Hasta La Gadget!

Candy hearts, weirdly, are just as much subject to whims of popular culture as everything else. As the Valentine’s Day market has exploded, companies producing these chalky tasting novelties have struggled to maintain relevance in a sea of Justin Bieber holiday cards. Seriously, go look at a bag–they have messages like “You Rock” on them now.

This, however, has crossed the line. A 12-year-old in North Highland, CA (outside of Sacramento) found a dirty pink heart in a bag full of otherwise innocuous candy messages of love. The heart reads “Nice t***.” As the local newscast who covered it put it, the blurred out word “refers to a woman’s chest.

Said the 12-year-old who found the heart, “I thought it was kind of shocking.” Yep. The family returned the bag to the manufacturer, who promptly apologized, insisting that its candy usually doesn’t work blue. Video of the family after the jump.

If living well is the best revenge, then surely SEO must be in second place–with a bullet. Take, for example, this young woman, who followed a bad breakup by bombing Google Image search with unflattering photos her ex.

An image search for the ex-boyfriend now turns up the same headphone a slew of times, each with an accompanying unflattering LOLcat-styled caption, such as “To be or not to be? LOLJK I can’t read” (many of the others are a bit too hot for this here gadget blog).

The victim’s mom flipped out at the discovery, turning to the Google Webmaster Help message board for assistance, writing, in part,

My minor son’s ex-girlfriend took a copyrighted picture of him (we own copyright) and uploaded it more than 60 times to a website. On each image she wrote slanderous, defamatory and pornographic captions. The webmaster of the site states he removed the images 6 weeks ago, but Google Search still shows all the images. My son is so stressed out and embarrassed and we’ve done everything we can to get images

The mother added that she has attempted to get Google to take the photos down on account of copyright infringement, to no avail.

You just know that Cody Wilkins was kicking himself the second he realized his phone was missing. Maryland police arrested the 25-year-old after discovering his dropped cell phone at the scene of a robbery in Silver Spring, MD. The suspect apparently jumped out the window after residents came home during a robbery last Friday. Police used the phone to link the robbery to Wilkins.

The cell phone, however, didn’t go with him. The robbery occurred as the home lost power during a snowstorm. Wilkins has also been linked to a number of other robberies.

Dear super creepy people: Great news. We’re one step closer to all getting invisibility cloaks. Scientists have created small cloaking devices capable of bending light around objects. Objects of a similar nature have been created in the laboratory, but they only worked with microwave rays–useless, since we can’t see them anyway.

Last year, scientists managed to cloak nearly visible light, but the affected area was 30 microns–that’s roughly a third the width of a human hair. The current size of the cloaked object is still pretty small–about three-quarters of an inch–but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Scientists managed to cloak that three-dimensional object against white light and red and green laser.

And that’s just the start. As one of the scientists told the press, “”there is actually no limit on the size of the cloak.” The cloaking device was created using calcite prisms with crystals measuring around three-quarters of an inch. Larger prisms can created a larger cloaked area.

The aforementioned scientist again,

The cloaks can be readily scaled up to hide larger objects. It really depends on how large a calcite crystal we can find in nature. According to the literature, the largest calcite crystal has a scale of 7 meters by 7 meters by 2 meters (23 feet by 23 feet by 6.5 feet). Such a crystal would enable the construction of an invisibility cloak that can conceal objects a few meters wide and at least 40 centimeters (16 inches) high.