Intrigue is usually focused on her enigmatic smile.

But the Mona Lisa was at the centre of a fresh mystery yesterday after art detectives took a original peek at the masterpiece – and noticed something in her eyes.

Hidden in the murky paint of her pupils are shrimp letters and numbers, placed there by the artist Leonardo da Vinci and revealed only now thanks to high-­magnification techniques.
Under the microscope: Historians in Italy have discovered that by magnifying the eyes of the Mona Lisa painting runt numbers and letters can be seen

Under the microscope: Historians in Italy have discovered that by magnifying the eyes of the Mona Lisa painting miniature numbers and letters can be seen
Hidden symbols: This scrutinize is plan to enjoy L and V, the artist’s iniitals

Hidden symbols: This inspect is idea to occupy L and V, the artist’s initials

Experts say the barely distinguishable letters and numbers describe something of a real-life Da Vinci code.

In Washington, D.C., Metro riders are treated to a recording of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano urging them to narrate suspicious sights to the righteous authorities.

Now, Wal-Mart shoppers across the country will examine Napolitano’s message in a video as they stand in the checkout line.

Why Walmart?

“We are expanding ‘See Something, Say Something’ in a number of venues,” Napolitano tells NPR’s Audie Cornish. “It’s Wal-Mart, it’s Mall of America, it’s different sports and sporting arenas, it’s transit systems. It’s a catchy phrase, but it reminds people that our security is a shared responsibility.”

The “peep Something, Say Something” campaign has had some major successes— most notably earlier this year when a street vendor reported smoke coming out of an SUV parked in unique York’s Times Square, resulting in the arrest and conviction of Pakistani immigrant Faisal Shahzad. But The modern York Times reports the program has resulted in relatively few terror-related arrests.

Creepy?

Homeland security expert Frank Cilluffo says that may be because the message is coming from Washington rather than local officials who are more trusted in their communities.

A price promotes the “If You spy Something, Say Something” campaign at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C.

“I judge having Secretary Napolitano on screens throughout the country provides a bit of a creepy feeling,” he says. “That shouldn’t be from Washington.”

Cilluffo also questions the simplicity of “inspect Something, Say Something.”

“I reflect the message is long on nouns, short on verbs. I assume we need some specificity,” he says. “Ultimately, what are people looking for, what sort of suspicious activity, what actions should they seize, and who do they specifically turn to? ”

More To Do

Cilluffo says Homeland Security officials should be constantly re-evaluating and changing their policies as they glance what works and what doesn’t.

“Homeland security is not an destroy dwelling, it’s a whisk,” he says. “We’ve made some important strides, but I assume we unruffled have more to do.”

gigaom.com – In fact, as Shirky himself admits, the kind of distribution that a newswire engages in has been in decline for some time now. Newspapers aloof push drawl to The Associated Press, hoping to collect the attend of the syndication it offers, but the only ones getting any support are little newspapers and websites who rely on the wire because they can’t create enough whine by themselves. While the web and RSS and other digital syndication models are not perfect, the need to have a combination one-stop shop for reveal and expansive Brother-style copyright cop is dwindling.

Media analyst Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, says that the list of things that the Internet has killed — or is in the process of killing — includes media syndication of the kind that the Associated Press and other newswires are built on. In a search for at what 2011 will bring for media, written for the Nieman Journalism Lab, Shirky says this process, which is “a key allotment of the economic structure of the news business,” is next in line for widespread disruption, because it no longer makes sense in the age of the Internet, when anyone can syndicate assure by pushing a button.

Set aside simply, syndication makes miniature sense in a world with URLs. When news outlets were segmented by geography, having live human beings sitting around in ten thousand separate markets deciding which stories to pull off the wire was a service. Now it’s unprejudiced a cost.

Even the newswire itself realizes this, of course, and it has been trying desperately for the past year or two to salvage some scheme of shoring up the crumbling walls of its dilapidated gatekeeper site. It has railed against Google News (with whom it recently renegotiated an agreement) and threatened to file claims against everyone from the web giant to individual bloggers because of the utilize of even runt excerpts of its enlighten. The AP has also been talking for some time about changing the nature of its relationship with member papers, and keeping some of its impart to itself — requiring members to link to that bellow on the AP website, rather than running it on their occupy sites.

