Pentagon

The Null Byte community is all about learning white hat hacking skills. In part, this is because I believe that hacking skills will become the most valuable and important skill set of the 21st century. This week, The U.S. Department of Defense confirmed my belief by announcin ...more

Chemical engineers at Cornell have created a small device that may one day turn troops into real life spider-men. The device would cradle in the palm of the hand, allowing troops to scale walls. It uses an adhesive inspired by the Floridian leaf beetle, an insect that "can adh ...more

Rescuing wounded soldiers in a war zone is extremely dangerous. Again, (previous entry, Futuristic Warefare), the Pentagon turns to scifi technology and robotics for the answer. The current solution is to develop robots that perform as "combat casualty extraction system[s].” A ...more

On May Day in 1971, the US Army rounded up approximately 7,000 protesters into a stadium in Washington, DC that they treated like a make-shift prison camp. Have things changed in the past 40 years? Now a Department of Defense document has been leaked to the Web that details "I ...more

The House of Representatives has approved an amendment to the draconian National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that will limit the Department of Defense from using data collected by unmanned spy drones against Americans. The Amendment, introduced by Congressman Landry (R-L ...more

Curve stitching is a form of string art where smooth curves are created through the use of straight lines. It is taught in many Junior High and High School art classes. I discovered it when my math students started showing me the geometric art they had created. The process of ...more

In recent years, Hollywood has taken a shine to hackers, with hackers appearing in almost every heist or mystery movie now. This can be both good and bad for our profession. As we know, whichever way Hollywood decides to depict our profession is how most people will perceive i ...more

You can do some pretty cool stuff with the golden ratio. The image above is made from taking each quarter-circle in the golden spiral and expanding it into a full circle. In the second image, the spiral and the golden rectangles are overlaid on the the first image, showing how ...more

Math Craft admin Cory Poole posted instructions on How to Make a Cube, Octahedron & Icosahedron from Sonobe Units, plus some great complex models in his article, How to Make a Truncated Icosahedron, Pentakis Dodecahedron & More. These models use the standard sonobe unit and a ...more

It's Monday, time to highlight some of the community submissions posted to the Math Craft corkboard. One of these posts inspired me so much, I think it merits a closer look. Today, I present a "simple" method for making a golden spiral using just a straight edge, a compass, an ...more

Last Thursday's post demonstrated how to Make Yin-Yang Pillow boxes, which were based on equilateral triangles and squares. The units for making these boxes were created by Phillip Chapman-Bell, who runs an amazing origami blog and has a spectacular flickr photostream. Using t ...more

Tonight is the night. Christmas Eve. The night where Santa Claus and his trusty reindeer soar across the skies to deliver presents to all the good little boys and girls around the world. But tell me— do you know where Santa Claus is right now? No? But you could. Santa's work ...more

Uh oh. Somebody screwed up big this time. It has recently been reported that Iraqi insurgents have used $26 software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. drones located in Middle East conflict zones. The drone (a remotely piloted aircraft) is considered one of the U.S. mil ...more

Innovative or downright frightening? Popsci examines five of the world's scariest science experiments-in-progress. Suitcase Nukes "Scientists are trying to develop pure-fusion reactions—bursts that don’t require uranium or plutonium to ignite—for clean energy. But they could ...more

An outbreak of anthrax from contaminated meat in Tanzania sickened dozens of people and moves the danger of this deadly bacteria back into focus. Naturally occurring in animals and the soil, Bacillus anthracis is a rugged bacteria that has a protective outer shell, called a s ...more

As sports fanatics, we know how central instant replay is in professional sports. The NFL proved it to any non-believer many years ago. Now the rest of the world is playing catch up. Yes, I am pointing my fingers at the FIFA idiots who run the World Cup. (UK was robbed against ...more

A raw video shot by Jason McMinn, using a GoPro mounted to a helicopter drone, gives us a look at Apple's new campus, currently under construction in Cupertino. Video: . The 8-minute video shows a huge construction site of "Campus 2," complete with a Pentagon-esque circular bu ...more

In a riveting interview on TruNews Radio, Wednesday, private investigator Doug Hagmann said high-level, reliable sources told him the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is preparing for “massive civil war” in America. “We have problems . . . The federal government is ...more

Holmes’ Psychiatrist Worked for Pentagon- New damning details on the Colorado shooting now surface on a daily basis. The latest is that the highest honors neuroscience student James Holmes was seeing a psychiatrist. Holmes was a patient of Dr. Lynne Fenton at the University o ...more

THE Pentagon's top two officials have revealed that President Barack Obama had asked for preliminary military options to respond to the Syria conflict but the administration still believed diplomatic and economic pressure was the best way to protect Syrians from the Assad gove ...more

An amazing amount of news this week; new proposals and new agreements have sprung up. But so has our "need" to spread our presence. The military warns of another war, while 26 congressmen decry the use of drone strikes. Read on: Plans for Syria? CNN reports this afternoon th ...more

» Video Blogger Documents Expanding TSA expansion. The TSA is continuing its expansion from airports to train stations and other modes of transportation. On Monday, an independent journalist posted a video documenting TSA agents setting up shop at Union Station in Chicago. Oba ...more

Modular origami is a technique that can be used to build some pretty interesting and impressive models of mathematical objects. In modular origami, you combine multiple units folded from single pieces of paper into more complicated forms. The Sonobe unit is a simple example un ...more

Last post, the Sonobe unit was introduced as a way to use multiple copies of a simply folded piece of paper to make geometric objects. In this post, we are going to explore that concept further by making two more geometric models. The first is the truncated icosahedron, which ...more

The "slide-together" paper construction method is a fun and satisfying way to build 3D geometric objects. It only requires paper, scissors or an exacto knife, and some patience. In Tuesday's post, we explored the slide-together method, using ordinary playing cards to build th ...more

There are many different ways and many different apps that allow you to censor a racy photo and then share it to Instagram or Facebook. If you're in a time crunch and don't have the time or the patience to deal with something like Photoshop, then Snapseed is a great and easy a ...more

Halloween is coming up, so many of you may have a need or desire to carve a pumpkin and turn it into a Jack O' Lantern. This week we are going to explore carving our pumpkins into interesting geometric shapes. In this post, we will carve the pumpkins into spherical versions of ...more

There's a set of drawing tools that have been available for a long time on the iPhone that helps you create handwritten notes and sketches. It's great when you need a free-form way to capture your ideas, and now it's even better. Apple added shape recognition in iOS 14 so that ...more

This is a zigzag tensegrity based on a small stellated dodecahedron. There are string pentagons on the outside of the model where the vertices have opened. It is made of thirty units, consisting of a barbecue stick pair with a loop of elastic. The stick pairs are all "floating ...more

I wondered how silly you could get with sonobe, and had a bash at a buckyball, which is a fullerene (technically a truncated isocahedron; you can see a simple model here). It's twelve pentagons—each surrounded by 5 hexagons (20 in total)—making a football shape in England or a ...more

Here's my Sonobe Jasmine Dodecahedron built from Imatfaal's instructions. I built it using "cheap" patterned origami paper (150 cm so I could use Imatfaal's measurements) from Michael's. I then took some silver metallic leafing paint and painted the exposed white parts with s ...more

Came across this gingerbread house while browsing the web. Looks like you bake the gingerbread in hexagons and pentagons, and then "glue" them together with icing. Very cute!