It’s always nice when the world catches up with 80’s sci-fi films. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have succeeded in reconstructing people’s visual experiences using MRI and image libraries. Which means that if you click on the link you can see somebody’s brain try to replicate the Pink Panther film trailer.
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.
Faces from arturo castro on Vimeo.
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?
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.
I’m not clear on why we would still need travel agents or anything, but if we do, Google Flights, launching today, is up to the task. Initially only available in a couple of US cities, Google Flights is the first result we’ve seen of Google’s acquisition of travel software company ITA back in April.
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.
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.
Do you know what day today is? Google knows what day today is – which is why their latest animated doodle pays tribute to the legendary Freddie Mercury, who would have turned 65 today, had he not made an early exit. Click through to take a look. Please insert your favourite Queen song title here.
I love Postsecret. I’ll just put that right there. It’s an ongoing community art project that started in the States in 2005. Now, after almost seven years of receiving the secrets, Postsecret are releasing their very own app for iPhone.
It’s pretty neat – the new pen by Wacom draws like a regular pen, but has a pressure-sensitive receiver that records your actual drawings for digital import and computer manipulation. So when you doodle obscene images, they show up directly onto your screen. Welcome to the future.
Remember the sad old days when the only screens that came with USB inputs in them were 15 inches wide, and you and 12 friends were forced to watch that awesome viral video on that single tiny screen, and inevitably there was a heated argument afterwards, because one of the guys who was watching from […]
Screenshots from a Chinese military propaganda video uploaded to YouTube last month reveal a cyberwarfare app designed to make attacks look like they’re coming from any IP address. In the video, the Chinese government can be seen sending attacks from an IP address belonging to the University of Alabama.
What did you do today? New York elementary school student Aidan Dwyer has designed and constructed a solar array based on the Fibonacci sequence that stores and generates energy between 20% and 50% more effectively than existing setups. He got the idea after noticing growth patterns in oak trees.
How unfair is this shit. When I was a kid, if you wanted something to fly you had to chuck it off a three-storie building, or tie it to a string and trail it out the back of your mom’s car, Napolean Dynamite style. These remote controlled badboys are super realistic,with actual moving fins to propel them through the air. And you get to choose between evil shark or cute clown-fish.
And for the first time in years I actually have a reason to want a Motorola. Google today agreed to acquire the handset division of Motorola, Motorola Mobility, for $12.5 billion (around 90 billion ZAR). It’s always nice to have money lying around for these little impulse buys.
They made a robot seagull. It flies by flapping its robot seagull wings. I mean yes this is a huge breakthrough in terms of flight engineering, but even if that’s not your jam, you’re going to want to take a look at the awesome two-metre wide flying robot on display at TEDGlobal.
I know temporary tattoos are usually pretty lame, but the ones they’re making over at the University of Illinois are looking pretty rad. Because unlike regular temporary tattoos that fade within two days and look like awful birthmarks, these guys come with diagnostic sensors, LEDs, wireless antennas, and solar cells for power. Take that, Kinder Surprise.
The Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle is not only 22 times faster than a commercial jetliner, it’s also capable of reaching Mach 20, which is roughly 21 000 kph. So basically it’s kak fast. It’s so fast that the company that created it, The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have lost it at sea. Again.
There is something encouraging coming out of the past three days of rioting and looting, even if it is a remote silver lining: the online mobilization of volunteer clean-up operations, mostly organized via Twitter and Facebook. By this time yesterday, #riotcleanup, was the second-highest trending topic worldwide.
Australian artist and ‘body architect’ Lucy McRae, in collaboration with Harvard biologist Sheref Mansy, is releasing these little digestible capsules that make human skin emit perfume scents. Which is nice and futuristic, I think. And by futuristic I mean I have no idea how this thing works.
A 31-year-old Swedish man, known only as ‘Richard’, was attempting to build a nuclear reactor in his kitchen and was arrested and had his experiment shut down after he contacted the Swedish Radiation Authority (Strålsäkerhetsmyndigheten) to ask whether or not his pet project was legal.
GM’s Electric Networked-Vehicle (EN-V), the pod-shaped hands-free electric vehicle unveiled last year, is set for release soon. Confined to metropolitan areas, we should be able to live out our Jetsons inspired fantasies a little sooner than we’d planned, once GPS technology catches up a little.
The future is officially nuts. It’s getting to a point where stuff like this probably won’t shock you anymore. It should. Be shocked. These robo-seals, called ‘Paro’, not only bring comfort to recovering Japanese tsunami patients, they also sing, clap, and even take part in the residents daily exercise routines.
Because robots can’t get depressed over awful working conditions and commit suicide, you see. Also we don’t have a robot union yet, so Foxconn (the guys who manufacture the iPhone and iPad) won’t need to worry about the slowly increasing factory worker wages in Taiwan, which are driving overhead costs upwards throughout the fancy-technology-making-industry.
Vodafone shut down their Egyptian network coverage during the revolution, arguably prolonging the event’s bloodshed and indirectly leading to the death of Egyptians who couldn’t summon ambulances when they were needed. This is bad. So it’s nice that AccessNow, a human rights NGO with Vodafone stock, are trying to force a company-wide human rights assessment.
Isn’t that surprising? A study of British recreational culture has been published, and it transpires that British people love nothing more than to listen to the wireless. Much more so than they enjoy reading, surfing the net, or even watching television. That kind of thing is almost unfavorable in South Africa. Because the general quality […]
VW are proposing a new technology that will allow drivers to take their hands off the wheel at speeds up to around 130km/h, and let the car’s system temporarily take over. Look, it isn’t exactly Knight Rider, but it’s good that VW’s looking after people who want to multitask while cruising down highways.
Social Intelligence, a company approved a week ago by the Federal Trade Commission, is one that uses deep-search tools to do background checks on other companies’ potential employees. These guys could find your MySpace account, they’re that thorough. And if your deep-search profile doesn’t look good, you don’t get hired.
Researchers at the University of California have put together tiny robot brains that replicate the long term memory function in rats; using this, they could switch long-term memory on and off with a button. Which means ‘electronic memory’ and the possibility of knowing stuff without having to learn stuff is suddenly a real thing.
Imagine never having to focus on what you’re photographing. You could just snap away knowing you could refocus the shots later. A new light-field camera will be launched this year by a company called Lytro, which will allow you to do just that. And it will mark a massive step forward in the evolution of photography as we know it.