Google Goggles turns translator

Those of us not lucky/smart enough to read foreign languages have, until now, been fairly poorly served by technical replacements to the trusty travel phrase book. There are, of course, plenty of standalone handheld devices which are simply electronic phrase books with keypads, some of them offering text-to-speech features. An existing Google phone app attempts […]



Hyping the cellphone, 1909 style

Most geeks will know of Nikola Tesla: an electrical engineer, he was pretty much the godfather of alternating current and one of the major reasons electricity became a commercially viable power source. He also demonstrated the idea that electricity could be transmitted wirelessly, a theory that today is looking ever closer to practical use. But […]



Stephen Hawking on Aliens, Real Possibility of Space and Time Travel

Stephen Hawking has partnered with the Discovery Channel to present a new documentary series called “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking” covering some pretty wonderfully geeky subjects including alien visitors and time travel. But don’t get all excited. Mr. Hawking, as ever, is measured in his approach—though his comments on time travel will likely cause […]

Robotic Mouth Simulates Human Voice + Trolololo Guy Mashup

Designed by engineers at Kagawa University in Japan, this creepy robotic mouth simulates the human voice by using an air pump, artificial vocal chords, a nasal cavity, a resonance tube, and a microphone. Check it out: Oh, and naturally, it didn’t take very long before people on youtube used the footage to create some pretty […]

School Laptop Spying Case Just Keeps Getting Creepier

You’ve probably heard by now about the school district in Pennsylvania that was using webcams in school-issued laptops to spy on students. And they might never have known except for one observant administrator who saw a student engaging in behavior mistaken for pill-popping and confronted him – at which point it was revealed that those […]