Google has begun to map parts of the Amazon and Rio Negro Rivers, as well as small areas of northwestern Brazil, in an attempt to capture panoramic images of the remote region and its communities for the world to see. Google enlisted the help of locals and will use camera-equipped tricycles as well as boats to capture the imagery.
On Tuesday, 2oceansVibe reported that there were possibly going to be new charges brought against ANCYL president, Julius Malema. Julius and other members of the league managed to infringe upon the ANC’s constitution, and the new charges that were served earlier, relate to his comments that the ANCYL will work against the government of Botswana to effect a regime change.
This is, once again, one of those things that should, but probably won’t shock many of you. Paris, France’s Orly airport has been experimenting with 2-D avatar hosts. Travelers will apparently be able to communicate with them as they show them to their boarding gates, and the best part is they won’t strike or take breaks.
Hello gang. Check our new toy! Yes man! “That’s just a TV!”, I hear you say. TV? Just you wait, my friend. That’s just one of the things this puppy does. HD, or 3D TV? Sure. Skype, YouTube, Facebook, Picassa? Walk in the park, my friend. And each of those is tucked up in a […]
Anne Hathaway decided she should show off one of her hidden talents to Conan O’Brien on his show: rapping. She was on the show to chat about her latest film, One Day, but of course she will also feature as Catwoman in the next installment of Batman. The “Paparazzi” rap proves that Hathaway is not just a pretty face.
Normally hot dog stories are about who shoves the most hot dogs down their gullet. This one is different. It’s hot dog maker versus hot dog maker in a US federal district court, as each claims their product is better than their competitor’s. It’s Kraft Foods versus Sara Lee Corporation. It’s a $1,6 billion sausage product war.
A special report in the Daily Maverick today has indicated that Julius Malema should in all likelihood face some much needed disciplining soon, at least from the ruling party that is. According to the report, the ANC is drawing up charges against Malema and a few of his sidekicks following two meetings of the party’s bosses on Monday.
How unfair is this shit. When I was a kid, if you wanted something to fly you had to chuck it off a three-storie building, or tie it to a string and trail it out the back of your mom’s car, Napolean Dynamite style. These remote controlled badboys are super realistic,with actual moving fins to propel them through the air. And you get to choose between evil shark or cute clown-fish.
Here’s some crunchy biology for your Tuesday! Our bodies are covered in vestigial traces of biological functions we’ve long left behind us. Once, we were able to move our ears like monkeys and cats, had tails, and may have even had a third eyelid, much like most reptiles do today.
Bad cellphone reception and weak signal strength might be caused by the sun, according to new research. Solar flares emanating from the sun could be to blame for telecommunications customers’ slow internet, signal reception issues and GPS problems, thus taking some the pressure off the network providers, for now.
Which, as you’ll see, is pretty damned fine. The August issue also features the very spicy Ferrari FF, which is an interesting development in the Ferrari stable, and a fast one at that. Here’s a little something else, to whet your appetite. The New 2012 Lamborghini Aventador – Top Gear… by videosonlytube Get your hands […]
And for the first time in years I actually have a reason to want a Motorola. Google today agreed to acquire the handset division of Motorola, Motorola Mobility, for $12.5 billion (around 90 billion ZAR). It’s always nice to have money lying around for these little impulse buys.
Finally, science has validated what those posters have been telling us for years. Apparently, beer goggles do turn ‘bow’ into ‘wow’. A team of scientists at London’s Roehampton University have killed a considerable bar tab investigating why people who are intoxicated by alcohol seem less critically receptive to the physical appearance of others, or for the rest of us: “Beer goggles – why?”
They made a robot seagull. It flies by flapping its robot seagull wings. I mean yes this is a huge breakthrough in terms of flight engineering, but even if that’s not your jam, you’re going to want to take a look at the awesome two-metre wide flying robot on display at TEDGlobal.
Trying to get your brand to tap into certain subcultures’ wallets is hard at the best of times. Increasingly, brands are pushing the limits of message delivery, but Levi’s certainly couldn’t have predicted that their new advertisement featuring scenes from protests resembling the London riots would cause such a stir.
