Live Action Dora The Explorer [Video]

Can you say sniper no sniping 3 times?

Warning: if you think seeing Dora handling a shotgun will scar you for life, please don’t watch this video!

Lady Squall (Final Fantasy VIII) Cosplay [Pic]

Featured Short Movie: Internet Story [Video]

A fast-paced and experimental film told through fragments of internet videos, animations, blogs and news articles.

A series of shocking events unfolds when a young man creates a public treasure hunt for his own amusement and a video blogger decides to pursue the riddles across country.

[Internet Story]

Crap IT People Have to Deal With [Pic]

[Failblog]

Brits get low key take on X-Files style mystery

Residents of a British street have been baffled by their electronic car key fobs suddenly stopping working. It’s led to a host of theories, some more outlandish than others.

The BBC reports that the key fobs in Dimond Road, Southampton stopped working last Saturday. It appears to be some sort of problem with interference with the frequencies on which the fobs transmit to the vehicles, but there’s no clear culprit. A nearby airport hasn’t changed any frequencies lately, and there’s no evidence to back a theory that a cellphone tower could be responsible.

Posters at one conspiracy theory forum, possibly with different levels of seriousness or humor, have suggested explanations including alien interference, an experiment with electromagnetic pulses, pranksters using remote controls, a secret military frequency, buried Roman lead reacting with the soil.

A similar incident last year in another British town, Windermere, took many months to solve, during which it’s reported some security vans were temporarily stranded. It eventually became clear the interference was caused by hand-held terminals at a nearby restaurant. The owner explained that the terminals had been supplied at a pre-set frequency but he was able to have the manufacturers change it to solve the problem.

That may not be the solution in the Southampton case as there don’t appear to be any retail outlets in the immediate vicinity. Another possible explanation is the one that caused a similar incident in a parking lot in 2007, namely a fault with one of the cars that caused it to transmit blocking signals.

(Image credit: Google Maps)

Round-Up: Pluto vs. Eris, Oil Spills and Time-Travel [SCIENCE!]

Pluto Might Be the Largest Dwarf Planet, After All

Eris, the dwarf planet that ruined everything.

Pluto’s still not a planet, but it’s probably the largest dwarf planet now, and that’s something… right? The discovery of Eris in 2005 led to Pluto’s demise as titleholder of our ninth planet. But new measurements indicate that Eris, once thought to be much larger than Pluto, may actually be the same size or a bit smaller.

Bruno Sicardy of the Paris Observatory and the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in France and his colleagues derived the smaller size for Eris from a 2010 celestial alignment called an occultation. On November 6 of that year, the dwarf planet temporarily blotted out the light of a background star and cast a small shadow on Earth. By comparing the shadow’s size at two different sites in Chile, the researchers estimated that the dwarf planet is 2,326 kilometers in diameter. In 2009 Sicardy and his colleagues had calculated that Pluto’s diameter is at least 2,338 kilometers, although some earlier estimates for dwarf planet’s size ran a bit lower. Regardless of which dwarf planet holds the slight edge in terms of diameter, it now appears that Pluto and Eris are near-equals in terms of size. The findings have been submitted for publication in Nature.

Winner of Million-Dollar X Challenge Cleans Up Oil Spills Three Times Better Than Existing Tech

In what appears to be evidence for the truth behind the adage “necessity is the mother of invention,” the winning team from The Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge has tripled efficiency in our most modern and effective oil cleaning tech. With the Deepwater Horizon explosion still wreaking havoc in the Gulf of Mexico, it is apparent and imperative that our ability to clean up after ourselves be improved. To help speed things along, the Wendy Schmidt promised $1million to the team who could improve cleanup rates by about two times current maximums. Elastec/American Marine blew thse numbers out of the water, achieving triple efficincy in a project that took under a year to coordinate.

Elastec/American Marine nearly doubled the gallons-per-minute requirement for the X Prize. But perhaps a better way of looking at it is through the lens of the state-of-the-art. In just one year’s dedicated time, NOFI found a way to double the efficiency of the industry’s best available surface oil skimmers. Elastec/American Marine tripled it, doing more in a handful of months than private industry had done in the two decades since the Exxon Valdez disaster.