Simone Giertz built an alarm clock that slaps her in the face with a rubber arm to wake her up in the morning. She took a regular alarm clock apart and wired it to an Arduino UNO board, which controlled a rubber arm attached to a 165 rpm brushless DC motor through a relay. Simone […]
Nashville is now home to a vending machine that dispenses cars rather than candy. And yes, it is a massive gimmick. It’s operated by a company called Carvana which lets customers buy cars online without having to deal with sales staff in person, whether that be because they dislike pushiness and pressure, or are just […]
Japanese researchers have found a way to make stiffer and harder glass. However, reports that it could mean phone screens stronger than steel are misleading at best, partly because of confusion over what has been measured. The work by the University of Tokyo and the Synchotron Radiation Research Institute, doesn’t involve any new materials, but rather […]
Google’s Inbox email app will soon not just make it quicker to reply to messages but will help you decide what to say. A new ‘Smart Reply’ feature in the app (which runs separately from the main Gmail app and includes a variety of organizational tools) is based around the idea that often messages simply […]
George Boole, the mathematician whose work indirectly made modern computing possible, was born two hundred years ago today. Boole’s work is one of the great examples of a seemingly abstract process having practical physical benefits, albeit around seven decades after his death. The British-born Boole developed a new form of algebra, with the difference being […]
Sadly, Kanye West’s ego is not on the list, somehow. TopMedia
Screw the hoverboards. Today is the end of futuregazing. Let me put that into context. I’m not saying people will never again imagine what the world of the future will look like. But October 21, 2015 — the day Marty McFly arrives in “the future” — may mark the end of a particular era in […]
¸ From the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich: Flying and walking robots can use their complementary features in terms of viewpoint and payload capability to the best in a heterogeneous team. To this end, we present our online collaborative navigation framework for unknown and challenging terrain. The method leverages the flying robot’s onboard monocular […]
The computer show is a series of videos that parodies those really bad tech talk shows that we used to see on community television in the 80s. There’s just two episodes so far, but I’m sure more will be released in the near future. [Computer Show]
The folks from Jalopnik got on board a Tesla Model S and drove with the autopilot system turned on. Let’s just say that even though I was not behind the wheel, just seeing the thing breaking and changing lane by itself kind of freaked me off. [Jalopnik]