December 2011
267 posts
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A Web Of Apps →
It is remarkable to think that we’re in the early days of the app era, when there are already close to 600,000 iOS applications and nearly 400,000 on Android (source: Distimo). The growth of these app ecosystems has been rapid, exponential and shows no signs of slowing down. As well it shouldn’t: the untapped, addressable market for...
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Stanford offers a peek into its extensive Apple... →
What we wouldn’t give to watch a “Blue Busters,” a company video made by Apple employees—yes, including Steve Jobs—posing as IBM-fighting Ghost Busters. Such a video does exist, and it’s currently housed at Stanford University’s Silicon Valley Archives as part of a collection donated by Apple and its employees. The location of the archive is in the San Francisco Bay...
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New group paves way for alternative 2012 choice →
Americans Elect, which has raised $22 million so far, is harnessing the power of the Internet to conduct an unprecedented national online primary next spring. If all goes according to plan, the result will be a credible, nonpartisan ticket that pushes alternative centrist solutions to the growing problems America’s current political leadership seems unwilling or unable to tackle.
The...
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Where Would Earth-like Planets Find Water? →
Last week, NASA announced the discovery of the first two Earth-sized planets orbiting a sun-like star. That followed an announcement from the Kepler space observatory two weeks before that scientists had discovered a planet roughly twice the size of Earth orbiting inside its star’s habitable zone.
SETI astronomers are firing up their Allen Array radio telescope to check these worlds for...
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Orangutans to Skype between zoos with iPads →
For the last six months, orangutans — those great, hairy, orange apes that go “ook” a lot — at Milwaukee zoo have been playing games and watching videos on Apple’s (seemingly ubiquitous) iPad, but now their keepers and the charity Orangutan Outreach want to go one step further and enable ape-to-ape video chat via Skype or FaceTime.
Orangutans, like their great ape brethren (gorillas,...
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Whip Up Some DNA With a Home PCR Machine →
Let’s say you want to identify the mold on that leftover pizza or do a very discreet paternity test. You’re going to need DNA. A lot of it. Labs take the few molecules from a cheek swab and replicate them with a PCR machine until there are billions. But those machines cost $3,000 and up. The new OpenPCR box does the same for the cost of an iPad, and it’s about as easy to use. Place a little bit...
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A Touch of Understanding: Gene Tweak Opens Sensory... →
A new technique for color-coding nerves involved in touch gives neuroscientists a much-needed tool for studying that mysterious sense.
For nearly 250 years, the intricate detail and complexity of skin’s nervous-system wiring has thwarted attempts at understanding it. But if researchers studying skin could be imagined as technicians reverse-engineering a supercomputer’s peripherals, they’d have...
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Anonymous 101: Introduction to the Lulz →
NYU Professor and Anonymous researcher Biella Coleman compares Anonymous to the trickster god archetype.
“The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the phreaker, the troller (all of whom, have their own unique elements of course, but so does each...
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Anonymous 101 Part Deux: Morals Triumph Over Lulz →
At the close of 2011, Anonymous Antisec members spent their holidays hacking companies connected to the federal government and exposing internal data as part of their Lulzxmas campaign. Antisec, who have emerged as the blackhat shock troops of Anonymous, going after police organizations and corporations such as Monsanto and Sony, represent a new, more forceful voice in internet politics.
It’s...
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Clubbing: Music in 3D →
After Hollywood made the jump to 3D, the rush was on to give everything an upgrade ( 3D TV! 3D opera! 3D fashion shows!). Clubbing appeared safe — until Novak, a collective of Newcastle-based creatives, launched 3D Disco, a high-tech, globally-touring party.
Clubbers in red-and-cyan shades watch 3D visuals on 3.5m-diagonal screens at eye level around the dancefloor — but with...
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US Army unveils 1.8 gigapixel camera helicopter... →
New helicopter-style drones with 1.8 gigapixel color cameras are being developed by the U.S. Army.
The army said the technology promised “an unprecedented capability to track people and vehicles from altitudes above 20,000 feet (6.1km) across almost 65 square miles (168 sq km).
