Posts
May 21, 2013
+
Microsoft Xbox One Microsoft At last: a game console that doesn't require gaming. "PlayStation" is a literal description of what you do with it: it's a station at which you play. Nintendo has released systems with "game" in the name--Game Boy, GameCube. But Xbox doesn't mean much of anything. Originally it stood for, in charming Microsoft fashion, "DirectX Box," as it used the familiar DirectX graphics technology. Now? It's just a box. Who knows what it does? And that's fitting, because the
[…]
+
Irish Lumper Potato The Irish lumper, the breed of potato that was hit by the Irish Potato Famine pathogen, nearly disappeared. In 2008, it was bred back into existence as an heirloom potato. GOAD One of the most deadly pathogens in human history has been pinpointed. It's widely acknowledged that Phytophthora infestans, a sort of fungus-like pathogen also known as potato blight, was responsible for the mid-19th-century potato famine that reduced Ireland's population, through death and
[…]
May 20, 2013
+
Darlingtonia californica, subspecies Yahoonica Wikimedia Commons The precise method by which Yahoo! digests and dissolves its prey. Yahoo! is a carnivorous plant whose prey-trapping mechanism features a deep cavity filled with liquid, known as a pitfall trap. Startups, such as Flickr, Tumblr, and Del.icio.us, are attracted to the cavity formed by the cupped leaf, often by visual lures such as anthocyanin pigments and nectar bribes. Yahoo!'s rim (peristome) is slippery, when moistened by
[…]
+
Yahooblr via Tumblr Yahoo, a service people used to use, spends lots and lots of money on Tumblr, a service people use now. And by "people" we mean "teens." Hence the purchase. Marissa Mayer, the new-ish CEO of Yahoo, announced this morning (though the purchase had been approved by Yahoo's board a few days earlier) that Yahoo will purchase Tumblr, the image-centric blogging and social network beloved by, mostly, teens. Her post was illustrated with a GIF, and posted on Tumblr. David Karp, the
[…]
+
Cool Biceps Wikimedia Commons Does physical strength lead to conservative beliefs? A new study in the journal Psychological Science took a look at the relationship between physical strength and political beliefs. More specifically, the study sought to answer a question: is there any correlation between "fighting ability" and opinions on redistribution of wealth? Conducted by researchers at Denmark's Aarhus University and the University of California, Santa Cruz, the study surveyed subjects by
[…]
May 17, 2013
+
Petcube helps your cat stay active/frustrated by chasing a laser pointer. Playing a game of "chase the laser pointer" with a cat is one of the most compelling reasons to get a cat in the first place. But what to do when you go to work, or on a trip? How will you induce hilarious chirping and pouncing then? Petcube, a little gadget currently in pre-production, couples a Wi-Fi-connected 720p camera with a laser pointer. Through either a website or an app (currently apps are planned for iOS and
[…]
May 16, 2013
+
Google Glass Sans Person Google Our first clue at how people might actually use Google Glass in the real world. Google announced today at the I/O developer conference in California that the first wave of apps, aside from the few that had already been announced, are here. Google Glass is a first-generation beta product. The way Google would like you to think of it is like the original iPhone: a totally new platform that won't really come into its own until developers can release apps for it.
[…]
+
8:30 PM | Earth's Core Is Weaker Than We Thought
Earth's Core Wikimedia Commons Like so many of our own! No judgments, Earth. A new study in Nature Geoscience, from two Stanford researchers, indicates that our planet's super-dense, super strong core may not be as strong as we'd thought. It's very difficult to replicate the kind of ultra-high-pressure environment of Earth's iron core; we can't dig down there and monitor it, so researchers have relied on reading and tracking seismic waves and extrapolating other information from there.
