Captain Raymond “Jerry” Roberts, the last survivor of the team that cracked a German encryption during the second world war, has died aged 93. Roberts didn’t work on cracking Enigma, arguably the better-known of the German encryptions. Instead his work at the top secret Bletchley Park center in England was based around cracking the Lorenz […]
Venture capitalists have invested ยฃ3 million (around US$4.8 million) in a business that uses a wireless-connected collar to tell when cows are in heat. Keeping track on when individual cows are in oestrus (heat) can be a complex affair with large herds. Mistakenly think a cow is in heat and you not only waste efforts […]
Now that thing has to be one of the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen. And the fact that it can follow you with its gaze makes it even worse. Acclaimed artist Jordan Wolfson’s imagination brought this animatronic figure to life with a little help from his friends at Spectral Motion. The piece is currently being […]
LG has made a “smart” lightbulb with numerous features, many involving your smartphone. It comes across as a case of “what can we make it do?” rather than “what need should it serve?” The bulb itself is a relatively ordinary LED bulb that fits standard light fittings and draws 10 watts at full brightness. The […]
IBM’s Jeopardy!-winning supercomputer Watson is to start exploring genetics in an attempt to tackle a rare brain cancer. Watson famously beat two champion Jeopardy players in a three-day challenge in 2011. While supercomputers can process information far more quickly than humans, the victory was significant as it showed Watson was able to process language and […]
One of the breakout stars from this year’s SXSW festival took his passion for music and his desire to create a new collaborative experience for musicians and the entire music industry to a deeper, more enriching level. MIT grad Philip Cohen has created a new cloud-based platform that transforms the way music is created. AudioCommon […]
An “antisocial” app offers users the ability to avoid people who you aren’t too keen on seeing in real life. The app is something of an anti-Foursquare. You connect it to other applications (including Instagram and Foursquare itself) and then get a map of any of your contacts who are near you, along with an […]
The ARM-powered CUBESTORMER 3 robot has smashed the Guinness World Record for solving a Rubik’s cube, recording a time of 3.253 seconds at the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham, UK. [ARMflix | Via]
The American pay-TV industry as a whole has had an overall drop in subscribers for the first time. But even if it’s evidence of “cord-cutting,” the firms involved haven’t really lost out much. There have been a few cases before where individual cable firms have had a quarterly decline in pay-TV subscribers. Now Leichtman Research […]
Wearable technology is no longer this vague idea we think of from sci-fi films. While walking around downtown Austin during SXSW, I stopped noticing how many people were outfitted with their Google Glasses or Samsung Smartwatches anymore. It was just as commonplace an accessory as a hat or sunglasses. These devices, which create a deeper, […]