Sadistically Trolling Neutron Stars with Unintended Acceleration

From inside their bionic exoskeletons, covering the Week in Geek and taking your calls.

Author Profiling

“Beyond the author identification and author verification tasks where the style of individual authors is examined, author profiling distinguishes between classes of authors studying their sociolect aspect, that is, how language is shared by people.”

Science confirms: Online trolls are horrible people (also, sadists!)

“If you have siblings, you no doubt harbor a hint of the sadist; who hasn’t delighted in getting the occasional rise out of a younger brother by petting his cat after he ordered you not to do so? (To take one, ahem, utterly fictional example that is not in any way drawn from my childhood.) But your run-of-the-mill backseat pokers, hair pullers, and forbidden cat petters don’t generally grow up to spend large portions of their time harassing total strangers on the Internet in search of ‘lulz.’ They don’t, in other words, turn into Internet trolls.”

Home Routers Pose Biggest Consumer Cyberthreat

“The remote-access management flaw that allowed TheMoon worm to thrive on Linksys routers is far from the only vulnerability in that particular brand of hardware, though it might be simpler to call all home-based wireless routers gaping holes of insecurity than to list all the flaws in those of just one vendor.”

Neutron star spotted moving 8 million kph, trailing particle jet

“Yesterday, the people who run NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory announced that they had imaged the longest particle jet yet seen in the Milky Way. The jet, seen in the lower right in the image above, has reached this length because its source, a neutron star known as IGR J11014-6103, also happens to be one of the fastest moving neutron stars ever spotted, possibly traveling as fast as eight million kilometers an hour.”

The Future of Sports Photography: Drones

Drones are being used to film ski and snowboarding events at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, as you may have noticed. But the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for sports photography is far from a passing gimmick. In fact, you should expect more and more athletic events to be filmed by drone.

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Remo Masina isn’t involved in shooting the Olympics, but he’s already familiar with drones’ finesse for filming winter sports: He uses them to film skiers for commercials. The drones are quieter and cheaper than a manned helicopter (though they can still cost up to $40,000), he told the Associated Press, and they allow the filmmaker to get much closer to his subject.

WhatsApp: 2nd Biggest Tech Acquisition of All Time

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to drop a cool $16 billion on WhatsApp, a messaging service with 450 million users. It was a mind-boggling sum, even if you buy into Facebook’s argument that WhatsApp (which will continue to operate as an independent subsidiary, at least for the moment) will soon connect a billion people around the world. But it wasn’t the biggest tech acquisition of all time: that honor belongs to Hewlett-Packard, which bought Compaq for (an inflation-adjusted) $33.4 billion in 2001.

3D Systems Prints First Hybrid Robotic Exoskeleton

3D Systems today announced that it recently debuted the first ever 3D printed hybrid Exoskeleton robotic suit in collaboration with EksoBionics at a Singularity University-hosted event in Budapest. Amanda Boxtel acted as the test pilot for this venture. On Feb. 27, 1992, Amanda Boxtel took a fall while skiing in Aspen, CO that culminated in a freak somersault. The accident left her paralyzed from the waist down. At the hospital, Boxtel’s doctor told her she would never walk again. Despite her paralysis, the hybrid 3D printed robotic suit enabled Amanda to stand tall and walk throughout Budapest.

A UK Surgeon Successfully 3D Printed And Implanted A Pelvis

The procedure, which happened three years ago, was an unrivaled success. The man has been walking with a cane and remains happy with the results.

GeekBit: The Evolution of Cellphones - Video

This videos shows the evolution of cell phones over the last 40 years.

Stack Overflow Could Explain Toyota Vehicles' Unintended Acceleration

“Due to recursion overwriting critical data past the end of the stack and into the real time operating system memory area, the throttle was left in an open state and the process that controlled the throttle was terminated.”