[…]
May 15, 2013
+
New Google Maps, a totally new GChat, new features for Android, and more. Google announced a bunch of stuff today at the annual I/O conference in California. The announcements are mostly updates--nothing as exciting as the introduction of Google Glass or a new tablet--but there are lots of changes that'll affect how you compute, and that give an idea of how Google plans to evolve in the near future. Here's what we saw: Maps Can Think. One of Google's best tactics of late is taking what it
[…]
+
Samsung Galaxy S4, With Skin Samsung Today at Google's I/O conference, stock Android seemed like a pricey luxury. Why? Today at the 2013 Google I/O conference in California, Google announced that the company would begin selling the Samsung Galaxy S4, the newest in the most successful Android phone line on the planet, themselves. When you buy a Galaxy S4 from your wireless carrier or a retail store, it comes with a skin called TouchWiz and a two-year contract. With Google, you'll pay more, but
[…]
+
4:22 PM | The Drone Camera Revolution Is Here
Drone Photography Paul Bunyard Focusing on drones as devices of scary military surveillance and execution ignores the entire field of consumer drones--which are, basically, next-generation remote-controlled helicopters. One of the fields that's seeing the most benefit from the new world of drones is photography--suddenly, combined with tiny, amazingly capable cameras, drones can accomplish what in years past you'd need tens of thousands of dollars of crane setups and cameras to do--for only a
[…]
May 13, 2013
+
Wikipedia Edits via Recent Changes Map Here are 10 great, odd edits from the past 10 minutes. At any given moment, somebody is almost certainly editing something on Wikipedia. Will that person have any expertise on the subject? Who knows! (For the story of one of those editors, click here.) The edits are invisible to your average Wikipedia visitor, though the edit history is publicly viewable via the "Talk" tab on each page. A new tool brings those edits to the forefront, pinning each edit to
[…]
+
Jennie Lamere via Mother Jones I DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHO HAD TO PACK THEIR KNIVES AND GO Twivo is a simple idea: protect yourself from spoilers by censoring references to a given TV show until you can get home and catch up. It's a nice little tool with a great backstory: it was created in only 10 hours by a high school student, who was the only female entrant to finish her project in a local hackathon. Jennie Lamere, a 17-year-old high school student in Nashua, New Hampshire, was the only female
[…]
May 10, 2013
+
Debit Card Swipe Dan Nosowitz If we weren't all using 1960s technology to conduct financial transactions, maybe we wouldn't get heisted. Yesterday, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn revealed that an international team of thieves had stolen close to $45 million in the biggest ATM fraud case in history. The heist required some hacking and a lot of orchestration, so news organizations and police forces have been calling it high-tech and "sophisticated." Which it isn't, really! It's possible because
[…]
May 09, 2013
+
The Liberator 3-D Printed Gun Defense Distributed Defense Distributed, the Texas company that created the plans for the Liberator, a 3-D-printed gun, have received a letter to take the plans down from the internet, reports Betabeat. If you're wondering why the State Department is involved and not the ATF or the larger Justice Department, well, there's a reason. The State Department cited the International Traffic in Arms Regulation for the request. ITAR is a series of regulations on exports;
[…]
+
Snapchat: Fun! Snapchat Snapchat is much more than just an encrypted messaging service. It's a form of communication that gives us a break from the way we usually communicate. Snapchat, a messaging service which allows users to send photos and videos that self-destruct after a few seconds, has a flaw deep in its DNA. This morning, a 24-year-old named Richard Hickman, of Decipher Forensics, a company specializing in data recovery, found that he could recover some data he wasn't supposed to.
[…]
+
Squirrel Monkey The squirrel monkey, a New World monkey, would be pretty adorable to have perched on your white picket fence. Alas, it is not to be. Wikimedia Commons If only they had developed monkey boats. Tiny little monkey boats! Oh man I wish they had monkey boats. The infamous "Mystery Monkey of Tampa," an escaped rhesus macaque, was captured back in October. The rhesus macaque is not a rare monkey; it's adapted to human society better than most, can survive on all kinds of foods, and can
[…]
+
Earl Tablet Earl Earl is a new kind of tablet--designed specifically for use in the wild. Android tablets are mostly dull; Asus, Samsung, Sony, and the rest are typically just pumping out versions of the same platform. Earl, from a startup called Sqigle (sic), is quite a bit different: it's designed top to bottom for use in the wild. To that end, it starts off with an electrophoretic display, an exceedingly low-power technology that's used in the black-and-white ebook readers like the Kindle
[…]
May 08, 2013
+
The Liberator 3D Printed Gun, disassembled The only vital metal component? A nail, used as a firing pin. Defense Distributed How do you ban the coupling of a digital file and a legal technology? California State Senator Leland Yee (who represents the western part of San Francisco) announced that he will pursue outlawing 3-D-printed weaponry, in the wake of the first 3-D-printed gun to be successfully fired. This weekend, a Texas group called Defense Distributed created the plans for a
[…]
+
The Animal Kingdom Wikimedia Commons You might be surprised at the answer! Or you might not. I don't know your depth of knowledge of animal sensory organs. Our old friend, the bat, is the king of extreme hearing in the mammalian world. It uses echolocation, emitting ultrasonic sounds and measuring the length of time before the sounds echo back, in order to locate prey. But it turns out there's an animal that uses an even more extreme variety of sounds--and it's theorized that it's a direct
[…]
+
Terrafugia TF-X Terrafugia Vertical takeoff. Hybrid power. Automatic landing. See it in action as it flies and drives. We've been following the progress of Terrafugia, the Massachusetts-based creator of several (prototype) flying cars, for a while, despite the company never having actually released one. But that hasn't stopped the company from "announcing its vision for the future of personal transportation": a plug-in flying car. Terrafugia's Transition is the company's most famous creation.
