flickering pictures

Sand animation is the art of storytelling through continuously created and recreated images in sand, and there may be no one better at it than Kseniya Simonova. In the video above, she steals the show on Ukraine’s equivalent of the America’s Got Talent TV show, and has the judges and audience in tears as […]

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To voice its displeasure about joint South Korean-U.S. military exercises, North Korea is threatening to shoot down civilian airplanes that venture near its airspace — even if they don’t actually enter it. Russia, China, South Korea and Japan may have something to say about that.
From the BBC:

In the latest of a series of bellicose […]

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This would be hilarious if it weren’t so terrifying.
The BBC reports:

HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant were badly damaged in the crash in heavy seas earlier this month.
[…] The submarines are equipped with sonar to detect other vessels nearby but our correspondent said it be might the case that the anti-sonar devices, meant to hide […]

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IBM has patented an armoured body suit that actually DODGES FREAKING BULLETS. Or at least it will, if it ever gets built.
For you geekier readers out there, here’s an excerpt from the patent explaining how this is supposed to work, via the United States Patent and Trademark Office:

A method of protecting a target from […]

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* = may not actually happen
If someone told you that IBM and the U.S. government were building the world’s most powerful supercomputer — one that could perform a staggering 20 quadrillion calculations per second — what would you think its purpose was? If you guessed curing cancer, studying climate change or running Vista smoothly […]

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Throughout the rebel armies and refugee camps of the world, Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s name has come to symbolize struggle against oppression, and his face just might be the most recognizable on the planet. The fact that Che advocated nuking New York and brutally slaughtered his own men on the slightest suspicion of disloyalty, and […]

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Unless you haven’t turned on a television lately, you know that ten days ago the Israeli army launched a full-scale attack on Hamas forces in Gaza, with the stated aim of halting the barrage of homemade rockets that have been launched into Israeli towns since 2000. As I write this, the fight has left […]

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Why shallots? Why not shallots?
From the Times of India:

India would make Pakistan a barren land in the next six years by blocking its water through construction of dams in violation of the Indus Water Treaty, Pakistan Indus Water Commissioner Jamaat Ali Shah said on Monday.
[…] Dismissing India’s claim that it had stopped Pakistan’s water […]

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If you didn’t know who he was, you’d swear he looked more like a merchant of used cars. Or plaid suits. Or kielbasa maybe. Anything but semi-automatic rifles, grenade launchers, helicopters, surface-to-air missiles, armour-piercing rockets, “ultra light” airplanes, unmanned aerial vehicles, anti-aircraft guns and armoured vehicles, with a client list that includes […]

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You likely know that just before the Beijing Olympics, Russia invaded the neighbouring Republic of Georgia. The move earned widespread international condemnation, and the resulting war of words with the West has been making headlines for weeks.

You may not know that last July the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded the 2014 Winter […]

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