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Tech/Sci
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Is It A Bird? Is It A Plane? No, It’s A Trillion Tonnes Of Comet
19 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
In a rare intersection of Science #FAIL and “Crap, that was close!”, scientists have re-analysed the findings of Mexican astronomer, José Bonilla, who, in 1883, spotted over 450 fuzzy looking objects passing in front of the sun. Turns out it was a trillion tonnes of comet debris!
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Facebook Enlarges Social Areas Of Brain
19 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Neuroscientists have discovered that using Facebook has a measurable impact on the size of particular areas of the brain. The results of a recent study show that the more Facebook friends you have, the bigger and denser become the three parts of your brain which are associated with the power to socialise. It’s unclear whether by ‘socialise’ they mean really, in real life. But maybe.
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Quantum Levitation: The Coolest-Looking Science [VIDEO]
19 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
‘Quantum Levitation’ even sounds cool. The guys from the University of Tel-Aviv’s School of Physics Superconductivity Group recently demonstrated ‘quantum locking,’ at the Association of Science – Technology Centers Annual Conference by getting a supercooled magnet to levitate above a locked track. The science is clunky, the video looks very cool.
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At $3 Million, It’s More Of A Camps Bay Van Than A Camper Van
19 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Being rich is hard. Especially when it comes to road trips. It’s always an issue of “The Ferrari’s too small”, or “I wish my mansion had wheels”. Enter, the Elemment Palazzo. This bad boy not only brings an element of average American retiree to your life, it also has 40” TVs, a rainfall shower and a fireplace in it.
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Microsoft’s Fancy New Touch-Screen Projectors [VIDEO]
18 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 4 Comments
The nice thing about initiatives like Microsoft Research is that you get to have an early gander at the things that you’re going to be spending stupid amounts of money on next year. Like the OmniTouch, for instance, which projects “touchscreen” interfaces onto pretty much whatever surface you want – desk, paper, or the back of your hand.
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Email Turns Forty This Month
18 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
This month, the venerable electronic mail turns 40, with the first verified electronic message being sent in 1971. Check out this neat Infographic detailing the history of email.
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Welsh Coaches Considered Faking Injury For Uncontested Scrums During Semi
18 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
This really isn’t the sort of thing you should go around admitting, even if you were disappointed with a poor refereeing decision. The Welsh coach, Warren Gatland, has publicly admitted that the Welsh coaching staff deliberated faking an injury to one of their props so as to force uncontested scrums during their semi-final clash on Saturday against France.
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i-Phone 4S’ “Find My Friends” App Claims Its First Marriage
18 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 3 Comments
It seems Apple’s new iOS5 operating system for the iPhone 4S has a new surprise around every corner. The App in question uses GPS, and if your friend agrees, it allows you to see their location, give or take a few metres. Unfortunately, one poor guy on Macrumours.com found another use for it, after installing it in his wife’s new handset.
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Band Jams Entire Song Live Using Only iPads [VIDEO]
18 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 2 Comments
Feel free to file this one under “awesome.” Indie band, moe., who I’m sure you’ve never heard of, has performed a live version of their song “Crab Eyes” – using nothing but iPads. See this amazing video after the jump.
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Sesame Street’s YouTube Channel Hacked, Replaced With Porn
17 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Sesame Street had its YouTube channel hacked yesterday. For about 30 minutes, videos of Kermit the frog and Big Bird were replaced with hardcore porn movies. Their slogan was also changed to: “Its where porn lives.” As funny as the hackers must have thought this joke was, one has to wonder about the kind of people that would deliberately expose kids to content like that.
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RIM Offers Free Apps To Apologize For That Whole BlackBerry Crash Thing
17 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
While Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of RIM, has already publicly apologized for last week’s three-day BlackBerry outage, the PR guys figured that that probably wasn’t enough. Which is why they’ve announced that they’re offering BlackBerry customers a bunch of free “premium apps,” in the hopes of winning back some love. Check the app list after the jump.
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YouTube To Sell Merchandise, Digital Downloads And Event Tickets
17 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
YouTube is launching something they’re calling the Merch Store. From it, the online video giant will sell all kinds of music paraphernalia like band merchandise, event tickets, digital music downloads, and even band meet-ups.
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Rio de Janeiro Has Set Up The World’s Largest Urban Surveillance System
17 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
In preparation for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics, Rio de Janeiro has established a huge state-of-the-art surveillance space, boasting 80 interchangeable digital panels, 450 cameras, 80 square metres of surveillance screen space, and an awesome Batcave-esque name: the Control Room. I don’t know how they paid for it either.
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Major British Banks Downgraded Amid Deepening EU Crisis
13 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Just before lunchtime, a rumour began to do the rounds, courtesy of Sky News, that credit ratings agency Fitch was going to bring more bad news for Britain’s banks. A credit rating downgrade of major banks was possible later in the day. Sky changed their tune and withdrew the statement on TV, but the blog post remained, and now the downgrade has happened.
