It was inevitable: given that surveillance cameras are everywhere these days, and that facial-recognition software is increasingly cheap and reliable, “privacy” freaks (who obviously have “something to hide”, or why make such a fuss?) are fighting back with a high-tech countermeasure, in the form of goggles that emit a cloaking glare of low-infrared radiation. There’s […]
This is very impressive indeed.
This is quite a story, if it’s all it’s cracked up to be.
Wow, I love this little guy.
April 30, 2013 – 12:59 pm
CERN has restored the world’s very first website to its original URL. Here.
March 21, 2013 – 11:05 pm
This caught my eye: US plan calls for more scanning of private Web traffic, email Non-electronic communication will soon be a thing of the past. It’s interesting that the simplest of technologies — a packet of paper, a drop of wax — made possible, for thousands of years, something that for most people will soon […]
February 10, 2013 – 9:34 pm
Attentive readers may recall that a few years ago we U.S. taxpayers lent $465 million to Tesla, a maker of electric cars. More recently we restructured the loan so that Tesla wouldn’t run out of money. (It is now, after all, a matter of vital national interest that Elon Musk’s entrepreneurial speculations actually pay off.) […]
February 8, 2013 – 10:35 pm
Here’s an clever idea: crowdsourcing of malaria diagnosis, using a simple video game. Have a look.
January 31, 2013 – 12:13 am
This is fantastic: Japanese robots making German cars. Hat tip: William Gibson.
January 23, 2013 – 10:58 pm
How to make a rail gun. Here.
January 12, 2013 – 11:42 pm
The Uncanny Valley, that is. Here.
December 10, 2012 – 10:12 pm
Forgive me, readers, but I have to make a brief technical digression: for some time now I’ve been grappling with a common but perplexing computer problem, one that appears to have vexed and confounded an awful lot of people. I’ve just found the solution, and I must share it here so that others Googling the […]
October 27, 2012 – 10:39 pm
With a hat tip to the indefatigable JK, here’s the latest on micro-drones. When I was at Singularity University this past April, a recurring theme was that the coming ubiquity of tiny, cheap and efficient sensors will soon have a seismic effect on the technological, and therefore the human, landscape. We like to think that […]
October 27, 2012 – 10:38 pm
Never heard of it? Neither had I. It has a negative Poisson ratio. Here. See also here and here.
September 20, 2012 – 5:27 pm
A reader brings to our attention a fantastic Google-Maps-based application. Here.
September 18, 2012 – 5:43 pm
Here’s another edgy little item: warp drives might be feasible after all. Sharpens up the Fermi paradox even more, if so.
September 8, 2012 – 8:55 am
Where? Google, of course.
August 21, 2012 – 1:38 pm
One trillion frames per second, folks.
Here’s a stunning 360-degree panorama from Mars, courtesy of the rover Opportunity.
With a hat tip to reader JK: In 1970, a Zambia-based nun named Sister Mary Jucunda wrote to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then-associate director of science at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, in response to his ongoing research into a piloted mission to Mars. Specifically, she asked how he could suggest spending billions of dollars on […]
I like this: our Reconnaissance orbiter snapped a picture of Curiosity descending to Mars last night. Here.
August 5, 2012 – 11:03 pm
All eyes on Mars tonight! I’ll bet the thing lands on a cat. More here.
Will this thing replace the mouse, do you think? I’m skeptical. It’s a great accessory, but one important feature of using a mouse is that one can rest one’s hand on the desk. Holding your arms up all day to use your computer would be tiring, I think.
August 1, 2012 – 11:01 am
Autonomous swarming quadracopters. Here.
In a tart item at NRO today, Kevin D. Williamson points out that eleven times more people die each year from neglecting to fill their heart-disease prescriptions than in gun assaults, and makes the piquant observation that “Gun control isn’t about guns; it’s about control.” Well, here’s something that should enliven the discussion: out there […]
From Big Think, a glimpse at the ongoing Graduate Studies session at Singularity U.