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More than glue: Glia cells found to regulate... →
Glia cells are central to the brain’s plasticity, Tel Aviv University researchers have found, controlling how the brain adapts, learns, and stores information — and their design can be implemented in neuromorphic computer chips.
Glia cells (Greek for “glue,” also known as glial) hold the brain’s neurons together and protect the cells that determine our thoughts and behaviors. But glia cells...
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Behold Your Doom: Robospidernaut →
Spidernaut is designed for constructing and maintaining large on-orbit structures in space. NASA went with a design featuring eight 3-DOF legs so that the robot can spread out its weight (or mass, I should say, since this is space we’re talking about) over as much area as possible, and with all those legs no torque is imparted when the robot moves. NASA has been talking about about a whole...
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2011—we gained net neutrality, met Aaron Barr, and... →
Legislators, regulators, and litigators aren’t known for snap decisions, so tech policy stories tend to drag on… and on. But they do come to a resolution eventually, and some of this year’s most important stories wound their way to a more-or-less satisfying conclusion.
Net neutrality.
Righthaven.
AT&T and T-Mobile.
Mass P2P lawsuits.
Anonymous hacks HBGary Federal.
...
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China reveals its space plans up to 2016 →
BEIJING (AP) — China plans to launch space labs and manned ships and prepare to build space stations over the next five years, according to a plan released Thursday that shows the country’s space program is gathering momentum.
China has already said its eventual goals are to have a space station and put an astronaut on the moon. It has made methodical progress with its ambitious lunar and...
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Ministry of Defence Improves War Games for Console... →
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has begun updating its Battlespace2 and other simulations to bring them in line with commercial wargames like Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3.
Andrew Poulter heads up the technical team behind the war-game and said that while back in the 80s and 90s, military simulations were state of the art, today they have fallen far behind commercial alternatives in terms of...
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Transistors made from cotton yarn, t-shirt... →
Altering the very fabric of technophilic society, a multinational team of material scientists have created electric circuits and transistors out of cotton fibers. Two kinds of transistor were created: a field-effect transistor (FET), much like the transistors found in your computer’s CPU; and an electrochemical transistor, which is similar but capable of switching at lower voltages, and thus...
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Copyright and Open Access at the Bedside →
For three decades after its publication, in 1975, the Mini–Mental State Examination (MMSE) was widely distributed in textbooks, pocket guides, and Web sites and memorized by countless residents and medical students. The simplicity and ubiquity of this 30-item screening test — covering such functions as arithmetic, memory, language comprehension, visuospatial skills, and orientation — made it the...
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LG to Show Off 84-Inch ‘Ultra Definition’ TV at... →
Apparently, a 55-inch OLED television isn’t wowing enough. So, in addition to the TV we reported on Tuesday, LG will also be unveiling at CES what it describes as the world’s largest 3-D “Ultra Definition” television — an 84-inch, 3840×2160 resolution 3-D display.
LG’s 4K set includes a feature called 3D Depth Control, which will let users customize their viewing experiences by adjusting the...
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3-D Tech Helps Runners Heal, Improve →
By now, those of us who follow entertainment technology are familiar the image: an actor covered with tiny biometric dots, which are used to transform the actor’s motion into a 3-D image. (It was the technology behind the recent Planet of the Apes movie, for example.) But here’s a novel idea: using the same technology not for entertainment, but for medicine. Runners from Britain will...
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WatchAl Jazeera provides an in-depth look at unmanned battle robotics
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WatchTo build a holodeck: an exclusive look at Microsoft’s Edison lab
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Occupy Geeks Are Building a Facebook for the 99% →
“I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook,” said Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the era of global protest.
They hope the technology they are developing can go well beyond Occupy Wall Street to help establish more distributed social networks, better online business...
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Stealth Tech, Facebook Revolutions, Shadow Wars:... →
Al-Qaida Loses, and Then Loses Some More
The Arab World Routes Around Its Dictators
America’s Advanced Warplanes Catch a Cold
Mexico’s Cartels Attack Bloggers, IRL
Secret Tech Is Dragged Into the Light
The Shadow Wars Grow
Counterinsurgency Ends in Afghanistan
The Pentagon’s Mad Scientists Go to War
FBI Trainers Compare Islam to the Death Star
The Military Freaks Out...
