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Tech/Sci
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Facebook Employee Accidentally Reveals Upcoming ‘Listen With Friends’ Feature
22 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Look, it’s nice to know Apple isn’t the only company that knows how to create buzz by accidentally leaking information. Ji Lee, Facebook’s creative director, tweeted about Facebook Music, which is set to launch tomorrow. The post was quickly deleted, but not before the Internet had time to get all excited about it.
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Faces from arturo castro on Vimeo.
Now There’s Vaguely Terrifying Face-Stealing Technology [VIDEO]
21 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
Watch developer Arturo Castro shows off his fancy new FaceTracker API, which allows users to harvest photographs of other folks’ faces, and project them onto their own. Here we see Castro variously becoming Vladimir Lenin, Chairman Mao, and Steve Jobs. Because, why not?
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This Week’s Weather Report: Falling Satellites
21 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 4 Comments
Remember that defunct NASA satellite that was going to fall to earth some time, they just couldn’t tell us when or where? Well, don’t worry – they’ve told us that it’s definitely going to come screaming down to the planet’s surface some time this week. This Friday, actually.
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The Guardian Doesn’t Have To Reveal Phone-Hacking Sources, Yet
21 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
In an abrupt turnaround, the Metropolitan police have dropped their attempt to order the Guardian to reveal confidential sources for stories relating to the phone-hacking scandal. They’d hoped to force reporters to reveal confidential sources for articles disclosing information about the murdered teenager, Milly Dowler, whose phone was hacked on behalf of the News of the World.
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Online Gamers Solve Retroviral Enzyme Code In Three Weeks
20 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
The University of Washington has finally found a way to make us of the mental energy expended by online gamers – recruiting them to decipher the structure of monomeric enzymes, found in retroviruses like HIV, by playing an online game called Foldit. Researchers had been working on it for the past decade; the collective gamers did it in three weeks.
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“Forest Boy” Keen To Go Back To The Bush
20 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 2 Comments
A teenage boy who has been dubbed “forest boy” by the international media is apparently keen to go back to the bush. The boy, believed to be a 17-year-old English language speaker, handed himself over to German officials in Berlin earlier this month after walking for about two weeks. Officials describe his story as “incredible”.
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Mini Robots Entered Into 225 Kilometre Hawaiian Triathlon
19 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Do you remember the old adverts that pitted the Duracell bunny against other batteries at massive distances? Well, Panasonic is actually doing this now. They’ve designed robots, and entered them into a rather large triathlon taking place in Hawaii next month, in which homo sapiens will compete.
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David Attenborough Joins Campaign To Ban Creationism In Schools
19 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Sir David Attenborough is one of the world’s most well-known scientists and natural history film-makers. He has now thrown his weight behind a campaign in the UK to have the teaching of creationism and intelligent design banned outright from school curricula. He is joined by 30 other leading scientists and campaign groups, including the British Science Association.
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South African Fortified Wines Will No Longer Be Called “Port”
19 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
A European Union trade pact that dictates that the name “port” may only apply to fortified wines from Portugal will mean that the word will disappear entirely from bottle labels in this country by the beginning of January next year. The move has been on the cards since 2000, when the South African government agreed to stop using it.
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NASA Unveils Launch Vehicle To Take Astronauts To Mars
16 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Because what every good recession needs is a plan to go to space. NASA today announced their new launch vehicle, the Space Launch System (SLS), which should be able to take astronauts past the moon to near-Earth asteroids, and eventually to Mars some time in the 2030s.
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(Russian Accent) You Want Buy Solid Gold Phone Comrade?
16 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
A limited-edition 18-carat gold phone aimed at Moscow’s fashion-forward elite has just been designed by Danish retailer, Aesir. It’s price tag? $57,400. The phone, which took three years to develop, doesn’t boast email, games, a camera or even GPS, it only boasts solid goldness. Or does that not satisfy you? The company founder, Thomas Jensen, subtly calls it ‘not a play thing’.
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Conjoined Twins Separated By Surgery See Each Other For First Time
15 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
Joshua and Jacob Spates are twins who were delivered by emergency caesarian in January this year, six weeks before they were due. They were also conjoined at the base of their spines. The two brothers have now been separated by life-saving surgery and introduced to each other – face to face – for the first time in their lives.
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Croatian Entrepreneur Unveils 300kmph Electric Supercar
14 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
23-year old Croatian entrepreneur Mate Rimac unveiled the Concept_One electric supercar at the Frankfurt Motor Show yesterday – a 1,099 horsepower machine that can go a little under 600 km per charge, and can get over 300 km/h on a stretch. Is that enough car numbers? I’m not great at car numbers. Take a look at the thing though, it’s sexy.
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New Emotion Detecting Camera Knows If You’re Lying
14 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
So they say this kind of thing is “new”, but I think what they really mean is that it’s “new” to public knowledge. It uses thermal imaging technology, something that’s been around for a while already, and it just seems impossible to believe that “scientists” wouldn’t have thought of it before.
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Huge, Potentially Life-Supporting Exo-Planet Discovered
13 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Screw climate change, we’ve found a new home. Well, I mean that’s my attitude whenever astronomers says they’ve found new planets within the “Goldiclocks zone” of core temperature – like the one European astronomers announced yesterday, the catchy-sounding HD85512b, which fits life support parameters, and is a little over three times the size of Earth.