[…]
May 07, 2013
+
Driving a super-powerful ice-breaking vessel through huge sheets of ice has never looked so serene. To delve deep into the arctic or antarctic regions, you've got to have an icebreaker. Icebreakers are big, burly boats with a few adaptations to, well, break the ice that lies in front of them: a reinforced hull, a more pointed shape that'll break and move the ice out of the way efficiently, and enough power to crush thick ice sheets. Expeditions on icebreakers are usually pretty slow going;
[…]
+
Gamma-ray Burst (Artist's Conception) Wikimedia Commons Look at a lightbulb. Now imagine 35 billion lightbulbs. If you weren't looking at the constellation Leo very early on Saturday morning, you probably missed the brightest explosion NASA scientists have ever observed. It was three times as bright as the next-brightest explosion, and a ridiculous, basically unimaginable 35 billion times brighter than visible light. The explosion was a gamma-ray burst, or GRB, a type of event that's the
[…]
+
New Sundew Species Mikio Watanabe "Meat-eating," not "man-eating." Still cool though. According to Japan Times, a new species of carnivorous plant has been found in Aichi Prefecture, on the central-southern coast of Japan's main island. The Japan Times calls it a "pitcher plant," which it is not; as a species related to (and mistaken for) Drosera indica, it's actually a sundew. Sundews and pitcher plants are both carnivorous, and largely insectivorous, but they're very different otherwise.
[…]
+
Gross Big Mac Wikimedia Commons Over the past 14 years, fast food has gone from "awful, health-wise" to "awful, health-wise." A new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine takes a look at a host of popular American fast-food establishments to see if they've improved, nutritionally, in the past decade and a half. They have! Technically! Also technically: they are still way below average. The team used the Healthy Eating Index, a tool created by the US Department of Agriculture that
[…]
+
1:00 PM | Google Glass Isn't A Surveillance Device
Google Glass Sans Person GoogleFears about Google Glass's surveillance potential are, if not unfounded, at least a little misguided. A petition created late last week on the White House's very serious petitions site requests that Google Glass be banned nationwide "until clear limitations are placed to prevent indecent public surveillance." The fear articulated in the petition is that a Glass-wearer will be able to record without a subject knowing, even in potentially sensitive places like
[…]
May 06, 2013
+
A Rusty Padlock Quantum cryptography might even be more effective than this! Wikimedia CommonsQuantum networking could enable the most secure communication possible. The central principle of quantum mechanics--that the act of measuring a quantum object actually changes it--has some pretty amazing potential in the world of cryptography. And Los Alamos National Laboratory just revealed that it has been using a new design of quantum cryptography setup for more than two years. Quantum cryptography
[…]
May 03, 2013
+
8:00 PM | New Dinosaur Species Found In China
Aorun zhaoi Skull James Clark A new dinosaur found in China may be the oldest of its kind--and a crucial link between lizard-like dinosaurs and the feathered, late-period creatures that bore a closer resemblance to today's birds. A team of international researchers led by James Clark, from the George Washington University, found a fossilized leg bone on the side of a stream in a remote part of Xinjiang province in the far northwestern corner of China. That's not much, but, amazingly, they found
[…]
+
Acer Aspire R7 Hinge AcerAn easel-inspired hinge turns this singularly weird laptop into a tablet or an all-in-one. At an event this morning in New York City, Acer announced a slate of new gadgets, some boring (an iPad-Mini-sized Iconia tablet, a small convertible laptop) but one distinctly...odd. The Acer Aspire R7 isn't quite like any other laptop out there. Windows 8's emphasis on touchscreen navigation has led to a lot of unusual laptop designs, which is exciting; there's Dell's
[…]
+
AOptix Scanner via The VergeLook to the iris. Iris scanning as a form of biometric recognition doesn't get as much attention as retinal scanning or fingerprints, but it's got a lot of advantages. Irises don't change over time, like fingerprints can, there's no need for any actual physical contact to get a scan, and it's hard to fool an iris scanner with surgery or other medical alteration. Now, there's one even bigger advantage: you can carry an iris scanner around with you in one hand. Russell
[…]
