My pal Korben (who runs the most awesome French blog on the web, seriously) recently got his hands on a few close-up shots of a Google Street View vehicle, and when he sent me his link to the shots, I knew some of you guys would be interested in seeing them. Unfortunately, the 360° objective […]
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 […]
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 […]
As great as modern mobile device apps may be, they hardly compare to what one man in Britain did with a handheld device last week: he performed heart surgery. Andre Ng became the first doctor to use a remote controlled robot for the surgery to correct an irregular heartbeat: and he also felt the medical […]
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 […]
[Via Reddit]
You may have heard that there’s one heck of an oil leak right now in the Gulf of Mexico, which is currently oozing out some 42,000 gallons a day. But what you may not know is that robots are working overtime to help control the situation before it gets even more out of hand. According […]
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 […]
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 […]
185 voices from 12 countries join a choir that spans the globe: “Lux Aurumque,” composed and conducted by Eric Whitacre, merges hundreds of tracks individually recorded and posted to YouTube. It’s an astonishing illustration of how technology can connect us. [Via Ted]