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Vodacom To Cap Internet Speeds For High-End Blackberry Users
12 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 3 Comments
Vodacom has popped a cap in the bandwidth of Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) subscribers who exceed a monthly data limit of 100mb – cutting the speeds from 3G to 2G. Vodacom claims that this should only affect around 5% of the user base, as the rest are all using the service “fairly”.
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Scientists Produce Glow-In-The-Dark Kittens For AIDS Research
12 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
This really has nothing to do with making your pet cat fluorescent so that you can see it in the dark and not stand on it when you get up to go the toilet at night. It has, however, everything to do with the similarities between human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV).
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Let’s Drink Tonight Helps You Find People To Drink With
12 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
If people keep telling you that drinking alone is a sign of alcoholism, then you either need to drink less, or find a way to make sure that there are people to drink with all the time. The geniuses behind the social network app ‘Let’s Drink Tonight’ figured the latter choice made more sense too.
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The Rebirth Of Radio – By Arthur Goldstuck
09 Sep 2011 by Seth Rotherham / No Comments
For those of you who don’t know who Arthur Goldstuck is, he is a South African journalist, media analyst and leading commentator on Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Internet and mobile communications and technologies. Goldstuck led early research into the size of the Internet user population and the extent of Web commerce in South Africa, […]
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Apple Wins: Samsung Galaxy Stays Banned In Germany For Copying iPad
09 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 2 Comments
A German court on Friday upheld an injunction requested by Apple barring the sales of Samsung Galaxy tablets in Germany. In what is surely another groundbreaking ruling against Samsung and the Galaxy Tab, the German court ruled that Samsung had basically copied Apple’s iPad.
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NASA’s Satellite Is Going To Fall To Earth. They Just Don’t Know When Or Where
08 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 5 Comments
Awesome. The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS), NASA’s defunct, 60 000 kg baby, will be re-entering Earth’s atmosphere sometime later this month or in early October, and NASA doesn’t really know when or where it’s going to happen. What they do know is that it’s going to leave a 800km-wide debris footprint, somewhere. Heads up.
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SA’s Lowest Ever ADSL Line Rental Prices
08 Sep 2011 by Seth Rotherham / No Comments
You gotta love it when local companies beat Telkom not only on speed, but also undercut them with line rental prices. I mean seriously, how do you do that? It’s hilarious! We just received word from our official hosting partners, RSAWEB, that they have launched the cheapest ADSL line rental in South Africa. That is […]
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‘Find My iPhone’ App Helps Locate Wreckage Of Chilean Plane Crash
08 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
In the aftermath of last Friday’s plane crash off the island of Robinson Crusoe, Chile, officials have stated that no effort would be spared in the rescue/recovery of the 17 passengers. This apparently includes using the Find My iPhone app to isolate the coordinates of one of the passenger’s last known whereabouts before the crash.
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Liberate Your Data With Google Takeout
07 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Hello, internet people. Google Takeout has been launched for you – a “data liberation platform” that lets users export their data from a number of Google products. It’s an importance service! If all your information is on Google without a backup, then you don’t have much control over it. Click through and learn things.
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Gautrain Jinxes Bokke
07 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 3 Comments
Look, let’s not beat around the bush here. We are a confident nation, and we do like to win. But, we don’t jinx ourselves here in South Africa. Especially when it comes to something like playing a Rugby World Cup in New Zealand, because, well, that’s just silly. Gautrain marketing department, we’ll remember this if anything happens.
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The US Army Wants Their Gear To Be Powered By Android
06 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
‘Nett Warrior,’ the military program that aims to give soldiers the tools for communications and mapping with each has been put on ice. It seems the US army have decided to cut a couple of kilograms in the solider’s kit and go with civilian technology. And they’re going Google.
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Amazon’s Tablet Will Probably Be The Only Real Challenger To The iPad
06 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Amazon’s tablet is coming soon. Very soon, according to some of the rumours doing the rounds. We could even see the new device in the next few weeks. Supposedly, it will be in the seven-inch region, run a tweaked version of Android and be quite affordable too. But what’s going to make it special, and better than any Google attempt?
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The Award-Winning Invisible Cycling Helmet [VIDEO]
06 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Swedish designers have made a cycling helmet that isn’t totally obnoxious, which is pretty great. It won an award. Understand that no matter how nice this helmet is, it still isn’t okay to wear this guy indoors, because that’s rude. Still, it just won the Index:Award, the largest monetary prize for design in the world.
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“Stand Down Boys, It’s Just A Volvo”
06 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 3 Comments
The Swedish are developing a new defence system that can make a tank not only disappear in front of its enemies, but look like something else. The system, known as ‘Adaptiv’ is being developed by Bae Systems and can actually blend in with its surroundings, when viewed in infrared. So, essentially, they could make an army vehicle look like a station wagon if they wanted to.
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Watch Out BlackBerry Users, Government Might Start Watching You
06 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
We already have the Regulation of Interception of Communication Act (Rica), and as the ad hoc committee from Parliament yesterday adopted the controversial Protection of Information Bill after nearly a year of deliberations, we might now also see the decryption of BlackBerry messages become a reality.
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