science (Page 18)

The End of Barcodes? Toshiba Unveils Register Scanners that Can See Rather than Scan

I remember on my first day of computer programming class the first thing the teacher said was, “Computers are stupid.”  It was a valuable fact that has served me well in my relationships with these ubiquitous machines.

For instance, if I show a four year old a can of Coke, they can quickly tell me what it is. Whereas for a computer, we have to print a series of lines and numbers on it just so the dumbass box can get up to speed.

It makes you wonder why we have to go through all the trouble of making up barcodes just so a machine can understand what you and I plainly see.  It’s enough to make you think the barcode industry is some sort of insidious freemason plot.  Recently, though, Toshiba has announced a scanner for supermarkets and other shops that will bring this evil syndicate of barcode charlatans to their knees.

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Revisit 20 Photos of Some of The Most Powerful Moments and People in Modern History

Thanks to the proliferation of the internet we can see countless images in an instant with the click of a mouse.  Most of the pictures available online, however, are of cats with misspelled captions or people confusing Joseph Kony with Carl Weathers.

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Could Cool Blue Lights Help to Calm the Suicidal?

Thanks to Japan’s extensive rail system, millions of people are safely and promptly carried to and from to their destinations every day.

For instance, Uchihara Station in Mito city alone sees over 2000 people pass through every day. However, these useful transportation nodes are also plagued by a dark social ill: suicide by train.

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Japanese Shoppers Buying Tomato Juice Like There’s No Tomorrow, Or Like There’s A Fat Tomorrow

Supermarkets all across Japan have been struggling to keep up with demand for that barely-tolerated gritty beverage known as tomato juice.  This is the latest in an ongoing series of food fads many in the country believe to be effective in reducing weight like cabbage and bananas.

At the beginning of February one supermarket in Osaka had a well-stocked shelf of tomato juice daily, most likely catering to the odd person avoiding blood clots or making Bloody Marys.  However, on the weekend of February 10, hordes of shoppers descended on their supply of juice like so many locusts on a farm.  By the 14th, the staff was turning desperate dieters away as new shipments could not reach them in time.
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A Must-See Visual of Japan’s 2011 Earthquakes

On March 11, an unprecedentedly large earthquake struck northern Japan, marking 2011 as a disastrous year for the Japanese. This video shows the fierce power of that quake and the cascade of aftershocks that came in the months to follow as nothing less than horrific. Read More

HAMAMATSU – The Hamamatsu University School of Medicine has partnered with the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute to develop anti-cancer medicine with reduced side effects. The research group announced Tuesday that research and development are progressing and that experiments on animals have yielded positive results.

Cancerous mice were given 1/40 the usual dosage of anti-cancer medicine, and their tumors nearly disappeared by the 19th day of the test. Moreover, the researchers observed no side effects whatsoever.

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