Your CD collection has officially become outdated, because 2011 was the year that digital music sales finally surpassed their plastic disc-based counterparts, and the trend doesn’t look to be over.
Five days into 2012 and we’ve already got fancy new technology. A team from Cornell University have developed a light-distortion device that can mask events as if they hadn’t happened; they managed to use light distortion to hide an event for 40 picoseconds. Which, granted, is 40 trillionths of a second, but the research is groundbreaking in the extreme.
Apple is holding a product event later this month in New York – and since the Christmas buy-a-palooza is just past, it’s looking unlikely that they’re going to be announcing any new hardware just yet. Instead, Apple seems set to refurbish iBooks, their eBook retail platform, with a couple of new publishing options.
Every new year a group of us has great fun forwarding and swapping SMSs with each other. You know the ones I’m talking about – “May you and your loved ones have blessed New Year and blah blah blah.” It is a very weird practice, but more-so because the wording is so unnaturally elaborate – […]
Social media feeds, especially Twitter feeds, started buzzing with a rumour that Nelson Mandela had been admitted to hospital a few hours ago. It appears a DJ just happened to watch a programme airing on E-TV about the year that’s passed, and saw old visuals that prompted him to think Madiba had in fact been hospitalised.
Stephen Hawking is one of the most brilliant scientists of our lifetime, and author of “A Brief History of Time”. And he is currently shopping around for a new assistant. His website features a picture of his wheelchair, complete with wires and complex electronics. The caption reads “STOP PRESS: Could you maintain this?”
Any article discussing some fun new tech in Japan is liable to be instantly out of date, because those guys have everything. Voice synthesizers, Olympic robots, eco-friendly Christmas lights – whatever. But this is new, and probably practical enough to port overseas: vending machines that sell Wi-Fi accessible within a 50m radius.
Peace and quiet can come at a premium, especially if you live and work in a busy urban environment. However, a new study shows that the biggest actual threat to our hearing is one we deliberately expose ourselves to every day.
As North Korea lays to rest their Dear Leader, we should not forget that the ANC Youth League wished to show Kim Jong-il their appreciation for all that he has done for the struggle of the North Korean people, as well as his many achievements. The Youth League will miss their other Dear Leader.
An annual report from comScore on what happens online has shown that 1 in every 5 minutes of time online this year was spent on social networking sites – as compared to the 6% of internet time that went to social networking in 2007. By all accounts that sort of growth is expected to continue, and speed up, in 2012.
A team of scientists has finished developing a cheaply manufactured paint-like product prototype that they hope you will eventually be able to put on the outside of your home. The paint will generate electricity from light – electricity that can then be captured and used to power the appliances and equipment on the inside of your home.
The Raspberry Pi – the eagerly anticipated barebones mini home computer – will go into production shortly, it was announced today. The manufacturers’ hope is that the low cost device will inspire the next generation of technical whizz kids.
Electronics, they’re at the center of almost everything we use and interact with on a daily basis and also one of the biggest sources of frustration known to man. But what if, when a gadget or appliance broke, it could repair itself, and do it so fast that you wouldn’t notice? That’s happening, right now.
One would assume that when one blacklists a phone, one could take it for granted that the phone is, in fact, blacklisted. Mobile phone networks also like to offer their assurance that when one blacklists a phone, that’s actually what happens. However, this isn’t the case for a BlackBerry user who’s found out this chap is now using it.
Yes, you read that correctly, the “occucopter” is a drone that is being used by protestors to monitor the police. As the 99 per cent continue their protests around the world, they’ve acquired their own surveillance drone. Tim Pool, an Occupy Wall Street protester, has acquired a Parrot AR drone he amusingly calls the “occucopter”.
8ta is up to all sorts of shinanigans this summer, as they surprised a bunch of travelers on a recent Kulula flight. This, after they completely dominated OR Thambo airport, with a surprise dance routine. Hysterical! Check it out: South Africa’s fourth mobile operator, 8.ta, continues to push the boundaries of marketing with its ‘It’s […]
A Brazilian woman has given birth to a baby with two heads this week. The boy has two brains and two spines but shares one heart, lungs, liver and pelvis. In the spirit of Christmas, she has decided to call her son(s) Emanoel and Jesus respectively.
It hasn’t been Woolworths’ finest month in retail relations. At the beginning of the month, the retailer abruptly announced it would be relieving Jupiter Drawing Room of its advertising business. Then, allegations of product counterfeiting and imitating began to emerge yesterday. Now, another small business owner has come forward and identified Woolworths as selling a knock-off of his product.
Score one for creepy technology. Vocaloid, a voice-synthesis brand owned by Yamaha, has come up with a process by which to “resurrect” any singer’s voice for use in synthesized songs, without requiring the vocalist to build up a painstaking voice library first – so they could be doing that Kurt Cobain/Michael Jackson duet album pretty soon.
It’s no secret that Blackberry’s stock has been falling. The company that once dominated the world of business smartphones has been heavily hit by the likes of Apple and Android, causing it to market itself to the masses with cheaper handsets. This move has done little to help the company’s falling stock, with the entire company now valued at less than Apple’s App Store alone.
Banks know they make too much money, and South African banks could learn a thing or two from this. Five of the UK’s biggest banks, including Lloyds, Barclays and RBS, as well as other credit card companies, have agreed to scrap the charges associated with buying currency with a card while abroad.
IBM have released their annual predictions for the future of technology, via the IBM “5 in 5” project, which looks at five innovations which they figure will transform modern life within the next five years; these include mind-reading computers, human-generated electricity, and biometric scanning replacing passwords.
This is big. And it’s a row that has been on-going for quite some time too. Just as Android devices started making sales headway against other major brands, they might be in for a little setback. It’s not hardware, but software, luckily.
According to the exciting world of Science, the men in white coats have discovered a molecule in the brains of mice that, when switched on, gives these mice super memories. This could work for humans too – but the question is, do you really want to?
It’s always nice when researchers employing a loosely scientific method produce results you were more or less expecting. Folks at the University of Portsmouth have determined that loud music makes people want to drink alcohol in greater quantities and at a much faster rate because the music makes it taste sweeter. Science!
Well, it’s nice to see that the House and Senate can agree on something. Although in this case they’ve agreed to a provision snuck into the U.S. military’s 2012 funding bill that grants the military power to conduct “offensive” strikes online — including clandestine attacks. And won’t that be fun for everybody.
The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association has compiled an infographic showing the penalties targeting gays and lesbians in Africa. Parts of the continent are known to discriminate against gays and lesbians, but did you know that more than half the countries on our continent carry at least a prison sentence for the “crime”?
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have done the unthinkable. They’ve captured video at the speed of light, or, one trillion frames per second.
Space probe Voyager 1 is about to do what no man made object has done in our history. It is about to burst through the outer reaches of our Solar System, almost 11 billion miles from the Sun.
Regis McKenna has very kindly donated rare vintage footage of Steve Jobs giving a presentation in the early 1980’s to the Computer History Museum. It shows Jobs discussing the early history of Apple, and speaking in his usual inspiring manner.