For tonight, an interesting item from the frontier of advancing technology. One of the the most promising innovations we discussed and saw demonstrated at Singularity University back in April was 3-D printing, in which a movable printer head builds up solid objects by depositing one very thin layer at a time. The extraordinary thing about […]
This looks promising: touchscreens that can create 3-D buttons as needed.
Singularity University‘s Peter Diamandis talks about the SpaceX Falcon launch. Here.
Our reader The Big Henry has been sending along some engaging science-related links lately, and he’s just sent me another. This one has to do with the possibility that “biophotons” — light quanta emitted within living cells — may be a channel for some sort of information transfer. I’ve never heard anything about this until […]
From Brad Templeton’s blog: flying telepresence drones as medical first-responders. Here.
Here’s a novel approach to implementing coordinated behavior in a non-hierarchical “swarm” of autonomous machines: Biologists have long puzzled over the ability of bacteria and social insects to sense not only the presence of compatriots but their number and to synchronise their behaviour. It turns out that these creatures perform this synchronisation using a process […]
Attention, teens: if you need some help answering the call of the wild, then make your way to Sex: A Tell-All Exhibition, now running at Ottawa’s Museum of Science and Technology. The exhibit includes floor-to-ceiling photos of nude toddlers, children, teens and adults, and an array of heated, flavoured and textured condoms rolled over wooden […]
I’ve mentioned “exponentially advancing technology” a lot lately. Think I was kidding?
April 19, 2012 – 12:09 am
Longtime readers will know that I’m a big admirer of Richard Feynman. In the nanotech discussions last week at SU, there was frequent mention of his visionary 1959 lecture There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, which is widely regarded as the genesis of the field. If you aren’t familiar with it, you can read […]
So: here’s the latest inevitable step toward having our brains permanently jacked into the Internet. Are you going to want a pair of these? In this demo the user talks to his glasses. But what’s the endpoint here? Once the interface is fast and intuitive enough, so that we can send and receive data as […]
Our friend David Duff posted an item today in which he quoted an article from James Bamford at Wired about a new U.S. data-storage facility: Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of […]
Matters reproductive have been all over the news lately (with Rush Limbaugh’s idiotic tactical blunder getting the most attention over the past few days). One item that might have slipped under the casual observer’s radar is this one, in which a team of researchers have developed an artificial womb to which a blastocyst can successfully […]
See for yourself, courtesy of Iowahawk.
Folks my age are old enough to remember, wistfully, the golden age of the American manned-spaceflight program, and have with sadness watched NASA’s long descent into senescence and irrelevance — from the virile pioneer of a “new frontier” that it was in the 1960s, to a sedentary bureaucracy tasked with getting children interested in science […]
February 19, 2012 – 2:44 pm
Speaking of my daughter ChloÁ«, she dropped by today and showed me an amazing new application she has downloaded for her iPhone. I’m a lifelong techie, and it takes a lot to bowl me over, but I’m bowled over. See it in action here.
February 18, 2012 – 11:33 pm
A remarkable innovation, by the look of it: article here, video here.
January 25, 2012 – 10:24 am
With a hat-tip to the indefatigable JK, here’s something new about to make its debut: the Tata MiniCat. Not what you want for traversing the Interstate system, but perfect for getting around locally — and cheaply.
January 19, 2012 – 1:30 pm
My friend Danny Fisher’s website Wish I Didn’t Know has picked up a story about a proposed smart-phone app that will warn users about high-crime districts, presumably so that safety-conscious travelers can avoid blundering into them. The app has apparently irked various interest groups, who I suppose think that gathering crime-rate statistics and making them […]
January 19, 2012 – 12:28 pm
Lawrence Auster brings to our attention (with pithy comments of his own, here) an article from the Daily Mail on the SOPA bill that has been getting so much attention. (I’ll confess I haven’t read the dense 78-page bill itself yet, but from all the summaries I’ve seen it does indeed appear to be a […]