The same maps that can help you find your way to the mall can help the police predict where meth labs will pop up next. Here’s a look inside the strange, fascinating world of geospatial predictive analysis.
Google Maps is a lifesaver. But the mapping technology behind Google Maps isn’t just good for highway directions and bike routes; it can also find methamphetamine labs and track gang activity. Experts in the growing field of geospatial predictive analytics use cutting-edge algorithms and data analysis techniques that can do everything from predicting terrorist activity to preventing auto theft.
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Talk about getting more than you bargained for. A student ordering a textbook from Amazon received the book, plus a bag of white powder.
Sophia Stockton, who ordered a book on terrorism for one of her classes at MidAmerica Nazarene University in Kansas, received the Amazon shipment and discovered a bag of cocaine that fell out of the pages of the book.
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We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night – but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.
It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.
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Taking a deep breath in that new sports car might not be such a good idea. The new car smell many drivers love actually comes from the off-gassing of chemicals in your car’s interior. And some of the compounds might be toxic.
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Stairwells strewn with debris and walls crumbling slowly to dust, it is the island that New York forgot for 50 years.
Now, in a series of extraordinarily eerie pictures, the lost world of North Brother – quarantine zone, leper colony and centre for drug addicts – has been brought back to life.
It is hard to believe that these echoing corridors and abandoned halls were home to hundreds of patients – or that a criss-cross of tree-lined avenues were once roads.
But the haunting quality of these pictures makes it easy to imagine that it was a place of indescribable misery, which one inmate compared to the notorious black hole of Calcutta.
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Artist Simon Beck must really love the cold weather! Along the frozen lakes of Savoie, France, he spends days plodding through the snow in raquettes (snowshoes), creating these sensational patterns of snow art. Working for 5-9 hours a day, each final piece is typically the size of three soccer fields! The geometric forms range in mathematical patterns and shapes that create stunning, sometimes 3D, designs when viewed from higher levels.
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