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Ancient devil frog may have eaten baby dinosaurs | U.S. | Reuters Beelzebufo ampinga was a frog that lived in Madagascar 70 million years ago. At 16 inches long and weighing in at an estimated 10 pounds, this bad boy was so mean he may have fed on newly-hatched dinosaurs. The largest living frog species is the goliath frog of West Africa, a mere 12.5 inches long and 7.2 pounds. Graphic by Kazvorpal . Paleontologist David Krause of Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, is one of the scientists who discovered the bones in 1993. They pieced together Beelzebufo’s skeleton and recently published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . “It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Beelzebufo took down lizards and mammals and smaller frogs, and even — considering its size — possibly hatchling dinosaurs,” Krause said in a telephone interview. Beelzebufo has some modern relatives in South America, more evidence...

Create your very own Semacode tag . What is Semafox ? Semafox is an easy way to create a smart 2D barcode (aka a semacode) using your web browser. There’s nothing to install or uninstall. Bonus… the QRCode reader from KAYWA can decode it. As always, my search for this item resulted in something totally unexpected, in this case a Ruby on Rails book called BLiXy’s PREDOMINATELY IMPROMPTU big book of cryable, injectible ruby . Oddly enough, it is a Ruby tutorial in comic book format. This is a sample entitled When You Wish Upon a Beard .

MYTAGO – do magic with your phone Yes, it’s Yet Another Meatspace Tag. This one requires a free membership to get the tags. Seems like a bit of a privacy hassle. MYTAGO is a little different from QRCode or Shotcode. There’s no phone app. Instead, take a picture of the tag and use one of these methods to get the tag data -a bookmark and description: Take a picture of the tag image. Next time you sync your phone to your PC, upload the jpeg image to the MYTAGO site to get the tag data. Enter the URL of an online tag image and get the tag data. Type the 12 digit code from a tag image into the MYTAGO site to get the tag data. Install an Uploader Tool on your PC. Email the tag image or the 12-digit tag code to yourusername@mytago.com with your PIN as the email subject line. The tag data will be available next time you log into MYTAGO.

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http://www.laptop.org/ It’s here, the ideal gift for early adopters. We’ve been hearing about the $100 Laptop for months now. It seemed like a pipe dream. A laptop for children in third world countries? It would have to be an engineering marvel. The kids often live in houses with dirt floors. They often don’t have electricity. Internet infrastructure – or even telephone service – is non-existent in rural towns. They’ve probably never seen a computer before. They’ll have to learn the OS and the software without the a priori assumptions of a Westerner. Getting computer teachers trained has to be a logistical nightmare! How can this possibly work? The answer is one that wouldn’t occur to most of us… Cooperation on a global scale! It’s the One Laptop Per Child ( OLPC ) program. This program attempted to design, build and distribute laptops for under $100 to children in third world countries. In December OLPC had a prom...

I have to give a speech on evolution…help? – Yahoo! Answers My nephew would tell you that a shark doesn’t turn into a chair. Darwin and Wallace were the first guys to write about evolution. Darwin got his ideas while traveling around the world and seeing all kinds of animals. The ship was called the “Beagle.” You’ll want to talk about Galapagos Island, where he saw different species of birds in a place so far from the continent that they had to have all come from one ancestor. He thought that their beaks were shaped by what food their ancestors ate. Seeds vs. berries vs. bugs, etc. Don’t forget the tortoises. There are different theories of how evolution occurs. **Lamarck** said that species evolve because acquired traits are passed down through the generations. Like giraffes stretching their necks up to get leaves makes their offspring have longer necks. (not true) Darwin believed that evolution was a slow process of population drifting in resp...

In WWII the Germans ran into Russia killing everyone they found. They destroyed entire villages, an entire way of life. In some parts of Russia one in four people died. Every family was affected. However, the Germans awakened a sleeping giant. And when U.S. General George Patton realized just how big Russia was, he wanted our army to march right through Germany and into Russia to get at them while they were still recovering from Germany’s predations. There was a big antisemitic component to this that I don’t wish to go into at this time. Remember that at the same time we were taking back Europe, we were also fighting in the Pacific theater. Japan was throwing Mitsubishi Zeros at us – yup, made by the same company that makes cars and Three Diamonds tuna. The kamakazi pilots literally committed suicide by ramming our ships with planes. They had already been at war with China for years before Pearl Harbor and they were pretty much tapped out. Kamakazi means ...

Popular Science: Nano-Pollution: No Tiny Issue? I’m an electrical engineer and a born skeptic, but through the years the medical profession has shown a particularly unscientific streak when it comes to identifying and treating new illnesses. I have been worried about the environmental and medical effects of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is a catch-all phrase that describes microscopic man-made objects. These come in many shapes and sizes – soccer-ball-shaped cages made of 20 carbon atoms, nanotubes the thickness of a hair. These objects persist in the environment after they’ve been used and disposed of. There has been little, if any, investigation into the effect of exposure to environmental nanotechnology. Please consider the possibility that some, if not all, cases of Morgellons are the result of exposure to tiny man-made objects. These objects can lodge almost invisibly in the skin, causing unexplained lesions. Larger nanotubes or groups of smaller ones may a...

I’ve been playing on Yahoo! Answers and it’s been great for my writer’s block. I’m starting a new category. Renaissance means “rebirth.” It is the rebirth of knowledge and of culture after a thousand years of ignorance. If you control information – DRM! – you control the world. King Charlemagne of France wanted to learn to read, probably the first European king to do so. He started a program to educate the populace of France. The newly-emerging merchant class became patrons of the arts – the Medicis. Up until then, the church supported artists and controlled the subjects of all paintings. Scientists exchanged ideas and this led to new inventions and ultimately to industrialization. One invention, the printing press, made mass production of books possible so that anyone who could learn to read could school himself. Until then books were copied by hand – manuscripts. And since the church was doing the copying, pretty much everyt...