them have to be euthanized. It’s a shame,” said Moran, who, together with Campbell, co-chairs the Congressional Animal Protection Caucus. But Moran added, “three and half million or so” are adopted from animal shelters each year.
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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) completed its first three-year running cycle at 7:24am today, when its crew removed its beams and entered it into its first long shutdown period. Called LS1 (Long Shutdown 1), the LHC will undergo maintenance and consolidation work, enabling it to run at a higher energy when it is fired back up in 2015.
The maintenance and consolidation work will be performed to the LHC itself, but especially to its entire accelerator complex, which will have the magnet interconnections rebuilt to run at energy level 7TeV per beam. According to the announcement, the CERN complex will resume running in the middle of next year, ahead of the LHC’s scheduled restart in 2015.
CERN’s Director General Rolf Heuer had this to say about the LHC’s long shutdown: “We have every reason to be very satisfied with the LHC’s first three years. The machine, the experiments, the computing facilities and all infrastructures behaved brilliantly, and we have a major scientific discovery in our pocket.”
Over the last three years, the LHC has achieved some monumental things, including discovering what is believed to be the Higgs boson particle, which was made public in summer 2012. In addition, just recently the 100 petabytes of stored data was exceeded, which CERN reports being approximately equal to 700 years of 1080p HD movies.
[via CERN]
Large Hadron Collider completes three-year cycle, goes into long shutdown is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
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A San Francisco restaurant was ordered to pay sizeable back wages and penalties after allegedly forcing employees to work up to 80 hours per week for under $4 per hour — less than half of the city’s minimum wage.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Dick Lee Pastry, a Chinatown dim sum and buffet restaurant, paid $525,000 in the settlement last week, the single largest payment the city has received in its ongoing effort to undermine wage theft.
Wage theft, the illegal withholding of wages or benefits, is widespread in the United States, particularly in urban centers with a high immigrant population. The problem has been significant in San Francisco, especially in the Chinatown neighborhood.
The 2008 financial crisis cost the U.S. economy more than $22 trillion, a study by the Government Accountability Office published Thursday said. The financial reform law that aims to prevent another crisis, by contrast, will cost a fraction of that.
“The 2007-2009 financial crisis, like past financial crises, was associated with not only a steep decline in output but also the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s,” the GAO wrote in the report. The agency said the financial crisis toll on economic output may be as much as $13 trillion — an entire year’s gross domestic product. The office said paper wealth lost by U.S. homeowners totalled $9.1 billion. Additionally, the GAO noted, economic losses associated with increased mortgage foreclosures and higher unemployment since 2008 need to be considered as additional costs.
The report, five years after the collapse of mortgage-focused hedge funds in late-2007 set off a yearlong banking panic and a deep recession, was published as part of a cost-benefit analysis of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law of 2010. The GAO tried to determine if the benefits of preventing a future economic meltdown exceeded the costs of implementing that law.
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