Hasta La Gadget!

WASHINGTON — After decades of maintaining a minimal nuclear force, China has re-engineered many of its long-range ballistic missiles to carry multiple warheads, a step that federal officials and policy analysts say appears designed to give pause to the United States as it prepares to deploy more robust missile defenses in the Pacific.

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Hearts are too valuable to risk—which is why the NSF announced Friday that it would be funneling millions of dollars into a new effort to develop virtual hearts for medical device development and testing.

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Venus might not be top of the list for manned missions, but a flock of floating explorers – part drone, part blimp – for its atmosphere are are on the drawing board. Drone-maker Northrop Grumman wants to send its Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform (VAMP) concept, a long-lived, maneuverable, semi-buoyant research platform that would soar through Venus’ skies around 30-40 miles … Continue reading

It’s long been known that you can manually figure out the combination that unlocks any given 40-digit Master combination lock. But hacker Samy Kamkar discovered that the three numbers that open such locks are related to each other. This allowed him to build a compact device that can crack such locks open in a few minutes, or even within seconds.

Samy calls his lock cracker the Combo Breaker. It’s main components are a stepper motor, a rotary encoder, an Arduino Nano and a Samy’s custom designed and 3D printed handle to grip the lock’s dial.

The Combo Breaker can guess all three numbers on its own within a few minutes, but if you manually find the first number that makes the dial get stuck when you pull on the shackle, then Samy’s device can open the Master combination lock within 30 seconds, using a maximum of only eight attempts. To be more precise, Samy’s technique will give you the exact first and third numbers of the combination, plus eight possible second numbers. Samy made an online calculator that demonstrates his technique, which you can see him demonstrate below:

High school kids hate him! Head to Samy’s blog to find out how he built the Combo Breaker. Check out his teardown of a Master combination lock or his Wonder HowTo article if you’d like to find out how he came up with his shortcut. And don’t buy this lock anymore.

[via Gizmodo]

Samsung’s new payment service may soon go live. In March when the company unveiled its two new flagship handsets it also announced a new payments service called Samsung Pay, think of it as a rival for the Apple Pay, and it’s certainly meant to be one. However the company itself has not officially revealed when its new service will be launched.

Samsung has started sending out emails to users in order to notify them that the Wallet app will be discontinued next month, it doesn’t provide an explanation for this action in the emails, only saying that Samsung Wallet will be discontinued at the end of next month. However the reason why it’s doing this is pretty clear, it’s making up space for its new payments service.

The company has notified users that coupons clipped in the Samsung Wallet app will not function after June 30th as the service will be discontinued, moreover tickets or reservations stored in the service will only remain accessible from partners’ apps.

Samsung Wallet was meant more as a service for storing membership cards, coupons, boarding passes etc. It teamed up with companies like American Express, Expedia, United Airlines and many others to integrated their services in Wallet.

It seems though that the company wants to dedicate its full attention to making sure that Samsung Pay beats Apple Pay in the market, and perhaps that’s why Samsung Wallet has to bite the dust. Godspeed.

Samsung Pay Launch Is Reportedly Not That Far Off , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.