Monkey See, Monkey Do
Award-winning nature photographer Marsel van Oosten ventures to the hot springs in Jigokudani, Japan, every winter to capture images of wildlife, including cranes, swans, eagles and snow monkeys. Over the years, the once relatively unknown location grew in popularity, now bustling with visitors and photographers. As one tourist brought her iPhone ever closer to her subject, a macaque monkey snatched it from her and made a getaway to the middle of the hot spring.Van Oosten’s picture of the event was nominated for the People’s Choice Award in the U.K. Natural History Museum’s 2014 Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest.
Source: 500px.com. photo by Marsel van Oosten
Finding a Smartphone in a Haystack
Avalanche and earthquake victims could have a new lifeline in the form of a planelike drone developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Even if the phone’s owner can’t make a call, the drone detects the phone’s Wi-Fi signal, triangulating its location within 30 feet. The drone could give people trapped under rubble new hope, as it can pick up weaker signals too, helping direct rescue personnel’s search efforts. Source: GigaomCAPTCHA Gets Gamified
Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham are threatening to make the text CAPTCHA code obsolete. Developed to differentiate human users from computers, CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, requires users to reproduce letters and numbers that appear in distorted form. The method, however, is vulnerable to a relay attack in which people are paid to enter the codes.Dynamic cognitive game (DCG) CAPTCHAs ask users to interact with images, and the technology shows promise in warding off relay attacks as well as machine-based hacking attempts. DCGs ask users to grab a particular image, like a boat, and drag and drop it into a nearby dock. Research on the gamelike challenges is supported in part by Comcast and a National Science Foundation grant.
Source: Science Daily