FORT PIERCE, Fla. (AP) — A Florida county has grand plans to ditch its dump, generate electricity and help build roads — all by vaporizing garbage at temperatures hotter than the sun.

The $425 million facility expected to be built in St. Lucie County will use lightning-like plasma arcs to turn trash into gas and rock-like material. It will be the first such plant in the nation operating on such a massive scale and the largest in the world.

Supporters say the process is cleaner than traditional trash incineration, though skeptics question whether the technology can meet the lofty expectations.

The 100,000-square-foot plant, slated to be operational in two years, is expected to vaporize 3,000 tons of garbage a day. County officials estimate their entire landfill — 4.3 million tons of trash collected since 1978 — will be gone in 18 years.

No byproduct will go unused, according to Geoplasma, the Atlanta-based company building and paying for the plant.

FL County To Incinerate Trash With Plasma

State police hid eight ounces of plastic explosives on the back bumper of a truck Wednesday night during a drill for bomb sniffing dogs at Logan International Airport.

Before the drill had been finished, however, a Massport employee drove off in the white pickup truck, unaware that a clump of the explosive Semtex had been slapped on the back. The employee only drove about 1.5 miles, according Lieutenant Sharon Costine, but it was far enough for clay-like explosive to fall.

State Police today were still searching for the Semtex, which they say can’t explode without an ignition device, Costine said.

"It isn't dangerous if you bump it or if you drop it," Costine said. "We are still looking for it."

The search today was confined along a non-residential section of Harborside Drive and remained active late this afternoon. Officials had retraced the route that the employee drove and were in the process of checking street sweeping machines, which had been cleaning roads in the area, Costine said.

The explosive was lost or stolen when State Police assigned to Massport's Troop F were conducting the K-9 training exercise in a secure parking area by the airport and Massport headquarters.

Freakin' Awesome.

MA State Police Loose Plastic Explosive

Seems that BP may have suppressed a few complaints about corrosion which lead to eventual failure of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and a rather large oil spill.

Say it with me... Pipeline out of commission, gas prices on the rise...

Oil Pipeline Corrosion A Problem

Designed and built by Airquee Ltd, The pub is the latest development
from Andi Francis, who also created the worlds first Inflatable Church.

The pub is 40ft long, 19ft wide and 22ft high. It can be customised
for use as a fully working pub, with room for a bar and 30 customers.

The pub can be erected in 10 minutes with 2 small blowers
and can be sited on any firm, level surface.

An internal aluminium frame can be used to support additional
lighting, sound systems and also doubles as a safety barrier.

Inflatable Pub

This article scares me. But moreso the links within, particularly to the 2,300 cameras covering Manhattan....

Internet Attached Cameras

Truth is getting stranger than fiction.

Wrestling for Jesus

Startling research aimed at determining why Russians are among the worse drivers in Europe has revealed that it can be largely attributed to a penchant for getting their ends away while behind the wheel, Mosnews reports.

Indeed, around 25 per cent of those quizzed for the Goodyear poll admitted to mobile rumpy-pumpy, and a fair percentage of those also admitted driving while drunk and chatting on the mobile, jumping red lights, eschewing the seatbelt and breaking the speed limit. Specifically, 30 per cent have driven while drunk, while 36 per cent "regularly" exceed the speed limit.

25% of all Russians get busy behind the wheel

A new security technique promises to uniquely identify any WiFi device in the world, so hackers cannot hide behind a fake MAC address.

Every wireless device has a unique signal "fingerprint" produced by variations produced in the manufacturing process for silicon components, according to Dr Jeyanthi Hall, of Carleton University in Ottawa.

As a doctoral student, Dr Hall analysed the RF signals of fifteen devices from six manufacturers, and found it was possible to distinguish clearly, even between devices from the same manufacturer.

Using "transceiverprints," Dr Hall got a detection rate of 95 percent, and a false positive rate of zero, according to papers submitted to various conferences, including IEEE events on wireless and security.

She achieved this reliability in the task of "recognising" the transceiverprint from a pre-recorded set - a job which could usefully be built into a wireless IDS, she says in the paper. Beyond this, things could get even more exciting: "It would be interesting to identify the correct transceiver (from the set of all profiled transceivers), using the same set of transceiverprints," she goes on.

Hall used a probabilistic neural network to work out the transceiverprint and compare it with stored prints.

Although the signal processing equipment and analysis software is specialised at present (see a brief by account software vendor Mathworks) it could eventually be delivered on a more general-purpose signal processer system, Dr Hall hopes, according to a report in Electronic Engineering Times.

Limiting network access to specific devices using MACs has been a possible security technique for some time, and is included in many WiFi systems.

However, it has mostly been dismissed by security professionals, as it is easy to spoof the MAC address of a device. Comparing the MAC to a pre-recorded transceiverprint would make an access control list based on devices feasible again.

Nothing new  here. Just a new application of existing technology.

Unique Fingerprints Identify Wireless Users

Because who needs a Ph.D. to do crazy things with DNA? ;-)

DNAHack -- Amateur Genetic Engineering

September 04, 2006 02:14pm
Article from: The Courier-Mail

THE Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, is dead.

He was killed in a freak accident in Cairns, police sources said. It is understood he was killed by a sting-ray barb that went through his chest.

He was swimming off the Low Isles at Port Douglas filming an underwater documentary and that's when it occured.

Ambulance officers confirmed they attended a reef fatality this morning at Batt Reef off Port Douglas.

Wow. What an unexpected twist.

Steve Irwin Killed By Sting Ray