Watch as Bill Gates drinks water extracted from human waste, thanks to the Janicki Omniprocessor, a machine that turns sewer sludge into water and electricity. In third world countries, something like this could be a real game-changer. [thegatesnotes]
Rather than sit here and tell you the Pixel dancers (Pixel being the name of the troupe) will astound you with their seamless blending of dance with mind blowing hologram technology, I think it best if you just sit back and watch it yourself. If a picture is worth a thousand words, than these moving […]
Empire Robotics have built a pretty impressive robot in the form of the Versaball. It is a simple robot arm that can do some really cool, simple things that would make your own life immeasurably easier (to help you change light bulbs and such). But apparently, while sitting around the lab figuring out other uses […]
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 suggested 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 Rouhani argued that blocking Internet access to cut down political protest was harming the country’s scientific progress. He also 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 […]