British astronaut Tim Peake is to take part in this year’s London Marathon — despite the fact he’ll be in orbit at the time. Peake won’t be an official competitor, but will be starting a 26.2 mile run at the same time as the more conventional runners on April 24. The big difference is that […]
15,000 potentially dangerous ‘hoverboards’ have been seized by officials in the UK. Then again, what do you expect from outdated technology? It seems the hoverboards, also known as self-balancing scooters, were set to be among the hot craze Christmas gifts for this year. That’s thought to be because of their hipster retro appeal: as the […]
Wikipedia is adopting a new artificial intelligence tool to weed out potentially low-quality edits. However, human users will retain the power to decide which edits remain active on the site. Previous attempts to automatically rank edits and highlight possible malicious activity haven’t worked well, according to the Wikimedia Foundation. It says such tools have placed […]
Classical paintings could be recreated in 3D for blind and visually impaired art lovers if a crowdfunding campaign proves successful. The Unseen Art project wants to use 3D printers to produce tactile versions of paintings. The plan is to not only make the 3D artworks available for galleries but also to share the print files […]
The organizers of the leading auto racing circuit for electric vehicles says it will run races for driverless cars next year. The races will take place on the same city street circuits as the existing manned Formula E racing. The Formula E championship series which ran from September 2014 to June 2015 was the first […]
A wireless connection using an LED bulb has been tested in an Estonian office. The technology achieved a 1Gbps transfer, though the theoretical maximum is 224Gbps. The basic principle of “Li-Fi” is the same as Wi-Fi, just using wavelengths of visible light rather than radio waves. Instead of using a router, it involves varying the […]
A man who claimed Facebook was refusing to recognize his legal name of “Phuc Dat Bich” has admitted it was a long-running prank that got out of hand. The man, believed to be Australian and of Vietnamese origin, had been using the name on Facebook since last year. In January this year he posted to […]
A 14 year old has become the first person to solve a standard Rubik’s cube in under five seconds. Lucas Etter’s performance meant the world’s best time was beaten twice on the same day. Although the World Cube Association recognizes a variety of world records, including different sized and shaped puzzles, and records based on […]
Belgian cats have done their part to fight terrorism thanks to an unusual hijacking of Twitter hashtags. The meme began over the weekend when police began a series of raids to pick up people suspected of planning attacks. The severity of the situation meant movements in many public areas were blocked off. That inevitably led […]
Windows 1.0 was released thirty years ago yesterday. Despite an amazing sales pitch from Steve Ballmer, it didn’t get a great reception. The system took two years to appear after Microsoft first announced it, leading to widespread claims of it being “vaporware.” It was by no means the first graphical user interface, coming a year […]