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.
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.
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.
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.
A 31-year-old Swedish man, known only as ‘Richard’, was attempting to build a nuclear reactor in his kitchen and was arrested and had his experiment shut down after he contacted the Swedish Radiation Authority (Strålsäkerhetsmyndigheten) to ask whether or not his pet project was legal.
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.
The future is officially nuts. It’s getting to a point where stuff like this probably won’t shock you anymore. It should. Be shocked. These robo-seals, called ‘Paro’, not only bring comfort to recovering Japanese tsunami patients, they also sing, clap, and even take part in the residents daily exercise routines.
Because robots can’t get depressed over awful working conditions and commit suicide, you see. Also we don’t have a robot union yet, so Foxconn (the guys who manufacture the iPhone and iPad) won’t need to worry about the slowly increasing factory worker wages in Taiwan, which are driving overhead costs upwards throughout the fancy-technology-making-industry.
Vodafone shut down their Egyptian network coverage during the revolution, arguably prolonging the event’s bloodshed and indirectly leading to the death of Egyptians who couldn’t summon ambulances when they were needed. This is bad. So it’s nice that AccessNow, a human rights NGO with Vodafone stock, are trying to force a company-wide human rights assessment.
Isn’t that surprising? A study of British recreational culture has been published, and it transpires that British people love nothing more than to listen to the wireless. Much more so than they enjoy reading, surfing the net, or even watching television. That kind of thing is almost unfavorable in South Africa. Because the general quality […]
VW are proposing a new technology that will allow drivers to take their hands off the wheel at speeds up to around 130km/h, and let the car’s system temporarily take over. Look, it isn’t exactly Knight Rider, but it’s good that VW’s looking after people who want to multitask while cruising down highways.
Social Intelligence, a company approved a week ago by the Federal Trade Commission, is one that uses deep-search tools to do background checks on other companies’ potential employees. These guys could find your MySpace account, they’re that thorough. And if your deep-search profile doesn’t look good, you don’t get hired.
Researchers at the University of California have put together tiny robot brains that replicate the long term memory function in rats; using this, they could switch long-term memory on and off with a button. Which means ‘electronic memory’ and the possibility of knowing stuff without having to learn stuff is suddenly a real thing.
Imagine never having to focus on what you’re photographing. You could just snap away knowing you could refocus the shots later. A new light-field camera will be launched this year by a company called Lytro, which will allow you to do just that. And it will mark a massive step forward in the evolution of photography as we know it.
The cyber-war on cyber-terror now has innocent bystanders, apparently. In a hunt for LulzSec, the hacking group claiming responsibility for the compromise of huge amounts of Sony user accounts and for briefly taking the CIA website offline, the FBI raided DigitalOne’s data – finding nothing, but causing a bunch of unrelated websites to go offline.
Google announced on Tuesday that they’d been they target of a phishing scam originating in Jinan, China, aimed at the accounts of Chinese activists and senior officials in the U.S. Victims were sent fake emails with links to a fake Gmail site, which harvested the usernames and passwords of anyone trying to log in.
Cisco have just come out with their annual Visual Networking Index, which is a pretty reliable source of internet traffic reporting. Global traffic will quadruple, by 2015, with Asia’s traffic generation overtaking North America. Which is cool, but less cool than the stuff they say about traffic in South Africa, which is after the jump.
So Joshua Kaufman had his MacBook stolen in March. Which sucks – he reported the crime to the police, but they couldn’t help, due to lack of resources. Except Kaufman has the Hidden app on his MacBook, which lets him remotely stalk and photograph the thief – and put them online. Thanks, Internet.
The concept for a Marlboro cigarrette-swapping smartphone app has been making the rounds – the idea being that social smokers would be able to trade digital cigarettes for real ones using bump technology, and ‘hardcore smokers’ would be able to redeem the digital smokes for real ones once they’d accumulated enough.
It’s called iPlayboy because, well hell, what else were they going to call it? The appeal here is not so much that you get to see tastefully nude photographs in glorious iPad detail as the fact that the application offers full access tothe Playboy archives – you would own every Playboy issue ever. Welcome to the future.
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, the commercial spaceflight vehicle, recently had its seventh test flight, dropped from a height of 15km to see if it could adjust speed and bearing with various wing configurations. Which sounds technically fancy, but really just looks insanely cool.
Surprise! Security firm Symantec yesterday reported that a hole in the Facebook security system allowed third-parties like advertisers access to user accounts and private data – and that this hole has been in place for the past four years, since Facebook first started offering apps to its users.
Yay, future. If you’ve had a digital camera stolen, you can upload a photo taken with the missing camera to StolenCameraFinder.com and it’ll use the serial number embedded in the image to search for matching photos online – meaning you can find the douche who took your stuff.
Hemingway drank cocktails. I’m just saying that now so that any concerns about masculinity and ‘girly drinks’ are shelved from the get-go. Multimedia artist Marcos Lutyens has set up an installation that projects arsty scans from EEG headsets worn by people drinking Absolut vodka, and if boozey brain-waves isn’t art then I don’t know what is.
And you thought it was just Apple and Google! Gosh. TomTom has admitted that its satellite navigation devices can track users and report to third parties about how fast they’re going – like the police, for instance. Your TomTom is a speed camera now.Yay future.
The opening of Burberry’s flagship Beijing store was marked by a holographic runway show. Holographic models walked through the virtual images of one another, flickering up and down the catwalk, and disappearing in pyrotechnic bursts. Also, Edie Campbell turned into Jourdan Dunn mid-stride – no spice.
A life-sized, functional, AT-AT Walker. From The Empire Strikes Back. You know – those big walking four-legged suckers. If you’re still reading this I assume you know what I’m talking about, so click through to read about a giant nerd’s awesome plan to crowdsource building this thing.
Google has set up the first of its startup-funding offices in Cape Town, under the ‘Umbuno’ flagship. “Umbono” is isiZulu for ‘vision’ or ‘idea’. Google also showed that it knows how to make a girl feel special, saying it chose Cape Town because the city is in “the process of positioning itself as a hub for innovation and technology”.