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The $300 GoTenna turns your smartphone into a CB radio, lets you send messages when you have no cell signal July 18, 2014 at 12:30 pm
If you’ve ever had a cell phone, you know how frustrating it can be when your network fails. Areas with little to no signal can be absolutely infuriating, and overcrowded events can be just as bad. To sidestep this problem, the folks at GoTenna have developed their own ad-hoc network for sending messages. It’s an incredible concept, but with an asking price higher than most smartphones, there’s no way that this implementation is going to take off anytime soon.
MIT upgrades human hand with two extra robot fingers. But why stop there? July 18, 2014 at 11:00 am
While the human hand, with four fingers and opposable thumb, is pretty darn awesome, it still falls woefully short when it comes to some tasks — such as opening a soda bottle or peeling a banana. MIT, which is obviously a firm believer that we can and should enhance humans as far as physically possible, has a solution: a wrist-mounted robot that gives you two extra fingers. With the so-called “7 Finger Robot” equipped, you can both grasp a soda bottle and turn the cap at the same time. According to the MIT engineer who led the project, Harry Asada, some users might even begin to perceive the robotic helping fingers as part of their body — “like a tool you have been using for a long time, you feel the robot as an extension of your hand.”
What are car surround view cameras, and why are they better than they need to be? July 18, 2014 at 10:03 am
Backup cameras will prevent only one in three backup deaths. Cost is too high (millions per life) to mandate better technologies.
Biologists discover electric bacteria that eat pure electrons rather than sugar, redefining the tenacity of life July 18, 2014 at 8:51 am
Some intrepid biologists at the University of Southern California (USC) have discovered bacteria that survives on nothing but electricity — rather than food, they eat and excrete pure electrons. These bacteria yet again prove the almost miraculous tenacity of life — but, from a technology standpoint, they might also prove to be useful in enabling the creation of self-powered nanoscale devices that clean up pollution. Some of these bacteria also have the curious ability to form into “biocables” that are centimeters long, and conduct electricity as well as copper wires — a capability that might one day be tapped to build long, self-assembling subsurface networks for human use.
Malaysia Airlines flight 17 shot down in Ukraine: How did they do it? (updated) July 18, 2014 at 6:27 am
Malaysia Airlines flight 17, a Boeing 777 carrying 280 passengers and 15 crew, has been shot down over Ukraine. Yes, this is the same Malaysia Airlines that lost flight 370 in the Indian Ocean earlier in the year. It isn’t yet confirmed who shot down the plane, but we have a military source who believes it was probably Ukrainian separatists, using a Buk missile system that was given to them by the Russians. Suffice it to say, if Ukrainian separatists have just blown up a commercial airliner using a Russian weapon, we are almost certainly looking at a massive geopolitical crisis.
US Department of Energy begins building largest carbon capture system ever July 17, 2014 at 4:12 pm
Large scale carbon capture and sequestration is almost here, but it’s going to face some economic hurdles.
US scientists push ahead with memory-boosting brain implants, but we still have to crack the brain’s code first July 17, 2014 at 2:05 pm
As the latest effort to build some kind of implantable “memory bridge” now takes form at Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL), we might ask — can such a device actually work?
UK, the world’s most surveilled state, begins using automated face recognition to catch criminals July 17, 2014 at 8:03 am
Police in the UK have become one of the first major police forces to deploy automated facial recognition technology to catch criminals. The British police will be using NEC’s NeoFace technology, which can match faces from crime scene photos or videos against a database of images in just a few seconds. Combined with the highest density of CCTV cameras of any country in the world, police body-worn cameras that are constantly recording, and a CSI-like smartphone and tablet app that allows for face and fingerprint matching in the field, it is rather hard to be a criminal in the UK nowadays.
Tegra K1 GPU posts some beastly benchmarks – but can Nvidia get devs to actually use it? July 16, 2014 at 2:27 pm
Nvidia’s Tegra K1 is benchmarking like a beast — is this the chip that will give the company what it needs to establish a premium gaming experience on Android?
Meet Jibo, the world’s first family robot – built by MIT’s social robotics master July 16, 2014 at 12:41 pm
Cynthia Breazeal, an MIT professor and one of the pioneers of social robotics, has unveiled “the world’s first family robot.” Called Jibo, the all-white desktop-sitting robot has more than a passing resemblance to a certain robot from a recent animated Pixar movie. The robot, which will cost around $500 when it’s released, will have a range of abilities that will hopefully make it the perfect companion to have around the house — such as telling stories to kids, automatically taking photos when you pose, easy messaging and video calling, providing reminders for calendar entries, and companionship through emotional interaction.
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