In a rather bizarre twist, as the UK government and security forces attempt to make sense of the wave of violent rioting and looting that swept across major UK cities this week, Prime Minister, David Cameron, called into question the role social networking platforms, such as Blackberry’s BBM (Blackberry Messaging) facility might have played in stirring up unrest that saw millions of pounds worth of damage caused to property around the UK.
I know temporary tattoos are usually pretty lame, but the ones they’re making over at the University of Illinois are looking pretty rad. Because unlike regular temporary tattoos that fade within two days and look like awful birthmarks, these guys come with diagnostic sensors, LEDs, wireless antennas, and solar cells for power. Take that, Kinder Surprise.
The Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle is not only 22 times faster than a commercial jetliner, it’s also capable of reaching Mach 20, which is roughly 21 000 kph. So basically it’s kak fast. It’s so fast that the company that created it, The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have lost it at sea. Again.
The second largest train maker in China will recall 54 bullet trains which are used on the new impressive Beijing-Shanghai line for safety reasons, the company said today. The recall of the high-speed trains by China CNR Corp Limited comes three weeks after 40 people were killed in a high-speed rail crash.
Two Israeli scientists say they have developed a sensor that can accurately detect date-rape drugs in drinks 100 percent of the time – a tiny, drink-stirrer-looking device that, when dipped into your appletini or other refreshing beverage, can detect the presence of dissolved drugs. Nice job, science.
Not even security exchanges are immune to hackers these days. Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited, the world’s biggest security exchange operator by market value, suspended trading yesterday for companies including HSBC. This came after its website was hacked in what’s been described as a hack with malicious intent at a critical time.
Dave MacKay, 53-year-old British pilot, will be the first captain of Virgin Galactic‘s commercial space fleet, taking up the role first with the maiden voyage of SpaceShipTwo, scheduled for 2013. MacKay has over 30 years of regular flying experience, but like pretty much everybody, he’s wanted to fly spaceships since he was a kid.
There is something encouraging coming out of the past three days of rioting and looting, even if it is a remote silver lining: the online mobilization of volunteer clean-up operations, mostly organized via Twitter and Facebook. By this time yesterday, #riotcleanup, was the second-highest trending topic worldwide.
Australian artist and ‘body architect’ Lucy McRae, in collaboration with Harvard biologist Sheref Mansy, is releasing these little digestible capsules that make human skin emit perfume scents. Which is nice and futuristic, I think. And by futuristic I mean I have no idea how this thing works.
When I first heard about Google’s self-driving cars I was excited. Google weren’t the first to experiment with this kind of thing, and technology is evolving, but deep down I always knew it would be hard to trump KITT from Knight Rider or DeLorean DMC-12 from Back to the Future. Prius on Prius car love after the jump.
Just when we thought NASA was going to take a backseat and let privatisation take the wheel for a while, they squeeze out yet another project. It just happens to be one of the space agency’s most ambitious missions too, and will attempt to discover the secrets behind the largest planet in the solar system – Jupiter.
Speaking at the Black Hat hacker’s conference in Vegas yesterday, former director of the CIA’s counterterrorism center Cofer Black voiced concerns about a future “code war” where hackers tamper with the technology that runs our day-to-day interactions. Then a fire alarm accidentally tripped, which was nice and thematic.
I was amused when I read that the article we published yesterday about Internet Explorer users having a lower average IQ than users of other browsers was a hoax. Not because I dislike IE users, but because this would have been the push they needed to, explore other browsers. Unfortunately though, sometimes global news agencies do get it wrong.
At least that’s what Mike and Jim at Research In Motion would have the industry believe. RIM is expected to launch several new BlackBerry devices today in a desperate effort to win back its market share, particularly in North America.
GM’s Electric Networked-Vehicle (EN-V), the pod-shaped hands-free electric vehicle unveiled last year, is set for release soon. Confined to metropolitan areas, we should be able to live out our Jetsons inspired fantasies a little sooner than we’d planned, once GPS technology catches up a little.