Extreme Tech- extreme

Extreme

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  Dystopian reality: GameStop now taking your fingerprints before you can trade in used games August 2, 2014 at 11:46 am

  If you plan on trading in used games at GameStop stores in Philadelphia, be prepared to be treated like a criminal. Stores in the city of brotherly love are now requiring fingerprint scans of everyone trading in their used games. Even worse, the GameStop Corporation apparently implemented these outlandish anti-theft measures voluntarily. It’s official, we’re now living in the dystopian future dreamed of in 20th century sci-fi novels.
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  High-efficiency spray-on solar power tech can turn any surface into a cheap solar cell August 2, 2014 at 9:02 am

  Perovskite might be our best chance at cheap, efficient solar panels in the near future, and now scientists have figured out how to essentially spray paint solar cells with it.
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  What’s it like to unbox a supercomputer? Surprisingly, just like unboxing a normal PC August 1, 2014 at 1:37 pm

  I don’t know about you, but unboxing new gadgets gets me pretty excited. For me, it’s knowing that soon — very soon now, after I cut through the bubble wrap or peel back the protective plastic — the device will burst into life for the very first time. If I’m honest, it actually makes me feel like Frankenstein breathing life into his monster for the first time — especially when I unbox a bunch of components and build them into a new PC. What, then, must it feel like to unbox a brand new petascale supercomputer?
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  NASA tests ‘impossible’ no-fuel quantum space engine – and it actually works August 1, 2014 at 11:01 am

  NASA didn’t set out to confirm the feasibility of a seemingly impossible fuel-less thruster design, but it seems they did exactly that.
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  Movidius, the chip maker behind Google’s Tango, wants to be the king of computational photography August 1, 2014 at 10:09 am

  Already the heart of Google’s Project Tango, Movidius is upping the stakes with a 20x more efficient chip — the Myriad 2.
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  NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will hunt for signs of alien life, produce oxygen from Mars atmosphere August 1, 2014 at 7:48 am

  NASA has announced that the next Mars rover — currently codenamed Mars 2020 — will be outfitted with an array of sophisticated, upgraded scientific instruments that will let it delve deeper and farther than Curiosity, with the hope that it will be able to uncover signs of life on Mars. Perhaps even more excitingly, Mars 2020 will also be equipped with a new instrument that can convert the carbon dioxide in Mars’ atmosphere into oxygen — this is of utmost importance if humanity ever colonizes Mars — and another instrument that will gather and store Martian rock samples for eventual return to Earth.
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  New indoor positioning system lets you do Batman-like echolocation on your phone July 31, 2014 at 1:27 pm

  Echolocation has worked helped bats navigate for millions of years, and now Berkeley researchers think your laptop could do it too.
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  Bleep: BitTorrent’s new p2p chat client avoids the cloud so you can speak freely July 31, 2014 at 9:46 am

  The world’s most successful data transfer protocol could underlie the next generation chat client: Bleep will provide totally secure, totally peer-to-peer chatting from BitTorrent.
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  Self-driving forklift Ray brings automatic parking to the luxury market July 30, 2014 at 4:24 pm

  Dusseldorf Airport in Germany is trying out a new robot parking system that uses self-driving forklifts to increase parking efficiency by up to 60%.
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  Regeneration therapy from Biplastiq can rejuvenate tissue with light July 30, 2014 at 3:17 pm

  A new company known as Biplastiq plans to offer a radical new medical treatment. The technology uses genetically-transformed mitochondria that can be activated with light to provide additional energy where cells need it most.