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EPFL Looks to Bats, Locusts for Jumping and... →
Gliding is a very efficient way for getting from getting from point A to point B. Jumping is a very efficient way of getting into the air at point A, especially if there are a bunch of obstacles between point A and point B that it would be a good idea to be airborne to make it over. Grasshoppers have been doing this for, I dunno, probably like a hundred million years, and roboticists at EPFL are...
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Infographic Explains Robotic App Market →
The RobotsAppStore has developed an infographic covering the market for robot applications. The infographic shows a number of apps already available at RobotsAppStore, which consumers will soon be able to purchase,” according to Elad Inbar, RobotsAppStore.com founder and CEO.
“Robot-Apps, like feeding the family pet, folding your laundry and even converting robotic dogs into security devices are...
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Human Gets Immersed In Remote Robot's Actions →
What if you could be in two places at once? Or four? A group of Japanese roboticists envisions a world where we all use robots to visit friends and family, and represent us in distant work sites. They are developing a telepresence robot they think will give humans more physical immersion in remote locations.
“Vision is not enough,” said Dzmitry Tsetserukou, an assistant professor at Toyohashi...
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How Santa Anita Park Represents The Future Of... →
Betting on horses can only be done at race tracks and authorized off-track betting locations, which is why we’ve never seen mobile or online apps used in this manner. Santa Anita is doing something different by localizing the availability of betting, allowing only those who are using the park’s Wi-Fi to access the mobile betting site.
The trend toward localized mobile access is...
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A Geek’s Guide to China’s Silicon Valley →
Twenty years ago, Zhongguancun was but farming fields and small houses, far from the city center of Beijing. The ‘cun’ at the end of Zhongguancun literally means “village.” As with...
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Mexico's cartels build own national radio system →
MEXICO CITY (AP) — When convoys of soldiers or federal police move through the scrubland of northern Mexico, the Zetas drug cartel knows they are coming.
The alert goes out from a taxi driver or a street vendor, equipped with a high-end handheld radio and paid to work as a lookout known as a “halcon,” or hawk.
The radio signal travels deep into the arid countryside, hours by foot from...
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NASA Grail probes ready to orbit moon →
Two NASA spacecrafts launched from Florida in September are set to enter orbit around moon over the New Year’s weekend to measure the gravity field and lunar interior, according to media reports on Tuesday.
NASA scientists want to know the most uneven gravitational field they know of in the solar system since it will shed light on what is going on beneath the lunar surface.
The twin...
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Anobii connects bibliophiles with a virtual book... →
Anobii is a book discovery platform that wants to provide a social environment for readers to engage with and discuss the books that they love, much like a virtual book club.
The venture, whose name means bookworm in Latin, is backed by HMV Group, HarperCollins, Penguin and The Random House Group. It had been around since 2006 as an online community for readers, but the investment from the...
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Graphing your opinion: Jawbone wants to data-track... →
Alex Asseily thinks the social graph is a little basic: “We want to elevate it to a more cerebral level — the opinion graph.” The co-founder of Bluetooth headset manufacturer Jawbone is launching a new venture,State, which aims to connect people— not based on who they know but on what they think. “The idea is you get to state your opinion, in a simple way, but you...
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In pictures: Kazakhstan's International Space... →
One of Baikonur’s main avenues is home to a full-scale mock- up of the Semyorka R-7. The 34-metre, 280-tonne missile was made by the Soviets during the cold war and was the world’s first intercontinental missile system.
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Dec. 27, 1831: Beagle Sets Sail With a Very... →
1831:HMS Beagle, a 10-gun, Cherokee-class brig sloop of the Royal Navy’s survey service, sets sail from Plymouth, England on its second voyage as a survey vessel.
On board, at the invitation ofBeaglecaptain Robert FitzRoy, is a young biologist called Charles Darwin. Darwin’s account ofThe Voyage of the Beagle, published in 1839, establishes him as one of the foremost naturalists of his time.
