British Police to Monitor Civilians with UAVs by 2012
In a move sure to generate plenty of Orwell name-drops in the Boing Boing comments section, the British police have begun developing UAVs for the surveillance of domestic civilians. The British police...
View ArticleNew Computer Program Studies Trees on TV to Simulate Their Movement
The same subtle, random movements, bouncing shadows, and immense complexity that make plants fascinating to observe in life also make them hell to animate. Like water and fire, a rustling tree is one...
View ArticleDARPA Gives $32 Million For A Bigger Big Dog From Boston Dynamics
After years of development and several creepy videos, Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog robot is scheduled to get bigger. Working off a $32 million request from DARPA and the Marine Corps, Boston Dynamics has...
View ArticleScots Use Cyberhawk Drones for Aerial Rugby Surveillance
While the English use their UAVs to covertly spy on their own citizens, the Scots have leveraged the technology for a much greater social good: helping them beat the snot out of those southern wankers...
View ArticleCarbon Crystals Harder Than Diamond Found In Finnish Meteorite
Diamond may remain the preferred material for wedding rings, Lil’ Wayne’s birthday gifts, and Damien Hirst sculptures, but it looks like girls’ best friend will have to relinquish its title as the...
View ArticleThis Week, Cybersecurity Efforts Advance on Several Fronts
For cybersecurity wonks who see Chinese agents or al Qaeda hackers lurking behind every email from a Nigerian prince, this was one hell of a busy week. With fallout continuing from the recent attack...
View ArticleMarine Corps’ Unmanned Programmable Copter Passes First Major Test
The difficulty of supplying remote outposts across rugged terrain has contributed to many of the deadliest moments in the Afghan War, by preventing the delivery of weapons and ammo to engaged...
View ArticleMarijuana Research Offers New Hope For Male Birth Control Pill
The male birth control pill has lingered for years tantalizingly just out of reach, in the realm where rumor meets science. Recently developed hormonal and mechanical contraceptives never found an...
View ArticleMiniature Sensor Perpetually Charges Self Using Environmental Energy
Scientistsu, engineers, and doctors yearn for tiny sensors to record a vast array of events in the world’s many hard-to-reach places. And so far, the tradeoff between battery life and size has...
View ArticleVideo: What Would You See As You Plummet Into a Black Hole?
By definition, one can’t see a black hole itself, only its effect on the light of intervening stars. And without some serious equipment, even that’s a tall order. Luckily for all us amateur...
View ArticleMeat the iPhone Sausage Stylus
It’s easy to see how Apple might have overlooked this, what with their headquarters located in a place with 60 degree days in February, but anyone from colder climates knows that you can’t operate an...
View ArticleIBM Develops Higher-Efficiency Solar Cells Using Non-Rare Materials
While IBM is primarily known for its information technology products, the company has recently begun expanding into the alternative energy market. So far, that change has mainly taken the form of a...
View ArticleNanofiber Lamps Are More Efficient Than Incandescent Bulbs, Eco-Friendlier...
For those who want to start saving the planet at home, lighting presents a vexing paradox. While incandescent bulbs are wildly inefficient, compact fluorescent bulbs contain hazardous chemicals. With...
View ArticleWindows Phone Series 7 Takes Aim at iPhone, Android
Gadget lovers are nothing if not fickle, always ditching their older tech for pretty young things. And recently, all the attention on the iPhone and Google’s Android OS has made Microsoft seem a bit...
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Video: Easy Russian DIY Car-to-Tank Conversion Kit
As the Northeast and South brace for yet another day of record snow fall, thousands of Americans are struggling with ways to deal with treacherous road conditions. Thankfully, some intrepid Russian...
View ArticleRHIC Collider Creates Quark-Gluon Plasma at 4,000,000,000,000 Degrees Celsius
Until the LHC finally gets up to full speed, Brookhaven National Lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) remains the world’s most powerful heavy ion smasher. And on Monday, they showed off some...
View ArticleMathematician Cracks The Code for Making Hollywood Blockbusters
Howard Hawks famously said that all a good movie needs is three great scenes and no bad ones. Well, according to James Cutting, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, they also need...
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Google Goggles Could Add Optical Character Recognition and Real-Time...
The Google Goggles Android app can already copy business cards directly into the address book and provide augmented reality overlays for restaurants. But now, Google has unveiled a prototype of a...
View ArticleTexas Secretly Gave The Blood of 800 Newborns to DNA Database
Parents across the Lone Star State are in an uproar after the Texas Tribune found that the Department of State Health Services covered up the donation of blood samples from 800 newborn babies to a...
View ArticleNext for NASA: Inflatable Space Stations, In-Orbit Refueling, Space UAVs and...
As we’ve been hearing for months, 2010 is going to be a year of belt-tightening for NASA. But now, with the release of the new NASA budget, we can see that even with substantially less money, NASA...
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