April Fool’s Day falling at the weekend hasn’t stopped Internet giants coming up with a host of pranks and “fake news” that at least have a playful element. To be honest, though, the major company offerings seem a little lame this year, with the attempts to market real products more brazen than usual. As usual, […]
What’s better than a Big Trouble in Little China board game? Why, two Big Trouble in Little China board games of course! The box art pictured above has just been released for “Big Trouble in Little China: The Game” and it definitely appears to be the option for component lovers. The board is two-sided with […]
Playing Tetris could help reduce the chances of people suffering long-term mental effects from traumatic events according to a study. Professor Emily Holmes of Karolina Institutet in Sweden led a multi-national research team and ran a study to test the concept. The thinking was that playing Tetris is so absorbing for visual memory that it […]
Elon Musk is working on a program to wirelessly connect human brains and computers. Potential purposes include boosting brains with artificial intelligence and tackling neurodegenerative conditions. Musk plans to detail his new company, Neuralink, some time next week. What’s already known is that it will be based around neural lace, the concept of implanting electrodes […]
Samsung is to remotely disable the remaining Note 7 handsets that the most devoted users have refused to return under a safely recall. One of the hottest phones of last year turned out to be too hot to handle after a string of handsets overheated and even caught fire. Independent reports blamed attempts to make […]
A would-be aircraft manufacturer says it will run electrically-powered flights within a decade. Wright Electric says it would be able to carry 150 passengers on short-haul flights up to 300 miles, with London to Paris the initial route. Electric planes already exist, reaching up to 200 miles per hour, but existing models usually carry only […]
NASA has thanked a teenage student who noticed an error in International Space Station data. It’s a unexpected benefit of a schools research program. The TimPix project involves schools getting access to radiation data collected from Timepix detectors on the ISS, with the name also being a nod to it having been collected during ESA […]
While Harry Potter-style butterbeer is only officially available at Universal Studios Hollywood, you can now taste the flavor at home, albeit in ice cream form. The new line from Yeungling’s Ice Cream is not officially licensed, though the makers say they took “inspiration from a popular wizarding beverage” and quote JK Rowling’s description of the taste […]
Buzz Aldrin can take you on a trip to Mars. But sadly it’s only virtual reality for now. The second man on the moon will star in a VR movie showing his proposal for trips using the moons of both Earth and Mars as stopping points on six-month journeys to the red planet. The movie […]
A computer program can lip-read four times more accurately than a human expert according to Oxford University researchers. They worked with Google’s DeepMind project to develop an AI system named Watch, Attend and Spell. The project involved a neural network using image recognition tools to analyse 5,000 hours of TV news footage making up 118,000 […]