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Apple’s Siri: The Greatest Comebacks So Far
13 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Those blessed with early access to the iPhone 4S have spent most of their time talking about Siri, the voice-activated feature that can answer questions like “What’s the time?”, and “What does prawn mean?” They’ve also found that it has a pretty decent cache of responses for people who ask their phone stupid questions.
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UNICEF Releases Report: MXit 1, Homework 0
12 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
A recent study by UNICEF has brought to light some interesting (though not very surprising) stats regarding usage of MXit, one of south Africa’s most popular mobile social platforms.
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Sony Recalls 1,6 Million Bravia’s Because Of Fire Risk
12 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Sony is to recall 1,6 million of its Bravia brand LCD TVs sold worldwide since 2007. This comes after several serious malfunctions involving parts melting, and even possibly catching fire as a result, have occurred. Japan’s trade ministry today instructed Sony to recall the TV’s as a precautionary measure to prevent further incidents.
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Hands-On Video For Siri On The iPhone 4S
12 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Apple’s Siri, the fancy voice-activated feature that was supposed to make people feel less disappointed about not getting a shiny new iPhone 5, was actually pretty cool when Phil Schiller showed it off on stage. But how well does it do in real life? See the hands-on after the jump.
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SA Aviation Authority Gives Go Ahead For WiFi In Planes
12 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
The drought is over. Mark this day down in your calender, kids. 12 October 2011 is the date you’ll always remember, for making domestic air travel in South Africa that much less excrutiating. Air travel, meet online content streaming. Online content streaming, meet air travel.
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Japan Shows Off Intelligent Robot – Well Hello, Skynet
12 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology’s Hasegawa Group have doomed us all to inevitable destruction at the hands of our robot creations by releasing footage of an experimental robot they’ve designed that basically models its behaviour on human cognitive processes, i.e. it learns from its actions.
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Goldman Sachs’ Secret £10 Million Christmas Present
12 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
It has been revealed that good old Goldman Sachs received one rather large Christmas present in the form of unpaid interest from Her Majesty’s Revenues and Customs, following a long legal battle over one of the US bank’s tax avoidance schemes.
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Adobe Made That Fictional CSI “Enhance” Tool A Reality
12 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
You know that thing in sort-of-science-fictional shows or awful police procedurals where they have a blurry photo which they zoom into indefinitely and then use television magic to ‘enhance’ it and keep it from turning into the pixelated jpeg it should be? Adobe Photoshop can do that now.
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Murdoch And Sons Might Be Voted Off The NewsCorp Board Of Directors
11 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
There is a shareholder advisory campaign calling for the removal of Rupert Murdoch, his two sons, James and Lachlan, and 10 other directors from the board of directors at the next NewsCorp shareholder meeting on 21 October. The radical shakeup would see 13 of the company’s 15 directors removed after the shocking events that took place at NewsCorp.
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Fashion Designer Makes Clothes From Milk
11 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
A young fashion designer from Germany has produced the first man-made synthetic fibre entirely without chemicals. And she did it with a staple you can find in your fridge — milk! The fabric is called QMilch, and is made from high concentrations of the milk protein, casein. The best part is that it looks and feels like silk but doesn’t smell.
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Google Opens Its First Retail Store In London
10 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 2 Comments
As part of its promotional campaign for the new Chrome operating system, Google has quietly opened up its first retail store in London, called the “Chrome Zone”. The store is Google’s first venture in realspace retail, using the location to sell its Chromebook computer line.
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BlackBerry Services Collapse Worldwide
10 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 4 Comments
Millions of BlackBerry users from all over Europe, Asia and Africa have been without online services such as email and BlackBerry Messenger for the last few hours. A spokesperson for RIM has not yet passed comment, but we do know a major fault at the RIM data centre in Slough is responsible.
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Archbishop Of Canterbury Lambastes Mugabe In Powerful Sermon To 15 000 Zimbabweans
10 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Dr Rowan Williams, otherwise known as the Archbishop of Canterbury, delivered what some of his aides are calling the “sermon of his career” when he addressed more than 15 000 Anglicans during his controversial visit to Zimbabwe yesterday. He told them that Mugabe’s tyrannical rule was no better than the colonial rule it had replaced.
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America’s Unmanned Combat Drones Infected With Computer Virus
10 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
Well this can only end well. The US Air Force’s unmanned combat drones in the “Predator” and “Reaper” class have been infected with computer viruses that they can’t get rid of, in case you weren’t sufficiently terrified of the world when you woke up this morning.
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Snoop Dogg Gets Cultivation Tips From Welsh Veggie Grower, Share Smoke
10 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Ian Neale holds the world record for growing the heaviest swede, weighing in at 38kg. Last week, the 68-year-old from Newport in South Wales, received a special video message from Snoop Dogg. The rapper wanted specific cultivation advice in return for some VIP passes for one of his gigs. The record-breaking vegetable grower accepted Snoop’s invitation.
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Samsung And Google Scrap Nexus Prime Launch
07 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
The companies jointly announced in a statement released a few hours ago that they have scraped the widely anticipated October 11 San Diego launch of the Nexus Prime, Samsung’s Android-based smartphone running the new Ice Cream Sandwich operating system. Does it have something to do with Steve Jobs’ passing on Wednesday?
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