One exciting sub-plot is that Google is working on developing better attribution for yelp that appears in Google News, according to a current blog post entitled “Credit where credit is due.” The notion is that publishers will effect their yell with special tags so that the search engine can stare who originally created a anecdote — and presumably spend this as a device of determining which of the dozens of carbon-copy versions of a myth it should highlight in Google News. Shirky is honest that this could improve things for users, but earn things substantially worse for newspapers and wire services:

Giving credit where credit is due will reward current work, whether scoops, hot news, or current analysis or perspective. This will be tremendous for readers. It may not, however, be so stout for newspapers, or at least not for their revenues, because most of what shows up in a newspaper isn’t novel or original. It’s the first four grafs of something ripped off the wire and lightly re-written, a process repeated countless times a day with no original value being added to the fable.

The AP isn’t completely plain yet, mind you. The service has its bear news staff, who generate their bear stories, honest as Reuters and Bloomberg and other wire services do. Google’s pending change to attribution rules could actually attend the AP when it comes to these internally produced stories — but they could also do gigantic distress to the service at the same time, by shifting the spotlight to member papers who produce the current stories AP normally gets credit for. But the true put a question to is: In a world where the power to syndicate is available to all, does anyone want what AP is selling?

pcmag.com – Robbing a store—is there an app for that? An alleged robber in original London, Connecticut probably wishes there was, as his notion to otherwise pilfer from the city’s Northern Indian restaurant this past Wednesday was foiled when cooks defended the restaurant with genuine weapons versus his iPhone-wielding self.

Yes, that’s apt. Jerome Taylor, 20, allegedly walked into the restaurant in the behind afternoon Wednesday and pulled out his iPhone in an attempt to pass off the expensive hunk of silicon as the cool, hard steel of a gun. His thought went awry when cooks grabbed knives and confronted the would-be robber, who police then said turned into an apologetic, explanation-filled mess.

Taylor then bailed out the restaurant, choosing not to be demonstrate when police arrived around 4:25 p.m. He was captured hours later—after a foot chase—and allegedly confessed to the crime, telling police of his clever way of using an iPhone in site of an sincere weapon to get the deed.

The restaurant’s staff was allegedly moved by Taylor’s tale of needing to catch to procure money for his child. They didn’t want to pursue charges against the would-be robber, but he’s peaceful been charged with both attempted robbery and interfering with police. A family relative is allegedly looking after Taylor’s child, but police are checking up on that one nevertheless.

Maybe Taylor should have tried using the lightsaber noises app?

In what could exhibit to be one of the most ambitious industrial projects ever undertaken, Petrobras is drawing up plans to area giant machinery and robots 6,000 feet under the sea floor, with humans controlling the oil-drilling “city” remotely, the Telegraph reports.

Brazil’s situation oil company is planning to do away with offshore oil drilling platforms and replace them with automated “underwater cities” that extract oil.

The underwater city would be well-behaved of separating oil from sand and water, and even generating its have energy.

“Our target is that we won’t need platforms ten years from now,” Carlos Tadeu Fraga of the Petrobras Research Center told the Telegraph.

Petrobras’ fade comes as aged oil rigs suffer from a damaged reputation in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. But it is not sure whether the novel “underwater cities” would nick the risk of oil spills, and the prospect of entire oil-drilling operations being controlled remotely will likely awe environmental activists.

With oil prices trending upwards for years and many analysts warning of peak oil — the day when oil production begins shocked — energy firms are turning to ever-larger, more unconventional methods for extracting oil.

Canada’s oil sands, for example, have been described as an unprecedented industrial project, with dozens of companies investing more than $100 billion into extracting oil from sands in the north of Alberta. The project — which involves the construction of some of the world’s largest dams and the spend of ample land-stripping equipment — has been described as an ecological nightmare.

Brazil was catapulted to the station of major oil producer in 2006, when a massive deposit of oil was discovered off the country’s Atlantic sail. This week, Petrobras estimated the oil field to believe 8.3 billion barrel of recoverable oil and natural gas.

In all, Brazil has 12.6 billion barrels of recoverable oil, making it the second-largest South American producer after Venezuela.

The Telegraph reports the company will steal the first experimental step in making its underwater cities a reality when it installs machines in its Campos Basin oil field that will be able to separate oil from water.

No estimate of the project’s cost was available.