Apparently not content to just go after Facebook, Google has announced plans to bring the image macro to Google+. Rolling out over the coming days, the service will allow users to add text over the top of their images like a veritable meme factory.

IKEA furniture has long been the mainstay of people looking to furnish a home on a budget. Though cheap and highly functional, much of the Swesdish-made furniture is famous for its fabulously limited shelf life. It is not too surprising then, that IKEA should announce their adoption of one-time-use shipping pallets made of cardboard.

At the recent Silver Bullet security conference, Nelson Novaes Neto, chief security officer of UOLDiveo showed off a little method he’d come up with that let him take advantage of both the Facebook structure and the prevalent Facebook culture. Using this method, he managed to convince a web security expert called “SecGirl” to accept a friend request from him. In fact, he says he can get anyone to accept a friend request from him. In 24 hours. How can he do that when it has to be accepted by the target? Well, a little deception goes a long, long way.

One of the best games of the young console video game industry, city destruction simulator Rampage, is currently under development by New Line Cinema to hit the silver screen. The game, which has been remade a few times since its initial arcade release in 1986, featured a small cast of the usual suspects of big monsters from movies that destroy cities — a big gorilla, and a big lizard — and also a giant wolfman because why not. The goal of the game is to destroy buildings by punching them and eat people, and when one city is sufficiently destroyed, the troupe of monsters would move to the next. This is now being developed as a movie.

Bodymetrics, a London-based company with a thing for body scanning, has teamed up with PrimeSense, who you may know from their work with the Kinect, to create a full, 3D body scanner that could have a serious impact on online clothes shopping. The pilot scanner, equipped with 8 PrimeSense 3D cameras, can look its occupant up and down, recording all kinds of information about body size and measurements. After the scanner has collected all that juicy data, the user can upload it to the web where it can be used to aid in clothes shopping.

The pilot model has been deployed at the New Look store in Westfield Stratford shopping complex where it will be used mainly to help ladies find wonderfully shapely jeans, an endeavor I whole-heartedly support. The scanner can take up to 100 measurements, which are then used to figure out what jeans are right for them. Of course, whether or not this fad really catches on depends on how widely scanner units get deployed and how many retailers support the functionality. Bodymetrics seems optimistic about both.

ABC Studios has sold an hour-long police procedural script to FOX based on The Punisher. If you’re wondering how that is possible, ABC Studios is owned by Disney, and Disney owns Marvel. Former Chicago police officer Ed Bernero, who had done previous work on Third Watch and Criminal Minds, will executively produce the series. For Punisher fans hoping this never comes to fruition, I’m sorry to say, FOX has already committed to shooting a pilot, so at the very least, there will be one episode floating around at some point.

The FOX series will focus on NYPD detective Frank Castle, whose alter ego is a vigilante seeking justice for people who slipped through the justice cracks. Punisher will obviously be wary of that description, as the sentence makes it sound like Frank will be on the force by day and murdering criminals by night, rather than not on the force at all and living in a sewer. English is a funny language, though, so we can only hope that the NYPD detective bit is referring to Frank’s past, not his present.

I know that “flying has been the dream of humankind since the beginning of time” and all, but this is just crazy. The man in the wing-suit is Jeb Corliss, and he’s a braver man than I.

(via Reddit)

University of Leeds researcher Dr. Jordan Boyle has created a giant robotic worm that can maneuver around obstacles, modeled after C. elegans nematode; not that thing Doug Funny tried to catch, but the real thing in real life that uses a simple nervous system to control the way it moves. Boyle hopes that the worm could one day be used to maneuver through rubble and deliver rescue equipment to trapped survivors:

“A future version of this robot could potentially navigate through irregular gaps and holes in buildings that had been damaged by fire, explosions or earthquakes.”

Boyle feels that, given the correct “skin,” the next version of the robot should be able to deal with a variety of harsher environments, such as water, mud and snow, and may even be able to navigate around boulders or trees. Head on past the break to see a video of the worm in action, as well as a screenshot showing its size relative to humans.

We’ve been documenting the extremely neat, super creepy quadrocopters for some time, so we all know they’ll aid the machines in overthrowing humanity some day, but now they can do so without taking up much space. Arnaud Taffanel, Tobias Antonsson, and Marcus Eliasson have helped the robot revolution along a smidge by creating the CrazyFlie, a miniature quadrocopter.

The adorable little mechanical spy weighs only 20 grams and measures 8 centimeters from the end of one motor to another. The quadrocopter runs on a Cortex-M3 CPU that takes input from an accelerometer and uses a couple of gyroscopes to keep balance. The quadrocopter is controlled by a 2.4Ghz radio transmitter, uses a small 110 mAh LIPO battery pack from an R/C plane and uses a PC to handle the telemetry. Head on past the break to check out a video of the tiny little spy copter in action.

In the never-ending chase to improve returns on stock portfolios, several are turning to Twitter as a guide to their investing. Chief among them is doctoral student Timm Sprenger, at the Technical University of Munich, who has launched a new site called TweetTrader that allows investors to see in real-time the projected stock sentiments from tweets.

While this could easily be dismissed as a cash-in fad, there is some research to back it up. Sprenger himself wrote a paper on the subject, as reported by GigaOm:

According to Sprenger’s research, the sentiment rankings that his system extracted matched the ebb and flow of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fairly closely, and appeared to predict movements in the market by more than a day. The researchers said that any investor who bought or sold using their analysis in the first half of 2010 would have achieved an average rate of return as high as 15 percent.

The idea is that with millions of people constantly tweeting, TweetTrader reckons that some of those tweets will be about stocks and aggregates accordingly. The result is an overall temperature for the market — bearish or bullish — and some stock-specific information, all taken from tweets. If it operates in a manner similar to the methodology outlined in his research paper, then it is also looking for the best investment information, which Sprenger found was retweeted more often by Twitter users.

Sprenger is not alone in his findings, as others have sought a link between Twitter and stock returns.