11 years into its mission on Mars, the rover Opportunity is suffering from bouts of amnesia according to Nasa. It plans to remotely hack Opportunity’s software to fix the problem. In a similar fashion to PCs on Earth, Opportunity has a combination of volatile and non-volatile memory, specifically flash memory and RAM. As with a […]
Concluding our look back at the stories we covered during 2014 and what happened next, we turn to November. The Unicode Consortium, which develops standards to make sure characters appear consistently across different software and systems, unveiled proposals for changes to emoji, a system of characters for expressing emotions. It suggestedย the option to choose between […]
Continuing our look at the stories we covered in 2014 and subsequent developments, we turn to September. Iranian President Hassan Rouhaniย argued that blocking Internet access to cut down political protest was harming the country’s scientific progress. He alsoย lifted a ban on broadband providers offering fast speeds on fixed lines and cellphone networks, something seen as […]
Continuing our look back at the stories we covered in 2014 and subsequent developments, we turn to July. The Department of Homeland Security brought in new rules saying all electronic devices, including cellphones, had to be powered up for security checks for flights into the US; those with dead batteries and no charger would not […]
Continuing our look back at the stories we covered in 2014 and their subsequent developments, we turn to May. Despite finally bringing in a deadline to stop issuing security updates for the 13-year-old Windows XP, Microsoft issued a patch for Internet Explorer on the system, vowing it was a one-off. It has since stuck to […]
As we continue our look back on the stories we covered in 2014 — and the subsequent developments — we reach March. A group of more than a million players joined forces to beat Pokemon Red/Blue through a project that translated chat room comments into commands on a game broadcast over Twitch. That inspired similar […]
A rather creepy hexapod robot that has robotic snakes for legs. Each of these legs were built using the technology of a previous snake-like robot built by the Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab (Video at the bottom of this post.) Initial demonstrations of autonomous walking of “Snake Monster”, a hexapod robot built with modular actuators from […]
It’s time once again to take a look back at some of the news stories we’ve covered here at GaS in 2014 as well as following up on later developments. In January, AT&T started offering companies the chance to make “sponsorship” payments that meant they picked up the tab when users streamed or downloaded their […]
Minneapolis is to get what’s being billed as the world’s fastest broadband connection, a whopping 10 gigabits per second. The service is available to around 30,000 homes and businesses in the city and is provided by US Internet. It already provides a gigabit service but has now flipped the switch to increase that ten-fold. Although […]
Google has published photos of its first “complete” prototype of a self-driving car. It hopes to test it on public roads next year. The first mock-up of the company’s vehicle was unveiled back in May but was missing several key features, most notably headlights. Since then Google has built a range of test vehicles, each […]