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Searching the Sea for Scum-Busting Cholera Killers →
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — Bacteria-scanning robots have helped researchers discover scum-busting chemicals that could potentially cut rates of cholera infection.
The robots are part of an award-winning system developed at the University of California, Santa Cruz that fuses fast-paced automatic screening techniques and neon bacteria with undersea hunts for new disease-fighting bugs.
“The cool thing...
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The Mystery Behind Anesthesia →
Brown is quick to point out that he doesn’t explicitly study consciousness; it’s a messy problem, and many neuroscientists avoid the very word. His approach is to study what he calls altered states of arousal. These include anesthesia, sleep, coma, hypnosis, and meditation, as well as aspects of disorders like schizophrenia, epilepsy, and Parkinson’s disease. He believes that...
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The Internet's Perilous New Year's Resolution →
Internet legislation that is scheduled for a vote in the U.S. Senate next month would aim to stop the unlicensed downloading of billions of dollars’ worth of movies and music—as well as the trade in counterfeit drugs and other goods—by blocking access to certain websites, many of them registered abroad. But its basic strategies could lead to trouble on several fronts.
For one thing, the...
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Electricity from the Air →
Flying windmill: Multiple exposures show the flight pattern of the Makani Airborne Wind Turbine, built by Makani Power. The electricity-generating glider is attached to the ground by a carbon-fiber tether. The craft flies “crosswind,” or perpendicular to the direction of the wind, as a kite does. In early tests, prototypes have generated five kilowatts of electric power. Larger versions with...
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"Wikipedia of maps" challenges Google →
OpenStreetMap is exactly what its name implies — a wiki of maps and location data to which anyone can contribute, just like Wikipedia. With the help of some deep-pocketed boosters, including MapQuest and Microsoft, it’s suddenly a legitimate challenger to the hegemony of Maps.Google.Com.
Google announced two months ago that it was going to start charging the heaviest users of its Maps...
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Eight Ways To Go Viral →
1. Inherent virality
2. Collaboration virality
3. Communication virality
4. Incentivized virality
5. Embeddable virality
6. Signature...
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5 Japanese Tech Companies (And Samsung) Set Up LTE... →
Big news from Asia’s mobile market today: Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo (55 million customers, over US$50 billion in sales per year) is teaming up with five other tech powerhouses to develop chips for next-generation mobile devices. Docomo’s partners are NEC, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Semiconductor Ltd., Panasonic, and Samsung.
The goal is to use synergies in...
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Iowa GOP worried by hacker threat to caucus vote →
Taking seriously an apparent threat from a notorious collective of computer hackers, the Iowa Republican Party is boosting the security of the electronic systems it will use in two weeks to count the first votes of the 2012 presidential campaign.
Investigators don’t know if the threat is authentic, but it has nonetheless led the state party to confront a worst-case scenario. Their fear: an...
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We have drift off: Balloons to the edge of space →
Space tourism doesn’t have to be rocket science
“T minus 10 seconds.”
Imagine you’re a space tourist, preparing for lift-off. Yet rather than a deafening roar, followed by shaking and shuddering as the rocket engine fires up, you experience a serene stillness as the countdown continues.
“5, 4, 3, 2, 1…” And you’re away. You are pressed into your seat...
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Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz →
(Nevil Maskelyne – doing it for the lulz? (Image: RI))
LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution’s celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system...
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Pivotshare Believes Your Digital Media Is Worth... →
Adam Mosam is optimistic. The founder of Pivotshare, a new social content creation platform that allows multi-media producers to make bank on their videos, thinks the time is now to start a small revolution.
“We created a way to let publishers have their own branded online channel where they could select their own revenue model, manage their content, have access to detailed analytics, and make...
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Are Extreme Bacteria The Secret To A Clean Fuel... →
“Biology is the best chemist out there,” said Harvard scientist Pamela Silver. The U.S. Department of Energy funds Silver’s research exploring the use of deep-ocean extremophiles to create new biofuels. She described the bacteria she works with as being “like little batteries” that “move electrons around.” Silver’s goal is to genetically program these ocean bacteria to...